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Jamie Shilanski  

The Price of Freedom: it’s eternal vigilance – Thomas Jefferson and how true it is. TPR nation, how we must covet, protect, safeguard and deploy ways that allow us to remain free to do the things that we want to do. Welcome back TPR Nation. This is Jamie Shilanski in World to Conquer, and we are going to be talking about the second stage of an advisor’s career path. So what we talked about last week was the growth stage. There are three different stages that an advisor is normally at when they’re building their financial advisory career, and if you have around, and this is just kind of a WAG, but around less than $30 million of asset owner management, the only stage of your practice you should be in is growth. That’s the only thing that you should be focusing on, is growing, growing, growing your practice. But what happens when you’ve grown your practice and now you’re inching towards two things, either becoming really comfortable and complacent or really burnt out and afraid of what that might mean for all of your clients, your practice, your and your family. That’s a huge part of this. And so now we enter into this freedom stage. And this freedom stage, gosh, it’s it’s really, really difficult to enter into. And my father struggled with it, and my mom because they started Shilanski and Associates, our advisory practice back in 1981 up in encourage Alaska, and they dreamed of the Freedom stage. But when you’re grinding, when you are grinding and building a business from the scratch up. Regardless of what industry that you are in, it takes a lot of time and energy. I mean, we talk about, you know, these, these youngins, these youngins today, they talk about work, life balance. They have zero idea what they are talking about, unless they have started a business from zero and took it all the way up into into it, because one of the reasons, and I was telling my son, he was very confused by this Lane had said to me. He said, Yeah, you know, love the idea of being my own boss and not working for anyone. And I said, funny, because the second that I’m interviewing a prospect or a client and they say those words to me, I won’t take them on as a business client. And he was like, Oh my gosh. Can I ask why? And I was like, yeah, like, yeah, because you are full of deception. You have no idea what it is like to actually be a business owner. Can I get an amen if you say you don’t have a boss because you are the boss. You are so, so delusional. You have 10,000 bosses. You have all of the people that you have to answer to, a broker dealer, your clients, your employees. I mean, you are mentally working on that organization non stop, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep at night. And then you are weaving in parts of your like, like, family, vacations, holidays, etc. But as a financial advisor especially, we’re taking on a lot of the burden and concerns that our clientele have. You know, in a once you get out of your growth stage. So your growth stage is anything less than 100 clients. And if you have less than 100 clients, you’re still growing your practice. You’re still building out your book. I think the sweet spot, Bill Bachrach talked about this a lot in the 90s, was your ideal 100 clients. Maybe, you know, I’d like an ideal 50, and the other 50 maybe could be less ideal. But still, people I enjoy working with. One of the things that we’re really good about in our practice is we don’t allow any C’s and Charlie or D’s and delta clients. So there’s a practice in which you can rate all of your clientele, A, B, C and D, and you set up measurements based on fees that they pay and money that they have and whether or not you like them. The problem is the people we like the most, generally aren’t paying us the most. We just really like how much they’re paying us and that they’re pretty easy to work with. And so we’ll do this exercise every now and then, and we will go through and list our clients, and then we will have our team list our clients too, because at Shilanski and Associates, we have an RIA in which we have three cogs in the wheel, if you will. And we have our financial advisors who give advice. Then we have our relationship managers who foster that relationship but do not give financial planning advice. And then we have our operations team who are responsible for the movement of money. And it takes every single one of us to keep this going down the road, and so sometimes I’ll have a really good relationship with a client. I’ll absolutely love working with them, but they’re jerks to the rest of my team. The rest of my team thinks they’re high maintenance and terrible. They dread sing their name on the phone. So we have to have a day of reconciliation and a day of saying, Okay, listen, is this somebody that we should graduate. Graduate is what we call firing clients, and that’s when they no longer meet wide ideals, our ethos of who we work best with. And when I empower my team members, and I really let them look at that lens, they become very discerning about who they suggest as difficult, because they don’t want to say somebody is difficult. And if they have the courage to tell me, Hey, this person’s really obnoxious to deal with, they’re very, you know, persnickety, all of these different things. Now, some of them being fussy and liking things a certain way, the Type A personality she will deal with that all day long. But somebody being rude or disrespectful to my team, then cool, go work with somebody else. I don’t care about your account size, because at the end of the day, I’m going to have to be the one advocating for our relationship to remain in place, and my team is going to fight me every inch. And if you’re to my team, I don’t want to work with you, because we are in that enterprise stage. So we have that growth, that freedom and that enterprise. So the growth stage anything less than your ideal number of clients, 100 that’s what back rack recommends the most financial advisors that I meet with want about 150 clients, because that’s going to equate to the revenue that they want to earn. So 100 150 whatever your ideal number is, if you’re less than that, you’re still at your growth stage, and that is the only thing that you need to be focused on, all right. But once you’ve achieved that number, now you’re entering into your freedom stage. Now you’re getting the freedom of being discerning. And discernment is really important, because when we’re in our growth stage, we have a habit of allowing any prospect fog a mirror willing to pay us to become a client. But when we enter in our freedom stage, we don’t have to take on those relationships. We’ve built enough networks and connections we can graduate some relationships simply because we don’t want to work with them. And so we used to practice this gorilla test that I was telling you about, the A, B, C and D level. People run through it, scrub it, and then put on the agendas every quarter. Who is there anyone we need to graduate that maybe is in the C and D level? Now we have a little bit of a different test, and that test is whether or not the financial advisor or the team dreads the client coming in. So if we have an appointment booked on our schedule and we are absolutely dreading meeting with that person, and the way that the senior advisor capacity look at things is we Friday night, we’ll wrap up our appointments during surge, then Saturday or Sunday, we will look to the week ahead and make sure everything is done and ready for the next week. And what happens is, when we’re looking a week ahead and we see that appointment, let’s just say that I have a client I’m dreading on Thursday. What am I thinking about? Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and all day Thursday, I’m thinking about that one singular client I don’t want to meet with, and now my mental energy is focused on that, instead of focusing on the 35 people that are before him that I do want to meet with. So making sure that if we if we dread an appointment because we’re going to have a hard conversation, maybe question fees, maybe a spouse died, that’s okay. You could dread an appointment every now and then. If you dread every appointment with that client, what are you doing? You are setting yourself up for regulatory failure, because what’s going to end up happening if you dread that relationship, that’s going to become your is going to become a red flag, they’re going to send in a complaint, and now you’re going to have to defend that complaint or have that complaint on your record. I never once met with a financial advisor, never ever who had a regulatory complaint on their record and didn’t feel they should have fired the client before it happened. They were like, You know what? I just I didn’t trust my gut. I was uneasy. I knew something was going to come up with them. And hindsight might be 2020 but I’m a big believer in our instinct and intuition, especially as ladies out there, we are hard wired to assess. I’m going to use the word predator situations, but it end up just using that in a biological sense. And you know, we know something is not right. We know when the door rings, if we should answer it or not after we checked our ring camera and see who was not always. I mean, there are very there are people that are deceitful, but most of the time, what did I was listening to this one psychologist one time, and he said, in the animal kingdom, if you look at all the predators of prey that are out there, if the prey, and I’m just again using this animalistic, you know, thing, the prey sees a predator. It does not approach. It does not necessarily like, Hey, how you doing, buddy? I didn’t want to judge you from afar, so I thought I’d come over here and see if you actually are that. Mean, oh, those teeth are shiny. I’m dying. So the prey and Predator don’t have that scenario. But then think about it with the human side. So on the human side, imagine you’re in a warehouse. You’re in warehouse, and it’s under construction, and you’re trying to get to that top floor to meet a contractor, co worker, colleague, whatever, and the elevator opens and it has one single individual in there, and everything inside of you is like that person is a predator, that person is not safe, that person makes me feel uncomfortable. And what do most women do? They get any elevator anyways, the elevator anyway. And animal kingdom, this go, this person makes me feel unsafe, and I’m comfortable, and I throw some money to join them and see if that’s really true. You can talk all day long about how we don’t want to judge a book by the cover. We don’t want to stereotype. We don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. Screw that. If I don’t feel safe around you, I don’t care if it hurts your feelings. I’m not going to be around you. I don’t feel comfortable next. Just your gut on these things. Now, luckily, financial planning, it’s not that life or death most of the time, but you still have these individuals you don’t enjoy working with, and they will become your problems. They will become your complaints. So if you’re dreading, if you get through a couple of search cycles and you’re dreading those appointments that’s on. You figure it out. Graduate them. Matthew Jarvis fires off a letter Shilanski and Associates. We pick up the phone or have a meeting and say, and we graduate. And we say, Hey, listen, we’ve taken you this far. You’ve done really great, blah, blah, blah, but now it’s time to transition that relationship. And you know, I think you should go work with so and so. Don’t keep clients on your books because you want the revenue that at the end of the day, is not worth the potential complaint misunderstanding or losing a good employee over the price is too high. Trust your gut. So in this freedom stage, you do get to have that discernment. You do get to decide who you want to work with. And then then this happens also, and this is, this is the thing that most people have a lot of problems with, especially if you’re over the age of 50, you struggle with the shopkeeper mentality. And the shopkeeper mentality means I must be at my office to make sure the doors are open, the lights are on, things are refreshed, and client the doors answered when clients get there, and if we’re not physically there to see those things happen, we automatically assume they’re not happening and they cannot happen without our involvement. And it’s not just the opening and closing of the office. It’s getting what people scheduled. It’s getting money transfers. It’s accepting phone calls in the middle of the day that hijack the rest of your day. It’s all of the things that come along with being a shopkeeper, because at the end of the day, every person you’ve employed is relying on you to give them a paycheck, and you can only give them a paycheck if you’re still in business. And so it becomes this really big struggle, and this feeling of guilt of not being at the office all of the time, but when you enter this freedom stage, so you go, you’re moving out of growth. You’re transitioning towards the top end of your clients, or AUM, however you want to define that for yourself, and you’re beginning to enter into freedom. Freedom is all about making sure that you have systems, policies and processes in place. That is the last stepping stone between growth and freedom. And once you have systems, policies and processes in place. And by the way, these are not policies and processes between your two ears. These are documented in a system in which other people can pick up and finalize without you. That is the biggest part of this element that most people neglect. They say, Well, we’ve always talked about it. Here’s what we’ve always done. Well, if you’ve done what you’ve always done, you’re going to get what you’ve always got. But now you’re trying to grow. Now you’re trying to accelerate into this freedom and territory, and it takes the time and the vigilance to sit down and put in the parameters of safeguarding that. Now, what does this mean? How can you take that and apply it? Here’s the very first thing that you can work on. It’s low IQ. What’s the communication policy? Because when you enter this freedom stage, you’re going to give yourself permission not to physically be at the office when the rest of your team is at the office. And when you have that policy in place, you’re going to have a lot of guilt, and what you’re going to feel is when you’re physically away from the office, you have to answer the phone call every single time the office calls you. But guess what? You just put yourself in position of being the easy button they’re calling you because it’s easier to call you than it is to think how to problem solve most people that I meet, I mean, there are idiots out there. Lord knows, I don’t suffer a fool well. I heard that quote once from my good friend Paul Harris, and I absolutely love it. I think about all the time. I can remember the exact moment at the FBA conference she said it to me. She said, I don’t suffer fools well. And I took that with me, and I said same. That is me. That is I do not suffer a fool very well. I don’t do it tactfully. I’m pretty blunt. You know, my baby brother, Micah Shilanski, he says, Do you have a brain? Are you using it? I think that’s a horrific way of stating it, but it’s the same application. But most of the time, people that I meet with, they do want to problem solve. They do want to think things through. They do want to be of asset. They put a lot of value in the work. And I find that most of the CEOs, most of the operation officers, most of the leaders, the however you want to define your role, not as the financial advisor, but as the practice owner. You’re inhibiting that growth. You’re crutching them, and they’re allowing you to become their crutch because they don’t want to fail you, they don’t want to make a mistake, they don’t want to let the client down. And ultimately, whether we want to admit this or not, the brain is lazy. I just talked to my son Lane about this. He was studying for an examination, and they set a deadline to take the test on it, and he was like, You know what? I’m probably going to fail anyways, because that deadline is a lot sooner than I think I’m prepared for, but I’m going to give it the best college try that I got. Now, when he concluded this, you know, process of studying for this and he ended up failing, what Victoria in our office would call a good fail, he was super, super close, five points off from doing a passing score. But when he talked to me about this, you know, and I let him digest, he took ownership over it. He said, You know what? Here’s the things that I did wrong, blah, blah, blah. And I said, May I offer you, are you in a place for constructive feedback on this. And he was like, Yeah, I am, because that’s an important element of providing criticism. Are you in a place for constructive feedback, and then you have to actually listen to the answer somebody gives you? No, I’m not in a good head space for this. What do you have to say? No, you know what? It really wasn’t a life or death issue. We can table it and talk about it later. How can I be of service to you? How can I help you where you’re at right now? But you can’t have that conversation and somebody habitually say no, no, no, no to feedback. They have to just everyone has an off day, everyone’s in a bad mood, everyone has things come up, personal life that maybe doesn’t put them in the best frame of mind. Totally okay, but it cannot be habitual. It can’t be every week on the calendar for 52 times you’re telling me you’re not in a good head space, we have a different kind of problem. And so he said, Yeah, I am. And I said, You gave your brain permission to quit. And he was like, I don’t think so. Why do you think that? And I said, because the brain Lean is very, very lazy, and when you told it, I’m probably gonna fail. Anyways, it latched on to that idea, because the brain has a million things it is doing throughout the day that if you give it a way out, if you give it a way to not have to, not to have to process, not to be discerning, it will 100% take that route. It will take that route every single time you give it the opportunity to and I said, so you put in a lot of time, you did a lot of studying, but you still gave your brain permission to fail. You gave it a way out. You gave it this, you know, this crutch for you. And he said, Man, I can really see how, how that happened. Even though that wasn’t my conscious thought, it became my subconscious thought. And I said, 100% and so whenever we look at organizing our team, whenever we look at how we give them instructions, we want to make sure that we’re being very cognizant that they can’t hit us as the easy button. And this was really hard for me at first, because when my baby brother Micah and I took over the practice at Shilanski and Associates, it was an opportunity for my parents to enter into their freedom stage. And their freedom stage meant they didn’t have to show up at the office because we were there running the office. They didn’t have to answer every client call, because we were there to answer every client call. And so as we were coming up in this this area, we built out Micah’s book of business first, before concentrating on mine or other advisors. And so as we did that, Micah was entering this freedom stage, and I was still running the office and making sure that we were, you know, answering all the things. And so as he approached this freedom stage, I really, you know, could hear from my team members, and then being like, Micah is never available. Micah is never available. And then I had to start asking really intelligent questions. Hey, I heard Micah was never available. You’ve got this outstanding question from this client, you’re really concerned about giving them an answer? Yes, that’s true. I didn’t answer for them. I said, Great, show me what steps you took to get on Micah’s calendar. Well, I called his phone. Okay. Did you leave a message? No, I didn’t. Did you text him and tell him he had an emergency? No, I didn’t. Okay. Did you escalate this to a lead? No, I didn’t. And then all sudden it became this. They said, Well, I didn’t know what to do, and so in the absence of knowing what to do, they would pick up the phone and they would just call Micah, call Micah, call Micah. And when Micah would answer the phone and answer their question, it just accelerated the number of times he was being asked that question. What the heck is the point of being out of the office if you’re just gonna be on your phone the entire freaking time? And so I’m not talking about the emergency calls. I’m talking about when the team didn’t want to put all the information together, and they just wanted to hit the easy button and call you, and you answer the question, and then then relay the question. So the very first thing that we had to do, super low IQ, that you should be doing too, is put together communication policy. Great. Here’s the steps you take in writing, here are the steps you take in order to elevate this towards a phone call to Micah. And when you do this, you’ll notice, and I did, I noticed in a heartbeat, because I had one employee that habitually called me because I was the easy button and barely gave me any of the information, so much so that I was like, Oh my gosh, I hate answering the phone when you call. And I thought about it, and I was like, I hate answering the phone when you call. I hate answering the phone. I’m not going to answer the phone. I’m not going to answer the phone. I’m going to let you leave a message. I’m going to check my text make sure it’s not 911 client issue. I’m going to give it one hour. I would set a timer on my phone for an hour, and then I would return the phone call, and guess what happened when I call back an hour later, they had already solved the problem. Hey, thanks for returning my call. Actually, don’t need you anymore, because this is what I did. Oh, great, fantastic. And then that became the the go to process, because for the most part, we don’t have a lot of 911, emergencies at our office, and you probably don’t either. And if we give our team a process and a policy to follow, they were able to follow those steps. Now a couple of times, did I have to have corrective conversations with people like, yeah, okay, great. What did charnel, who is our Chief Operations Officer, what did she say when you brought this to her? Oh, I haven’t brought her to her. I brought it to you. Okay, great. So hold on. I’m going to go back. Let’s pull up this document together. Let’s see where I failed in the process to articulate where we are at. And it’s not done in a condescending way. It’s done a way of saying, If you followed a process in our office, that is a Get Out of Jail Free card, if there was not a process in place for you to follow, that is a Get Out of Jail Free card, because that is an ownership responsibility to make sure it was in place so that you could follow that process. But if there was a process and you deviated from said process that was documented and you were aware of then I’ve got a really big problem, then I’m not going to be the fun, energized leader. I’m going to be the disciplinary leader that says, What are you doing? Right? Because you’re not serving you, you’re not serving our clients, and you’re not serving me. So let’s start looking in this capacity of how we can help ourselves. And so start with your communication policy, and then move on to the next thing. Now, the way that I would just like this, if you’re if you’re graduating from growth and entering into freedom, and maybe you’re just already in your freedom stage, but you’re not sure if it’s working out successfully, and you feel a lot of guilt when you’re not in the office. You feel the office calls you obnoxiously. You feel clients are being serviced, etc, whatever this is. Then here’s how, what I would suggest when I’m out of the office, I still have check in meetings. So I still run a regular schedule in which I have check in meetings with my team so that they can tell me. Now the meetings aren’t all day, but it’s give me the high level stuff. I still monitor the calls that are coming in. I’ve created a widget inside of infinity that show us the call volume we have processes that are written out, so I can see if anyone is in a red zone, which means the process has lasted longer than it’s supposed to. So I’m still listening to these polls points now, this is one of the things that few years ago, about seven years ago, our team was like, hey, you know, we’re getting inundated with phone calls. And the operations team, who’s not the first people that answer the phone in our office, is constantly having to pick up the phone. And so they were, you know, and operations people are the type of people that are just so annoyed by incoming phone calls. They think their customer service skills are top notch, but they’re super introverted, and they’re absolutely annoyed by incoming phone calls. And a relationship management person isn’t they’re like, oh my gosh, somebody’s calling. I’d love to chat with you. And so they pick up that phone after they see the caller. D, they’re like, oh my gosh, Bob, how was vacation? You know, they’re energized by that interaction with another people. That’s how they refill their cup. Is through energy with other people. But introverted people, the people that are really good at operations, because they’re super detailed, do not get their cups revealed that way. They get their cups refilled by being alone in solitude and being able to focus deeply on the work that they’re doing. So they said, Jimmy, you know, we’re getting all of these phone calls, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, so I was just to the point of being like, we need to hire a new relationship manager to help with phones. And then I stopped, and I said, All right, this is getting in your client’s checkbook. It’s a lot of money. Well, how much is a lot of money? Because $1,000 to some people is a lot of money, and 100,000 is a lot of money to some other people. And so I pulled up our phone log, and I was like, Guys, we had four phone calls that the operation team had to make or how to take. And they were like, well, yeah, and I’m like, four, four in the entire week. So I’m going to hire somebody at 60 plus $1,000 a year for four phone calls and and it really made them validate. Okay, what kind of information am I giving my leader to see if that’s legitimate? And I didn’t just do the exercise by myself. I had, well, I did it first, I looked at first, then I had them do it with me. And I said, Great, let’s pull up RingCentral. We went into RingCentral. I said, Bring up the call log for last week. Here’s the extension that answered it. Here’s the ones that didn’t that the operations team, by their extension, had the answer, and then all sudden, it’s a Guided Discovery. And we do that all the time with clients. It’s a Guided Discovery. Oh my gosh, it really wasn’t that big of a problem. So now I’m not throwing human capital at a process problem. Instead, I’m looking at it and saying, Great, let’s set up relays that win because we have a hybrid office, where some people are in our local anchorage office, and then the other half there, you know, down through the lower 48 Well, let’s set up a rings scenario, where it rings to these people first, so that by the third ring, if the operations team is having to answer it, they know that the other two relationship managers are engaged on the phone. Does that sound acceptable? Yes, it does great. So we put this process across the board, and we looped everyone in, and then we explained to our relationship managers, hey, when the operations team is doing the movement of money, it’s really hard to interrupt because it’s very easy to make a mistake. And if they make a mistake, here’s what’s going to happen. So what we want to do is we want to safeguard their focus, which means here’s how I would like to set up the phone relay. Does that sound okay to you guys? Yeah, absolutely. Because relationship manager people, they want to be a service. They want to help other people. They are 100% about helping their teammates, and they were 100% on board with that. And then I came to the operations people, and I said, Listen, I know you’ve gotten Sue on the phone before. She’s not a two minute phone call, she’s a 10 minute phone call. And you know, sometimes when the relationship managers are tied up with that, it might trickle back. But here’s all the steps we’re going to take before the phone call gets to you. So if the phone call gets to you, will you acknowledge that these other two were super busy? And they said, Yeah, absolutely. We want to make sure the client’s taken care of. If all these other resources are being utilized, of course, we could take that phone call. Great, wonderful. Thank you so much. So getting these policies, getting these processes, then doing this cross pollination, making sure everyone understands that they’re all part of this dynamic wheel to keep this rolling is how you get to the level of freedom that allows you to get outside of the office. Because if I’m not doing financial planning work, which is working on the financial plans, if I’m not growing the practice, if I am not focused on business development or meeting with clients, I should not be hanging out at my office. I should be with my family, the people that I say I am doing all of this for the people that I say I work this hard for I should show up for so that they understand when I am in the office, I am deeply motivated and focused on the work that has to get done. So when I’m outside the office, I can really be present with them. But to get to that freedom stage systems, policies and processes. Now I gave you really good ideas of where to start, but this is where I see most people fail. Remind me what you listened to last week, and have you taken any actions based on what my conversation was with you on the growth stage of your practice? Because even if you’re freedom or enterprise, there’s still nuggets of truth inside of that growth that you should be able to go to either your practice, your team or your other financial advisors with, what was it? What action did you take? And if you’re not taking action, this is when you need to shut up and put your money where your mouth is. You need to enroll in memberships. We sell them at The Perfect RIA. If we’re not the right fit for you, cool, go find somebody else who is to hold you accountable to make sure you’re getting the things done. Because when we exchange our money, we attribute value to it. This is free advice, and free advice is almost worthless because you never take action on it. And if you’re not taking action, what is the point? You’re never going to hit this freedom stage alone try to get to that enterprise stage, which is where most of us are really trying to head. Because once you hit freedom, and you really, really got that dialed in, you’ve got to decide if you’re going to level up and take it to the next area, or if you’re just going to say, You know what, I’m good, where I’m at, I’m fat and happy, and, you know, I’ve built a really good life, and I’m going to coast all the way to my death sitting at my desk. So if you’re tiptoeing out of growth and into freedom, if that is your aspirational goal to get to in the next 123, or five years, great, we’ve got a membership for you, and you can take our systems, policies and processes as a framework, and that will show you how and where to get started. We will show you how you must put in the labor to get there. TPR nation, this is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of Worlds to Conquer. Go find people who share your values and change the world.