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This is The Perfect RIA, in case you didn’t know. Bringing you all the strategies to help your business grow. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? Sit back and listen in while you feel the beat. Another myth bites the dust…

Micah Shilanski:  Welcome to another great episode of The Perfect RIA podcast. I’m your co-host Micah Shilanski. And with me as usual is the legendary Matthew Jarvis. What’s going on, Jarvis?

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, another day in paradise. And I can say that with all seriousness, because I’m actually here in Alaska with you in the fine city of Anchorage where it does not get dark at night. Went to bed last night at 11:00, woke up at 5:00. It was equally bright at both hours. So a fyb fact this time of year.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right. And it’s going further and further towards the solstice recording right before that. So you know what? It’s going to be light all the time relatively, right, unless we get a cloudy day. So summer is a beautiful and a fun time in Alaska.

Matthew Jarvis:   I was trying to use this to explain in my mind how you get so much done, and maybe it’s just all the daylight. But then you reminded me that the counter is, of course, that you get a lot of darkness on the other half of the year. So I don’t know. Somehow it balances out.

Micah Shilanski:  There you go. In some way, we hibernate for nine months, work for the other three. But it works.

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s great. Well, Micah, I’m really excited for today’s podcast. One of the questions we get really often, and it was recently on the FPA forum and other places, which is, “What industry benchmarks or studies should I be using to gauge my practice? And Micah, like I said, it’s a question we get a lot, but what are your initial thoughts there? Of course, today we’ll dive into this in more detail.

Micah Shilanski:  Well, my initial thought is none of them. That’s initially what comes to mind, because one of the things that comes up with our studies … And this is not a rant, right? So we definitely want to give some good action items on what to do, but it’s how I put things in perspective, because I used to fill out all those studies and do these other things. Then I realized the more I talk with people, it didn’t match up what I saw on the averages of those studies.

So it led me to believe how much of the information is actually correct on those studies. Now, I’m sure whoever the provider is is doing a great job putting those numbers together. But the people who are inputting it, how accurate are we? And we call things different things. That was one of the things I’ve run into in the studies and be like, “No, that’s not how I classify this. Now, I have to make it conform to this thing.” And then it puts me in a benchmark that’s out there, and one of two things will happen. A, I’m going to look at it, it says, “Wow, I’m really crushing it. I’m doing a great job,” or, B, I’m going to look at it and it say, “Well, that’s …” Because the survey’s off and people aren’t looking at my business the correct way, and I’m going to justify exactly where I am and I’m not going to do a bloody thing about it.

So why did I spend hours going through that process if I’m not going to make any changes?

Matthew Jarvis:   Totally. And I think, Micah, to your point, we’re not looking to disrespect anybody who’s doing these studies, right?

Micah Shilanski:  No, no.

Matthew Jarvis:   They’re trying to gather information, but it’s like fishing stories or gambling stories or anything else. We all remember the numbers not quite like they were. And just by our personalities, we’re all about gaming the system. So Micah, like you said, you’ll see like, “Hey, here’s where my number … Well, how do I get my numbers higher? Well, if I call this this, if I move this expense to my personal side.”

Micah Shilanski:  Right.

Matthew Jarvis:   There’s too much opportunity to play office. But I think ultimately, Micah, a lot of these numbers don’t give you any actionable advice. This podcast is about action.

Micah Shilanski:  Yes.

Matthew Jarvis:   If I see that the average advisory firm allegedly has 47.2 clients per staff member, that doesn’t tell me anything. It doesn’t tell me about their service model, doesn’t tell me what I should do with my practice. It’s a lot of neat to know information, not valuable information.

Micah Shilanski:  Right. So every 47 new clients, I got to bring on a team member? How does that work, right? Is that comparing the firms that have a thousand clients per advisor or the ones that have 50 per advisor, right? So many different things that are out there.

So really, Jarvis, when we got together, especially on our live event, right, we created this thing called a mountain map, which we’re super excited about. And we really broke down. We spent a lot of time thinking about this. How do we break down an advisor’s practice and our own practice and say, “Great. What are those key things that we need to look at?” I know KPIs gets used all the time.

Matthew Jarvis:   Sure.

Micah Shilanski:  But we said, “Great. Which segment of the business, section of the business do we need to look at?” And we break it down into four categories, which are just musts and, by each of those categories, becomes a decision point, which is the key part of this.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. And having looked at hundreds or, I guess, thousands of practices now through the backstage pass and our coach and advisor, these are really the four numbers that give us the most insight into practice. Looking at these four numbers can tell us, can tell you as the advisor exactly where it is that we need to focus our efforts to get the maximum result.

And Micah, you and I use these numbers ourselves when comparing with our own mastermind, our own peers, “Great. Where’s my practice slacking off, for lack of a better term? Where is it excelling right? Who can I learn from? Who’s at the next level? And where do I need to learn?”

Micah Shilanski:  And that’s the other part that I think is really critical in these benchmarking studies, which is why we came up with our own, because we weren’t happy with it, is I want to compare to practices that I want to be like, not the average practice, because I don’t know whose practice that is. I don’t know what their lifestyle looks like, right? Do they work 80 hours a week? Well, I don’t know if I really care about their benchmarks. That’s not what I’m going for. So what practice do I want to be like? What model do I want? What value adds do I want to be adding to my clients? And based on that, great. How do I compare to those?

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s right. So today we want to look at what we’re calling the TPR, the perfect RIA power factors. And we’re going to look at each of the four areas as Micah pointed out, these four areas, and we’ll dive into each one. The number one is effectiveness. Number two is value to clients. Number three is prospecting/practice growth. Number four is profit or EBOC. And we’ll talk about each one of these.

And I would invite you listeners, TPR nation, now 20,000 plus a month strong, to look at these with an open mindset. It’s again easy to look at these and say, “Well, I disagree. I think it should be two-thirds of this and one-third of that.” Let’s just set this aside. Let’s just say, “What if this was how we took pulses of practices? What if this is how we could best improve your practice?” Let’s run from that direction. We can argue about these over a beer another day.

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely right. Take what works is one of the four rules of success. Do what works. And I’m going to tell you, this just works. So let’s jump into effectiveness first. And we put these in a certain order for a reason. Now, effectiveness is key. People focus on being efficient now. And I’m playing a little bit of word games here, but follow me on this. People focus on being efficient, which is doing things well or doing things fast or doing things fluidly. Okay? And there’s a purpose to that. But being efficient is doing the right thing … Excuse me. Being effective is doing the right things. Efficiency’s doing them fast. I want to be effective with my time. I want to do the right things.

And if I’m playing office, I don’t care how efficient I am at playing office. I’m still playing office. That’s not an effective use of my time. So Jarvis, we were really working. How do we gauge someone’s effectiveness in the office? And this can be a little challenging. So really simply, what we want to do is put a number to it, because now we have a place to be. And what we’re talking about is, with your effectiveness, how much was your gross income that you made last year? Now, let’s define gross income.

Matthew Jarvis:   Please.

Micah Shilanski:  Gross income is the total amount debited from a client account, right? So if you’re doing AUM billing, awesome. What was debited from the client? I don’t care how many people were above you in the food chain that got a cut of that. Gross is gross. What was the total number debited from a client account, charging the client credit card, et cetera?

What is that number divided by how many days did you work last year?

Matthew Jarvis:   I love that. For those listeners, right, we are platform agnostic, those listeners on commission or any other fee structure, again, Micah, to your point, top, top, top line before it hits the grid. Days working we define loosely as any day that there’s activities that keeps you from having a day with your family. So for me, I define that as any day I have to open my laptop or start responding to messages and emails from my phone. Micah, yours is anything that’s during the hours that your kids are awake. The key is to have a measurement that you’re consistent on. So look back at 2020. What was the total income generated, total income deducted from client accounts divided by the number of days you worked? And that number, that dollar amount gives us your effectiveness rating.

And now, you have two ways to move this number. You can, of course, increase your gross income and/or decrease the number of days you work. But this gives us the effectiveness of you and of your office.

Micah Shilanski:  Right. Now, if you’re sitting there with the head trash and say, “No, no, no. I’m more effective. It just takes me more time,” or, “This is my lifestyle choice,” blah, blah, blah, whatever. That’s not how this KPI works.

Matthew Jarvis:   That’s right.

Micah Shilanski:  Right? So for this one, just go with us. Gross income divided by days in the office, days worked, right? That’s the number want to use to measure this.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Micah, I also like this one because there’s some … We talk a lot about having a lifestyle practice, and there’s different definitions of that. But there are people who say, “For whatever reasons, I like working all the time.” That’s yours to decide. Perfect. Then your effectiveness number should still be at least as high, if not higher than mine.

Micah Shilanski:  Yes.

Matthew Jarvis:   Right? If you’re working twice as many days as I am, you should have twice as much income. Therefore, your effectiveness number is the same. This becomes a great equalizer, time in versus revenue generated. That’s your effectiveness score.

Micah Shilanski:  And I love time because time is that great equalizer, right? Because we all have the same 24 hours in a day. That’s it, right? We all have the same 24 hours. And the question is, “How effective are you with that time?” And this is what that number is going to tell us.

Matthew Jarvis:   I love it. Our second measurement. And again, I’m going to warn you. There’s a potential to have this be controversial. That’s not our intent today. Just go with what if this was the measurement? Our second one is value to clients, which is going to simply be gross income that we just defined divided by the total number of households. So a household of a husband and wife, that’s one household, right? Number of households, that equals your value to clients.

Now, you might be saying, “Wait a second. That’s not my value to clients. That’s the fee I’m charging to clients,” and you’re right. Those are synonymous. And let’s use a quick example.

Micah Shilanski:  Yes.

Matthew Jarvis:   In the parking lot outside of here, there are two cars. One is a Kia Sorento that somebody paid 20 grand for, one is a Mercedes S class that somebody paid $80,000 for. They are both point A to point B, but the value is dramatically different there. So we’re defining value for the sake of this discussion as essentially revenue per client. The more value you deliver, the higher fee you are charging. And if you’ve got a head trash around that, now we know where we need to focus.

Micah Shilanski:  Exactly. Now, let’s be clear. This isn’t just where we decided to place value. This is where value has been placed since the dawn of mankind, right?

Matthew Jarvis:   Yes.

Micah Shilanski:  Bartering. Great. Bartering is just establishing value, a willing buyer, a willing seller. And that’s what this is, your services at a price. That’s the value of your services, period.

Matthew Jarvis:   I love it. So value to clients, we’re going to go gross income divided by total households. Micah, you want to walk us through the next one, prospecting practice growth?

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. Prospecting is going to be really, really important, right? Because this prospecting key is going to say, “Great. Were you just a rockstar, and now you’re moving into this comfort zone?,” Because as what we often quote Joe Lucas, comfort is the cancer of success. We must always be uncomfortable. We must always be pushing in order to improve ourselves. So this is the figures that we’re going to talk about, including the next one, which is EBOC.

This is those figures year over year, the last three years what has been your growth. So that’s households. That’s number of clients, and we’re going to talk about in just a minute. That’s also profitability. So what are those three figure … and time out of the office. Forgive me. That’s the fourth one. And time out of the office. What are these main figures that you have over the last three years? And that’s going to be our benchmark for growth. And now, we get to see year over year growth and also longer term trends. Where are you at? And what I’m looking for here is, is your growth plateauing?

Matthew Jarvis:   Yes.

Micah Shilanski:  My growth in mine, it goes up and down every single year.

Matthew Jarvis:   Of course.

Micah Shilanski:  It’s not a constant, right?

Matthew Jarvis:   No.

Micah Shilanski:  Consistently, I’m in north of 20% per year growth. If I average them, is there some years that are 17? Sure. Some years there are 26? Sure. I don’t get concerned about that. But what I’m looking for is a trend. If all of a sudden I’m starting to see that growth curve go down, aha. Now, I have a problem. What was the reason it went from 27% to 17? Was I doing something different? Am I fixing those activities? Again, I need a clean benchmark. And we’re looking at that with revenue year over year, households year over year, profitability year over year.

Matthew Jarvis:   Now, Micah, pushback that we get on this from advisors, especially advisors in mature practices, they’ll say, “Hey, listen, I don’t need to grow anymore. I’ve already hit my goals,” et cetera, et cetera. And I would warn you that the danger in that is when you let off the gas in one area of life, your brain starts letting off the gas in all areas of life. What I almost always see is that when we let off in growth, we let off on delivering value to clients. We let off on effectiveness. We let off on profitability. These things all start to fade together.

You need to grow because when you stop, you start dying. And I know that’s a cliche, but I’ve just not seen it ever not be the case.

Micah Shilanski:  And Jarvis, this isn’t just growth for growth’s sake, or you don’t just have to grow in all areas. So you can say, “Great. I don’t want to take on any more households. I’m at X a hundred households, and that’s for my timeline. I don’t want to bring on anymore.” Perfect.

Matthew Jarvis:   Right.

Micah Shilanski:  Let’s bring up the revenue per client. Let’s take off more times out of the office, right? What’s the … This isn’t the reason it’s a single point of measurement and the reason we have these three different things in here, is because we really want to see where the areas that you need to focus in growing. If the households is you’re full and you’re good, perfect. We don’t need to grow there. The other areas should be growing.

Matthew Jarvis:   I love it. The last of the four areas is profitability, also known as EBOC, earnings before owner’s comp. We’ve talked about this quite a bit and there’s some confusion around the industry. So here it is. At the end of the day, the number that gives us the most transparency on your practice is line nine of your personal tax return. If you have other businesses or revenue sources, you’ll separate those out. Line nine of your tax return, that’s whatever income has flown from the practice to you in the form of salary, wages, whatever, shareholder distributions. Line nine of your tax return. That’s it. End of story.

And I know you say, “Well, I’m deducting this or I’m deducting that or this or that.” Nope. Doesn’t matter. Line nine of your tax return tells us how your practice is doing at the end of the day.

Micah Shilanski:  A reason that we really like line nine, so many reasons. I’m going to pivot this a little bit, give a client example. Whenever I have a client buying a rental property and they want to buy and they want to get rental income, right, and they’re looking at this as, “Oh my gosh. Look at all this income that’s generated,” and the real estate agent always puts up this great information, how it’s always occupied, right, and how it’s always generating all this income, I’m like, “Perfect. Sign a release and ask them for their schedule E or their LLC partnership tax return, 1120, or 1065, whatever they have on that side. Let’s get a copy of those and take a peek at it.”

And my clients were like, “Well, why do you want to see their tax return?” Simple. No one overestimates their income to the IRS, right?

Matthew Jarvis:   Totally.

Micah Shilanski:  And that’s exactly what this is. No one overestimates their income. We want all the deductions. We want all the writing off business expenses. Perfect. Good job. Now what’s that number? Now, we have an honest comparison number across the board where we get to benchmark you.

Matthew Jarvis:   I like that. A quick caveat on that, Micah. When you have clients who do that, and I learned this technique from you and it’s been great for my clients, you need to warn them that they shouldn’t be surprised if the seller disappears when you aske for that. So we say, “Oh, [crosstalk 00:15:44] our tax person wants to see these numbers so they know how it impacts us.” Don’t be surprised if they quit calling you back.

I know this because I’ve had a couple of clients where then the seller will quit talking to them. And so I just warn the client. And this client will say, “Well, I’ve offended them.”

Micah Shilanski:  That’s good, huh?

Matthew Jarvis:   And then we’ll say, “Actually, what’s gone on here is the numbers they told you are probably not the real numbers. Else, why else would they be afraid to hide it?” Same thing applies here. We talk to advisors all the time. They say, “Oh, I’m running a 93% EBOC on a million dollars revenue.” I don’t think so. I don’t think so. And we start talking to them. Oh, it turns out you’re paying all your employees personally. You’re manipulating the numbers all over the place.

Micah Shilanski:  Your BD’s paying everybody and you’re not counting gross, right?

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah.

Micah Shilanski:  You’re taking that 30% override and you’re counting that as, “Oh, that’s not really a business expense.” Nope. That’s not how it works. This is the reason we want the gross gross number and what shows up on your tax return.

Matthew Jarvis:   I love that. So those are the four numbers. And going forward, if you’re ever reaching out to Micah and I through the Perfect RIA and you say, “Well, I’d love some advice on my practice,” that’s what we’re going to look at. That’s what we’re looking at each other. In fact, at our mastermind events, these are now going to be the numbers on your name tag so that we know where are you at, what is your effectiveness, what’s your value to clients, what is your growth, your prospecting, what is your EBOC. Those tell us essentially everything we know.

And Micah, let’s use an example of this, right? Advisors ask, “When should I hire the next person?” Great. Well, we can look at that really easily. What’s your effectiveness ratio? What’s your profitability ratio? And right there, we’ll be able to see. If your effectiveness is super high and your profitability is super high, perfect. Let’s hire somebody to make this a little bit easier for you.

Micah Shilanski:  Right. Or if your effectiveness is low, but your profitability is high, right?

Matthew Jarvis:   Thank you [crosstalk 00:17:20].

Micah Shilanski:  … a better example. Yeah. Yeah. And in that example right there, you’re spending too much time in the office, but you have the money. But if all of a sudden your profitability is really low, you don’t got the money, right? So where is it that you’re going? What changes are you going to make? Maybe you need to set some milestones, some carrots out there that once you hit this, then you get to hire somebody.

But it gives us a benchmark, not only in your own practice, but Jarvis, one of the reasons I really like this idea that I’ve missed, and I’ve mentioned it before on the pod, coming out of the BD space, I really enjoyed the big BD conferences. And I know people are going to think I’m crazy. And it wasn’t because all the wonderful wholesalers that would sell us stuff. It’s because I’d look for the people with all the ribbons and I would go, “Great. You are crushing it in some area. Where? And what do I need to learn from you?”

And guess what this is going to do? This is going to give us four areas. And I can look at someone and says, “Great. Maybe their value to clients is just skyrocketing. I would love to be able to piggyback on them.” Says, “Okay, awesome. I figured out the time out of the office thing. How are you just crushing it with your value to clients?” And now, I’m able to learn from them. And if all of a sudden their effectiveness is really low, I’m like, “Sweet. I got a pretty high effectiveness. Maybe I could also give you some advice,” because we only want to take advice from those who have been there and done that. We don’t need theory. We don’t need all of this fairies and fantasy land. We need reality information.

And what this is going to do, this is going to give us our baseline in reality so that we can all lift together to make some phenomenal practices.

Matthew Jarvis:   Micah, you know another example that comes to mind is head trash around charging a fee relative to the value that you’re providing.

Micah Shilanski:  Sure.

Matthew Jarvis:   It’s something that I continue to struggle with. But to your point, I can look and say, “Great. Who is delivering more value to client, right, their fees. How do I either deliver that same value, or, if I’m already delivering as much value as they are, how do I raise my fees up so that I’m at a market level, so that I’m charging a fee commensurate to the value that I’m providing?”

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely. Right. And I don’t know why we spend so much time on fees. It is an industry. It’s ridiculous, right? We should all just charge more. All right. But so with that, it’s what is that value with what I’m doing? This is that main focus that we need to be in. And again, it’s in all of these different areas.

Now, one of the things we talked about, it’s not just enough to have a benchmark and then not do anything with it. You then have to look at the benchmarks and say, “Great. Which area am I going to work on?” Now, me personally, when I go through this, Jarvis, and I’d love your thoughts, I’m not going to look at all four and says, “Well, crap. I need to fix all of them,” because then I’m going to do nothing.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah.

Micah Shilanski:  I’m going to pick one, maybe one, a quarter. That could be something manageable. But I’ll say, “Great. Out of these four, what is my top one that I want to make sure that I’m crushing, that I’m going to make sure I’m improving and going?” And I’m going to pick on value to clients, right? Says, “Perfect. I want to make sure I’m increasing this value to clients. What’s the way that I can do this? You know what? And one of them is based on the fees. So do I raise my fees? Do I lower my households? Do I increase my value adds? Do I got to work on … What do I need to do to increase my value to my clients that they see and they appreciate?

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. I would also, Micah, take that and … And again, we have head trash here and it’s easy to play games with these things, but to look at those four numbers and say, “What difference would it make in my life, in my family’s life, in my client’s life, in the world at large, if I were to really do the work to start moving these up?” What charitable organizations would you be able to support? What trips could you take with your family? What value can you deliver to clients if you really made these numbers move, if you really move the needle in each of these four areas?

Micah Shilanski:  I love that charitable side. We’ve had some really great people step up and be like, “You know what? I’m going to make some big differences in charities and change the world with what my personal passion is, and the business is what’s going to help enable me to do that.” Because we live in such an amazing world, we can do that with these practices.

But again, if you’re not looking at these numbers, you’re not going to be there.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. I would throw in one caution, if you will, about these numbers, right? We want to set clear goals to move these numbers. Micah, I know you always do that in ranges because it gives you a range to work in. We want to make sure that we’re not setting extreme accountability on these numbers, because you cannot directly control these. There are things that feed to these. The extreme accountability would be, “Hey, my growth has been slow.” Perfect. My extreme accountability is, “I’m going to every week talk to two centers of influence. And each week that I don’t, I’m just going to send a thousand dollars to my least favorite political candidate with a note saying, “This is the first of many contributions,” right?

So these high-level numbers give us the pulse. It’s like your blood pressure. And then there are action steps that feed into each of these. We’ve talked about them on past podcasts. We’ll keep talking about them in the future.

Micah Shilanski:  Another thing, one of the three tenants of the Perfect RIA, Jarvis, as you know, is to run at a 50% profitability. You should be making at least a thousand dollars that are 50% profitability. Those are kind of some basic numbers. The reason we focus on this, and again, we have so many people in our industry with money head trash, and they come back like “this really isn’t important.” Really? What happens when the stock market drops 40%? How important is profitability then? Because if you’re borderline making money now, 15 – 20% and the stock market has a routine hiccup—and 20% is a routine hiccup—all of a sudden, what happens? What responsibility do you have to staff, to your other clients? How are you going to stay in business if you go through a—when we go through a five-year downturn—again in the market, and all of a sudden, your revenue is cut in half for years. What’s your plan? If you are not profitable today in building this, you are setting yourself up for a huge problem in retirement.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Micah, the other part on that—so the profitability is huge. What about the bandwidth? So if your effectiveness is low and all these big tax changes that are being talked about come out or some new regulations come out and you’re already at capacity, you’re already working every possible hour you can, where are you going to find bandwidth to take care of these things? Whereas advisors who are watching their effectiveness say “great, I was going to take off next week, but there’s this big tax law change I need to take care of. I have bandwidth, I can absorb that. Or Micah, to your point with the market falling, I’ve got bandwidth to talk with every single client and let them know, “hey, we were ready for this. Our buckets are ready for this to happen.”

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. Super, super important to be crushing it in these areas because, again, the best thing that you can do for your clients—and this is not selfish—is to take care of you so you are in the best place to take care of them. Changing gears a little bit, think about this as a first responder. One of the primary things as a first responder for a short period in time, one of the primary things is to make sure you do not get hurt as a first responder. Why? Because then who’s going to take care of the victim? Who’s going to take care of you? Right? Your job is to provide that care, that’s our job as financial advisors, whether it’s our mental health with getting days out of the office and being focused and being recharged so we can be at our A-game with clients, whether it’s building extra buffer time so when everything goes to hell in a handbasket, we have that time in here to be with our clients, being profitable so we can be in business. These are things that are your responsibility when you don the hat as a financial planner, to make sure you are taken care of so that you can take care of your clients, your staff, and your family.

Matthew Jarvis:   I like that, Micah. One other reason I would recommend that you track this, and we’ve kind of alluded to this, is so that you can find peers that you can mastermind with. We just this morning were on the phone with a rockstar advisor whose name we’ll be released shortly—rockstar advisor who’s forming multiple mastermind groups underneath The Perfect RIA. And these are numbers that he wants to see before you’re invited to join his mastermind because he needs to know that you will be lifting the ship with everyone else, not that everybody will have to be lifting you. So another reason to track these as masterminds continue to be in traction, you will need this information to find which masterminds you belong to and who belongs to your mastermind.

Micah Shilanski:  If you want help putting these numbers together, piece of cake. Jump on our website, theperfectria.com, and we’re going to have a tool right on there in order that you can put in these numbers and it’s going to track them for you so you can see exactly where you’re at. You can also apply for our masterminds which is great to see if you’re going to be invited to one. And if you are an Invictus member, then make sure to contact Shelby. Shelby’s not only going to give you the tools for this, but she will walk you through this mountain map if you haven’t done it already. Make sure you have these numbers tracked, and make sure you are connected with the right members in Invictus that are in your same category so that you guys can help grow together.

Matthew Jarvis:   Wow, I love that. That’s really exciting. Well, those are already a couple of action items for us, Micah, but let’s throw a couple more out there. So to really firm this up because this podcast is about taking action, your action item for this week—not someday, not when I get around to it, not when I feel like it—is to get these four numbers, get them on a single sheet of paper, a single Post-It note, and put them in a place where you can be aware of those, so as you’re making decisions—all decisions, from “should I check my email today?”, “should I do this?”, “should I do that?”—how will those impact these power factor numbers—that becomes your forcing mechanism or your lens for all decisions.

Micah Shilanski:  Absolutely. You know what? The next action item for you is you have to commit to changes. So one of the things, again, when I’m looking at my KPIs, it drives me nuts if I’m looking at number and not deciding to make a change with them, right? So look at these and say great, what is the one you want to focus on, what is the one you want to improve? Circle that. Then, what are you going to do? What is your extreme accountability? And again, that’s not increasing that number, that’s increasing things inside of that number in order to get it, whether it’s contacting COI’s, hosting different events, you know, graduating clients, those types of things that you can control.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, and I would look at that, Micah, from a “what if I had to double this number?” So sometimes we get caught—this is a whole episode—of saying “well, if I just bump this 5%”, “well, 5%, I just have to try a little bit harder.” If I had to double this number, if I had to double my effectiveness, what would I have to do? If I had to double my EBOC, what would I have to do? That big thinking, even if you never get close to the double—though you will—that kind of big thinking will change the whole paradigm. You can’t say “I’ll be more efficient”—Micah, to your earlier point—“I’ll check my emails faster.” Well, that might get you 1%. That’s not going to get you to double. “I’m going to eliminate my emails.” Okay. Now we’re on the path to double.

Micah Shilanski:  I love it. Alright, this podcast is all about action items. Make sure you take action on all of those things, and give us 5 stars. Give us 5 stars, send this out to more advisors. This is continually growing. We have some exciting webinars that are coming out and information. If you are not signed up for those, make sure you email lifestyle@theperfectria.com so you can get some great information about that, and until next time, happy planning.

Matthew Jarvis:   Happy planning.

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