Read the Transcript Below:

Matt  

Prospecting is like six pack abs. Everybody knows how to do it, but nobody wants to do the work.

Matt  

Today’s episode is brought to you by even more great content! If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, if you’ve been enjoying Micah and myself, go to theperfectria.com/trainingseries. That’s theperfectria.com/trainingseries to sign up for more of our great content videos, emails, other activities, webinars, asked me anything events, basically everything and anything that Micah and I are up to – You can get access to by visiting the perfect ria.com/training series. All right, back to the show. 

Micah  

Welcome back to The Perfect RIA Podcast. I’m your co host Micah Shilanski  and with me as usual brother legendary Matthew Jarvis. What’s going on bud?

Matt  

Micah so glad to be doing podcast with you every week. This is obviously something we both look forward to one it’s a lot of fun to spread the good word right to help advisors learn how to transform their practices. But also as you I’ve talked about a lot of times it gives us a chance to reflect back on our own practices, which of course we’re working in everyday at least every day that we’re in the office so always glad to be back here in the studio. 

Micah  

Yeah, it’s always fantastic to jump in here. You know, and record these kinds of up at different times, which is really great because when this airs, it’s right around my anniversary so I’m out spending time with my wife with this airs, which is wonderful thing to do. And it’s really about being intentional, right? I know Jarvis you and I were talking about this a little bit before the podcast as well about saying, You know what, how is our time kind of set up and are we being intentional with our time you know, are we carving out that family time it can be hard to do? Are we carving out enough time to work on that can also be hard to do, right? How do you balance those things? But Jarvis see, the biggest robber of this, especially when I’m talking to people is the aspect of playing office is they start justifying their time as oh, I need to take time off my family. Or I need to do this. No, no, you have to earn your time off with your family. And you do that by busting your butt doing the right reps in the right things, not playing off as it when it comes to prospecting. As soon as someone talks about prospecting immediately it’s playing on my mind, because most of the time when I’m talking to advisors about how they prospect it is playing office and you really got to address that. 

Matt  

Yeah, you do. And as you pointed out, like it comes back to being the intentional just you and I have now boy looked at well over 1000 practices 1000s of practices, and the practices that are successful and each person can define success a little differently, but however you’re defining success, the six most successful practices are the most intentional. And then same goes for prospecting. The advisors that we’re seeing with the most success in their prospecting, including you and I are the ones that are insanely intentional about doing the really hard work, right. We’re always looking for this silver bullet, right. What’s the ab exercise I can do for two seconds today? I’m really just not at all and have washboard abs. What’s the marketing strategy I can throw money at and mysteriously I’ll have the steady flow of clients and neither one exists.

Micah  

Alright I’m gonna push back on something. I was getting a little honoree in the young age here. 

Matt  

Yeah, you’re gonna show us your washboard abs is that what’s going on here?

Micah  

Yeah, pretty much that’s coming next time. That’s a different show. We’ll get to define success. However you want to define it. No, success is success or there’s failure. And I think one of the things that jurors who have run into with this was oh, I have a successful practice bla bla bla bla bla and they’re using that as an excuse and we’ve seen no you and I run into the same person that says this right? They’re using that as an excuse as to why they’re not actually successful. Oh, so many people wouldn’t be jealous of my practice because A B and C. Nah-ha, hard stopping. Anyone in your financial industry changed places with you or your practice? Probably not. Right? So that is not successful. If you are not being hyper intentional with your time and carving time off with your family while successfully growing your practice. Status quo is not growing. That’s not success. You must be moving that needle in your practice plus 20% growth must be profitable with your practice as well when the market has a 30% downturn and you’re tied to AUM you’re going to run into a problem. You must be profitable with this. If you’re not growing your practice how to lifestyle as well as being profitable. You are not successful in your practice yet, and you must be working. They’re pushing that direction. 

Matt  

We can even throw some numbers at that right? I mean, again, you need to be head down grinding it out until you’ve passed a million dollars of revenue per advisor. So none of this like hey, we have 2 million in revenue and 17 advisors. No, that’s for the Kitsis podcast right, on this podcast it’s usually of a million dollars revenue per advisor, you’re operating at a minimum 50% profitability. You have Micah to your point at Prospect pipeline that’s generating 20% growth, right? And then you’re taking a material amount of time off to spend with your family and to be out of the office, though again, that’s earned after the first three are accomplished, right? So that’s like people come to us to my practice is just like yours. I have a lifestyle practice, really. So you’re you’re grossing a couple of million. You’re netting a million plus Well, no, I, I grossed 238,000. Okay, so you’re making zero money and you’re not working? If that’s not the same thing? 

Micah  

And by the way, I’m not crapping on you right,  we were there. And we totally understand that and that’s the reason you have to embrace the grind when you’re in that stage. And that’s growth Gary concept versus a sub quarter million or glowing in this and I really do it. This is the podcast you need right here. This episode we’re about to do because it’s all about prospecting. This is all about how do you increase those reps? What are those things that you do in order to grow and that’s pretty much all you need to be focused on as you’re just crushing your prospecting and not playing office in different areas. And once you start growing kind of past that now you can start picking your head up a little bit more and looking at other areas of your practice to grow as well. But again, Jarvis back to the comment you made this is all about being intentional, right? You got to be hyper intentional with these things. 

Matt  

And part of that is of course tracking your results of tracking your reps, and it’s tracking your results. So let’s give a quick example. Let’s say that similar to me, one of your strategies for getting new clients is center of influence, right? Working with accountants and attorneys, other centers of influence, right, just saying that that’s my strategy is of zero value. Right? So what is the value of saying, hey, every single week, I’m going to call 10 of these people and the strategies in my book and podcasts every single week, I’m going to call 10. And I’m going to write down their names. Because what happens Micah with all prospecting channels, and we’ll talk about ones that you’re using just second, we tell ourselves oh, yeah, I worked out every day. I call 10. This week, cool. Write down their names for me. Well, there was there was Bob, you call Bob? Well, I didn’t call Bob. I thought about calling Bob. Okay, so we have zero. Where’s the other 10? Like we’re all notorious, especially with prospecting about lying to ourselves about the reps .

Micah  

Oh, a 100% lap X is talking to a salesperson the other day, and they were what  their closing issue was I was like, man, it’s absolutely fantastic, you know, when I started, you know, grabbing kind of more information, more information. Basically, they’re counting their closer issue, however, they want to count it on that particular day. Hey, it was raining outside. Therefore, none of the calls I made today counted against my close ratio. Oh, the sun is shining and somebody said yes. Okay. This call does count today. Right? No no this isn’t how it works, right? You need a trackable process. So you can see where we need improvement, and we all need improvement. I’m certainly guilty of this on my hand, right? I definitely need improvement on these things. But the only way I know where I need to improve is by having the data that backs us up. So whatever prospecting system you’re gonna have, you have to have some basic check ins with that to say what’s working, right, just because you start something and it doesn’t produce results in two months. It doesn’t mean to stop it either. Right? Number one, you only do proven systems, especially once you start doing north of seven figures if you were to start experimenting with different stuff, right sub that the only thing you need to be doing is proven systems by other advisors that are advisors you want to model in your practice. That’s it. That’s what you need to be focused on. And so you’re only doing proven systems and you break those proven systems down to check in points to say, Hey, what are the results I’m expecting these different areas and when it starts to break down you get to be able to bring somebody else in and say, Hey, what am I doing wrong here? 

Matt  

Oh, for sure. For sure. So I think Micah are one of the first places this measurement comes and it’s important to remember this measurement needs to be really could be on a sheet of printed paper, or it could be in a very simple Excel document. This is not in some elaborate tracking mechanism that you’re going to just play office. And so for anybody that has a somewhat established practice, let’s call that 250k of revenue to a million to 2 million revenue. The very first place you need to go and measure is where did your existing clients come from? Again, I know you’re gonna tell me how they all came from. XYZ. Cool. Once again, I want names and I want the exact source that they came from. So you say Hey, Bob and Sue. There was our most recent client. Cool. Where did Bob and Sue come from? They came from our website. Do they really like when they called How do they know your name? Like, we need to be really specific because what happens is advisors almost never know what this is. And it’s different for every advisor. And if you come and we say you and all of my clients come through LinkedIn messages, okay, cool. Let’s just get the names and we look at the names and we realize they all come from your local golf club. Well, let’s quit screwing around on LinkedIn and let’s spend all the time at the golf club or whatever the case may be. 

Micah  

Yeah. 100% Right. So breaking that stuff down. Alright, the other thing is you need to have three prospecting channels that you are always working on right. Jarvis push back on me if you’ve seen different I have never seen a successful advisors office that doesn’t have three channels they’re pushing on. They might be expanding a little bit into a fourth one kind of playing and whatnot, but they’re generally always got three base ones going on. Pushback if you have seen different.

Matt  

And these exceptions prove the rule? Actually, no, they say they 100% for the rule. There’s there’s a company without hyper focus niches super, super hyper focused. 

Micah  

Sure. 

Matt  

Then when you break that down, there’s there’s really three strategies inside of that. Right?

Micah  

Exactly. Yes. So I’m not I’m not saying like a niche like three different niches. That’s not what I’m saying at all.

Matt  

Because I’m even thinking of your federal employees niche right. So we say Oh, Micah has one channel we’re gonna have a second. Inside that channel is constant SEO content. It’s constant video content. It’s constant event. Oh, wait, we have three channels. Now by the way, as you point out that five channels it’s not like let’s also go ahead and tchotchkes outside the federal building. So it’s, it’s three it’s always three. 

Micah  

Yeah, so it really breaks down to those are the minimums that you need to be doing right. Alright. Number one, don’t worry you’re already doing this wrong because everybody is is referrals, right? Everyone is doing referrals wrong. Every coach out there says well, you should grow based on referrals. You have 100 clients, you should get 10 referrals a year. And it kind of doesn’t happen.  This is the reason the mocking voices are there. So you really need to have an intentional strategy about how are you going to grow your referrals. And this isn’t Hey, give me three of your friends names to sit down a call probably not going to be effective. So an effective referral strategy when I look at Jarvis is what’s something that my team can do that they are going to feel comfortable with consistently doing right? How do we surprise and delight our clients? How do we let them know that we’re always looking for clients like that, but we’re always taking care of them. So you need a really intentional strategy that’s baked around that right and just like with any client, that if we tell them something three times they probably didn’t hear it by the seventh time is when they’ve heard it for the first time. So this is same thing inside of this strategy. We need a method that a lever we can pull so we can keep those referrals coming in consistently. 

Matt  

And whether we’re talking about referrals or any of the other prospecting channels we’re going to talk on you’re only gonna see movement if you’re, and I apologize for the cliche, we’re not if you’re delivering massive value, and an extreme example of that is we’ve all been to McDonald’s, right? But no one has ever told their friends like hey, if you really want a good discount meal, like you should head over to McDonald’s. Why? Because McDonald’s always provides exactly what they said they would provide a mediocre meal for a mediocre price, right? Like I’ve never sent a referral to my electricity company. And you know, the electricity is pretty much on every day here. But I never think like I should call some friends and I should tell them about my electricity company. Why because they did exactly what I expected them to do not more not less for your practice before you’re going to get referrals you have to deliver value that exceeds whatever the prospect or client thought they were going to get. That’s where the surprise and delight This is the team falling back up all of these things. You’re never gonna get referrals unless you’re delivering value that far exceeds what you’re charging in the clients mind. 

Micah  

Yeah. Right. So what’s your strategy that’s going to be around that with your written prospect process, prospect strategy that you’re going to be going through to say, hey, and does the team know about this? Right? Does the team know how to thank clients and this isn’t the team asking again for referrals. But does the team do they know how to thank clients do they know how the experience was going to be on the phone? And uh, one of the things that’s really nice with our team members that just crush the client service is we consistently get compliments on them on the great job that they do. But also we also hear the comment or as I’m sure you do Jarvis, as well, Micah, I had to call my XYZ agent the other day and deal with A B and C and it really made me realize how spoiled I am working with you guys. You take care of so many things for us, and you make it easy, right? So our job with our clients is to make their life easy. And that gets highlighted pretty quick when they work with other people says Holy crap. It’s better to work with the Shilanski office when they take care of all of these things. 

Matt  

So the rep that we’re going to count here, the rep could be counting surprise and delight where we’re really going above and beyond we can count compliments, which is not necessarily a rep but it’s it’s reflected. We can count the number of times that we’re having the referral discussion which again Micah, the point is not write down five names. It’s a discussion of hey, we have the capacity to take on seven new clients, blah, blah, blah, whatever your process is there. And we’ve defined that on several pilots. So good. You’ve got to be counting that rep. Every week. Right now, it’s not like once a month or once a quarter once a year. I’ll go back and sort of reflect on it sure the number was 27. If you want the strategy to move every week in your team standard media, you’re saying alright, here’s what our rep is for getting referrals. How many of these did we do and how can we improve? 

Micah  

I love it. All right, so the next one I’m gonna say is good, that’s gonna be one of them. It’s probably BS between all of us, then your other two ones that you kind of pick and really depends on you. Now here’s a mistake that I’m going to see Jarvis, the right people say oh my gosh, Jarvis has done a good job with COI, good job with networking. Now I’m going to jump into these. One, 99% of people should avoid networking like the plague because we suck at it. We don’t actually do it. And it’s an excuse to play office, right? And so these are the strategies don’t do them just because someone else does them. Both strategies work. So number one, you have to choose a strategy that works everyone we’re going to talk about in a second works. But then the second part of this, what are you willing to work like if Jarvis has a great COI strategy, and I’ll pick on myself right here, George, you have a good SEO strategy. I’m not going to do that. I don’t enjoy taking COI out to lunch and chatting with them and go into this like, I am not excited about it. I’m not going to do it. I procrastinate like crazy, but I will build SEO content that produces clients. Okay, great. At the end of the day, we’re still working for the same thing, delivering value and getting clients and so there’s different ways to do it. But I have to choose something I know I’m going to do or at least creating a forcing mechanism that forces me to do that thing. But I’m not just going to do this just because Jarvis does it. There’s other ways to do it as well. 

Matt  

Yeah, you’ve got to be committed that you’re gonna do it for at least two years. And you’re gonna do it every single week. And none of these are easy options. I think this is a trap we fall into. I know I have fallen into it. Hey, what’s the easiest way to get prospects there is not there is no easy way to get prospects that just doesn’t exist so I’m going to buy a prices cool that’s not any easier right? There’s no easy option so like your SEO content, I love making random content I don’t really enjoy doing SEO content like that’s a real word isn’t just random posts. Obviously Micah you know this but  a lot of our listeners don’t. These are taking real effort, a lot of collaboration a lot of work. Cool. If I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do it every single week for the next two years. Right? And if I’m not, don’t start, don’t waste your time. Our good friend Benjamin Brandt who have coached extensively, his podcast right was where he gets the bulk of his points. He does it every single week. He’s done it for years and years years. He says the same thing. Don’t start a podcast unless you do it every single week for two years. Otherwise, just don’t waste your time. 

Micah  

Right. Alright, so let’s talk about COI wise a little bit. Right. And I noticed you mentioned a lot in the book and I know inside of backstage pass as well. We talked a lot about COI strategy that you need to have. But again, what this is is Centers of Excellence is right. And how are you engaging with centers of influence in your area and how were you not asking them for their clients, but how are you positioning you know, you respect to their expertise, and you help clients in these areas as well. 

Matt  

I see a lot of bad advice on this. All of it pretty much bad advice. Sorry. There was an article I saw just the other day it was like Hey, call centers of influence. And let them know that you’re a professional financial advisor, you’re providing comprehensive advice, and then therefore they should send you clients. And obviously it was written by someone who has never gotten one who’s never gotten a referral from a center of influence because that’s a pure what’s in it for you play. It’s got to be a what’s in it for them. Props to Joe Polish and Genius Network for that one and again, like as you point out, we’ve done a lot of training on this, but it’s you know, if I, if my strategy is COIs, and every week I’m going to call 10 with the intention of delivering value to them. And Micah to your point if that’s not your thing, if like, Hey, listen, the idea of talking to 10 CPAs a week slipped my throat now, cool, pick another strategy, just know that none of these strategies are any easier than any other strategies.

Micah 

You gotta get to pick what you’re gonna do, right or create a forcing mechanism to it, but you still got to do this. So COIs that’s one networking, this is another this is the one that I say 99% of people should avoid like the plague because you think this is showing up to a rotary meeting or going to a small business meeting or something of that nature, etc. And that’s a not yet. 

Matt  

In fact, I was talking to an advisor just the other day I was doing a training as something that’s come with a podcast when I get to speak to lots of advisors, and he said he was gonna do networking and what I love to do is car show so I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go to car shows every week and so we’re gonna have a lot of fun. Going to car shows every week. You will get zero clients from just zero plans from that as pure playing office, you want do it for fun, knock yourself out. If you want to do it to get clients that requires an entire strategy. 

Micah  

It really does you got to have an entire strategy. How are you going to put all of these things together? How are you going to be hyper intentional about it? Now Jarvis you and I have gotten clients from networking, but it was the unintentional side, right? And when clients come up to me and I know you’re better at this than I am, but when clients come up to me what I’m doing is you’re doing prospects coming to me and I’m doing something social, and they want to engage with me. I’d be like, Hey, I’d love to have this conversation. You know, right now I’m here for the shooting event. I’d want to focus on this but I’ll be happy to pass your information along to my team member and Victoria will give you a call and we’ll set a time that we can sit down and chat is that going to be okay? And they are super responsive too, super respectful but it works really well. And then I immediately dropped them into our prospect process. I don’t tell them to call our office right. I do collect their information and pass along to Victoria so she can do the follow up on it. I feel like we’re taking that extra step. But it goes immediately into our prospect process. We’re not going to violate anything else. The prospect was designed to deliver massive value to our prospects along every step. And I don’t want to get away from that. 

Matt  

I did have somebody as explaining last week at a conference, I was teaching the prospect process and they said hey, why don’t you cut out steps three, four and five. This seems really inefficient. And on the surface, it is really inefficient. But what I’m solving for is getting clients and it’s super efficient at. Micah, I want to mention at the networking, as I get like 1/3 of my clients consistently from my networking, but it’s a it’s a hybrid intentional strategy. I’ve never ever gotten a client from a chamber of commerce meeting. I’ve been to a lot never from a rotary club. I’ve been to a lot, never from hanging out of the car show, right? And I talked about getting everything wrong with networking. If you’re gonna do networking, like anything else, it’s just hyper intentional strategy. We use like a dream 100 concept like Alright, there’s 100 people inside my community that if I can get them as clients would transform my practice, and it’s borderline stalking, it’s borderline like, hey, anywhere these 100 people are going to be I am also going to be there. But that’s a long term strategy and it’s got to be one you’re gonna stick with for years. 

Micah  

One that I’ve used for a long time I still use it works really, really well is seminars and educational events. We do seminars, educational events before we did them for federal employees. We did them through the community schools, we taught retirement seminars, investment seminars etc, and stems – a blast from the past few those, those have morphed into more niche focused where we are specializing helping federal employees were put on all day classes for federal employees. So these classes still work. I haven’t talked to anyone a long time has been successful dinner seminars, but it’s because I left the BD world I don’t know. But we’re not doing dinner seminars, we’re doing daytime classes, and we’re going through kind of everything. In the class, to your point, there’s a certain methodology of how we need to go to the class, so they walk away with the most value possible. And also show that it highlights our area of expertise. And this again, is a lot of work. This isn’t just one day or a couple of nights etc. You’re doing these classes. This takes months of time to fill the class months of time of practice. How are you going to develop this How are you going to implement this and where advisors really make mistake is they say, Oh, I know all this stuff. I’ll just get on stage and magically be able to perform because I can talk to clients one on one. It is dramatically different jumping on stage than being in a conference or one on one with somebody.

Matt  

Well for most advisors, I’m sure they’re they’re not doing a good job one on one like if you want to record your climate and send it over to us, we’ll be glad to critique that thing. One on One people use it pretty polite and they won’t tell you that you’re doing a miserable job in a group setting. They’ll be the guy who’s kicked back or somebody else’s on their laptop. But Micah I was in your office the week that you were doing an event, right and the days before I was watching you and your team practice for hours, hours and hours and hours and that was just that that one week. There’s also of course Micah the endless reps of getting people into the event. Right? We’ve all fall into that trap. Hey, all you got to do is put together this event and people will somehow magically know and they’ll show up there’ll be a line around the block and they’ll be standing room only and no one shows up. And no one shows up. This is again it’s you got to pull the lever uniform a lot of times

Micah  

Yeah, so again, we’re not bashing on any of these advisors who have made a very realistic picture. These are a lot of work and these can be very productive, right. I really enjoyed doing our all day classes. We had a tremendous amount of value to our community. Our goals help another million federal employees with retirement right. So we’re working on that consistently. Which I really love. And this is a great way that we bring on clients we have transformed their lives. But it’s a ton of work just like networking, or COIs it is a ton of work and you must have a very intentional strategy. How are you going to pull this off? 

Matt  

Micah one of the last channels that we would highlight here would be content creation, which we’ve talked about a little bit and this is by me somewhere I have never had any success, at least from the advisory side. From an advisor side,  you know, we’re The Perfect Ria. We do great work there. But it’s somewhere you’ve had a lot of success with, but it’s also a spot where a lot of advisors go wrong. Similar to networking they think, oh, if I just post randomly on social media, that’s the same thing. And they’ll say Oh, well so and so they’ve gotten all their clients from social media. A that may or may not be true, but the ones who do who we’ve seen behind the curtain, they work like no one’s business. So John Lee Dumas is an example right? Yeah, he’s not an advisor, but he’s done a daily podcast every single day for what like 10 years Yeah, like 10 years, every single day methodical process. Every single one has a guest. So when you talk to him, he’s like sitting by the pool in Puerto Rico making 3 or 4 million bucks a year. And you’re like, Oh, this guy just kicks back and makes random podcast posts. No way. No way this guy is a machine. And after years and years of years it turned into a money machine. 

Micah  

So with the content play kind of like the concept of, Jarvis push back on me, concept of writing a book but when we decided to write our book or you or yours it was the aspect of okay wait to be really intentional. What are we going to cover? And we’re not covering 99.99999% of everything in finance, right? We’re being really particular on one thing is what we’re trying to cover and then start outlining the chapters, going through which message you want to deliver how you want to bring someone through this process. That’s the same thing with content creation as well. You’re taking and saying okay, I’m gonna not talk about most things. I’m gonna go really in depth on just a few things. But then the caveat is what are those few things you go in depth on? I’m in the camp of supply and demand. I think that’s what drives everything. And so we kind of looked at the attraction say, okay, you know, what’s the demand out there? What keywords are people searching that I want to go for the ones that have high demand and low supply? No one is supplying those example a lot of people search for retirement. Okay. There’s a lot of demand for it. But the supply is massive. And the people that are posting on just pure retirement are going to outspend me every single day of the week, right? So there’s no way I’m going to compete on that word. So I need to break that down a little bit more and say, what are some longer keywords people are searching for? And that’s the ones that I need to start writing. To your point. It’s not I randomly wake up and get a write whatever I want post any particular content that I want. It’s with us,a long strategy we planned out one of the questions that we get from federal employees now for our first federal fact check. Alright, how does this help with what keywords how is this built in? How is this going to help spread our messages has helped more people retire etc. So there’s a long process that we go through to build all of these different things. In stores, any one of these strategies starts by just taking action, right? Okay, you know, you’ve got to start moving down the path and you’re gonna start figuring it out. But the biggest thing is it’s going to push on this again and again and again, do a strategy that worke from an advisor that you respect in a practice you want to have. That’s the big thing I support where I’ve wasted the most time and money Jervis in the past is I got a really good sales pitch and somebody else and I bought this system, I did this system, etc. And I found out I never talked to another advisor that ever had that system work, and it was just blowing my money. So that’s the biggest thing I’m going to preach to people find and advisor you respect their practice, where do you want to be? What prospecting systems do they have? Those are the ones that you need to implement. 

Matt  

One of the filter Micah comes to mind as you’re looking at prospects systems, and that would be if there’s, like ratio of money spent to results you’re not going to win that game. And what I mean by that is, let’s say you use that retirement keyword. So it’s a great idea. I’m going to try to outspend fidelity and Charles Schwab and Vanguard and NerdWallet on the word retirement nope, cannot be done. And I’m going to try to outspend fidelity and Charles Schwab and Vanguard on direct mail. Can’t beat that. I’m going to try to outspend them on the fanciest website. Can’t beat that. Here’s what we have to remember that all these organizations I just named three of hundreds. They spend more money in your geographical area month that you’ll make in your lifetime, but it’s supposed to go toe to toe with Merrill Lynch. Now you cannot beat them and they’re gonna call them and say no I say this I’m gonna find a hyper local niche either geographically, or in a very narrow spa that relies on incredible expertise. I can win that game that’s an effort game, I can win the effort game. I can’t win the money game. Not in this right now.

Micah  

Yeah that’s not what we’re solving for. Right? So alright, this podcast is all about taking action as we did a lot of ragging on things so lets get into things that actually work right. Number one, you need a prospect. We will talk about this inside of here but this goes right into it – a prospect tracking system. That is the first action that you got to have because when anyone contacts your office, you need to start tracking, Jarvis your point you made at the beginning of the pod with people coming from how do they hear about you? Where did they get lost in your prospect pipeline? Right? So you need a break your steps down, you need to track where these people are coming from, especially if you don’t really have good prospecting right now. Okay. Well, if you go back for the last two years, where do you get all your clients from when you actually know that what you think we do actually have evidence to prove? We look at that as you start marketing? 

Matt  

Yeah, so it’s actually a number two ties to this prospect tracker, which is the step before and I’m tracking, what are the reps that I’m going to do so what are my three channels? And then what are the reps I’m doing every single week and each of those channels need to get. I’ve got to track those. Really specifically not like hey, it felt like I did. 17 calls. I don’t know who were they? Right. It felt like I was – cool. As you do. What was their name? It’s literally how many referral discussions did I have? How many centers of influence that I talked to? How many SEO optimized posts did I make? Whatever your prospect channels are you going to be tracking them? Or they just just don’t kid yourself. They’re not happening. 

Micah  

Yeah and if we break this down a lot of our membership programs really go through so there’s that plug for that, right? But we really want to spend some time breaking down your systems to make sure that it actually works. And Jarvis, the part, the last action item that I’m going to give in order to really be successful in this you got to do define in advance in writing what is your ideal client and what is your acceptable point? We define those as our three P’s personal profitable productive, right you got to meet those three P’s right personal I got to like them, they got to like me got to be productive I can add value to their life. Right and they gotta be profitable, I’m going to improve their life at some value, multiple what I’m offering and they’re going to be able to pay me the fee that I need in order to keep running the business. So they gotta meet those three P’s. And you got to have that in writing. 

Matt  

Not to get too hard privilegue here, but in ideal world it’s like edged into stone. And once a year you’re welcome to get the chisel out and edge that out again, or at a minimum, it’s printed. It’s a laminate. This isn’t like some document or something that’s top of your mind. It is my ideal prospect is this and my hard minimum is this and my soft number is this and it’s a non negotiable. So my hard minimum was $5,000 a year in revenue and somebody comes in with $4,999.99 of revenue. The answer is no. We have to have these hard lines in the sand. If I’m gonna do 10 reps a week I’m doing 10 reps every single week, not five, not 11. Not what I feel like. I’m getting it done every week. 

Micah  

Yes, Jarvis. I just look at it differently. If somebody comes in with you know my minimum was 5 is 4900 in revenue just charge more and then boom, we’ve solved that problem now that you’re still getting 5. That’s that’s what you’re solving for. And you’ve got to be intentional about this. These are all the steps that add up to delivering massive value right so this isn’t pinching pennies out of people. This is no no I need a system where I can deliver massive value consistently to all of my clients. And this is a very key point of that!

Matt  

I love it. Well Micah thank you so much and for all our listeners. Until next time, happy planning!

Micah  

Happy planning!

Matt  

Hey, before you leave a quick word from our sponsors. Hey everybody, I want you to take a quick look around your office and on your desk. There should be the Retirement Tax Services Desktop Tax Guide. And if it’s not there, or if it’s not current, meaning you didn’t download in the last month, go to retirementtaxservices.com and download the desktop tax guide. This is a must have resource for every financial advisor committed to tax planning.