Read the Transcript Below:

Matthew Jarvis  00:11

When you skip steps, you’re only cheating yourself, Today’s podcast is brought to you by TPR Live. That’s right, The Perfect RIA. Micah and myself will be joining you live and in person in Phoenix, Arizona on September 25 where we will be helping you with all things related to fees, how much to charge your clients, how to adjust your fees, how to explain fees to your prospects, and, of course, the extreme accountability around how to make that actually happen. So go to theperfectria.com/live to get signed up and get all those important details. Alrighty, back to the show. 

Micah Shilanski  01:12

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

Matthew Jarvis  01:19

Micah, it’s great to be back in the recording studio and talking to the TPR audience. You and I have been all over the place. Well, I’ve only been to, like, conferences. You’ve been to Europe. You walk the Camino trail like you guys have been all over the place. It’s great to get back in the studio. 

Micah Shilanski  01:32

It is, you know, family time is really great spending that, but getting back to work and, you know, adding a lot of value and doing those things are also very, very important. So I’m excited to get back at it. 

Matthew Jarvis  01:41

Yeah, Micah, excited to tackle today’s topic, because you and I are just ruthless at effectiveness. Not necessarily be confused with efficiency. We’re ruthless and effectiveness. We’re always looking at everything and saying, if this takes 10 steps, how do I do it in two steps? But that can cut both ways, because what can happen, and you and I have gone on the wrong side of this. You can cut out steps that don’t seem important, but are, in fact, critically important, and this is absolutely essential when it comes to client profitability, when it comes to surge meetings, when it comes to the prospect process, when it comes to your own financials. We’ll share a story later this episode about an advisor who was off on his numbers by just just $400,000 just so it’s not really a big, a big deal, so, but these steps are critical. They can be cut out. And there’s ones that have to be in there

Micah Shilanski  02:29

And you nailed it, right? We get in this aspect of a, hey, I want to be efficient, and so you start cutting things, but then you lack effectiveness. And I’m always sold for effectiveness, not efficiency, right? Efficiency is doing things the most efficient way possible, as simply as possible, but that’s not always solving for a quick outcome. Effective is doing the right things efficiently. So to be effective, you must be efficient, but you must be focused on doing the right things, and sometimes that means adding steps to a process that you don’t think should be there. But there are key things that must get done, since our team grows, right? And that’s one thing. It just took me a long time to realize that, you know, I need a different process for Micah versus for the team, because we think differently. And when I have my operations persons in here, and they’re sitting there building out processes, they have so many more steps than I think are necessary in the process. However, when we go through them, each one is the decision point they want to be able to track and make sure things are done the first time. And when I finally went into that and had them kind of build up, these processes build a lot of steps, error rate went down, things got processed so much more effectively. We could track things so much easier, right? So it’s again, what are we solving for? I’m a big fan of cutting out steps, but be careful you’re not cutting out too many or putting up the right steps. Yes, you got to be really careful that even when some people who are super successful are not good at articulating why they have each step in their process again, if I’m and they’re crushing it, my first thing is to duplicate the entire process 100% right? And after I have success in that process, now I can go and look at it and say, Okay, what’s working? What’s not working for me? Because now I’m gonna be different. And so many people jump to that second step before they do the first one. Jarvis, instead of getting 100% to make it work, they’re like, Oh, I’m different. I’m different. I’m gonna say it different. I’m gonna set it up differently. I’m gonna process this different. Like, hey, this thing doesn’t work unless only one piece of Alaska doesn’t work for everyone else. No, you did the process wrong, right? Really little details matter. 

Matthew Jarvis  03:41

We also need to be very diligent. And I know this is a common theme our podcast. From whom did this process come? So if the process came from some expert, I’m probably going to cut out all the steps. If the process came from an advisor that I know and respect who has a level of success beyond my own, then I’m going to follow that and assume that every single step, from how they hold their pen to the script on the call, everything is intentional. Example, Micah, I was just calling for its advisor, came up to me says, Hey, Jarvis, listen to the podcast. Big fan. I know you talk about centers of influence a lot, so I’m started calling all the centers of influence in my area, offering to take them to lunch. And I said, dude, hard stop. You missed the entire thing. He says, no, no, lunch is the same as paying them. No, it’s not. The reason I call an offer to pay them is because it’s really different experience than taking a lunch. And so you but you think, you might think, well, I’m going to shortcut this process. Lunch is a better thing than meeting their office. I don’t pay as much. You missed the entire process thinking that you found a shortcut. 

Micah Shilanski  05:13

All right, so let’s give you some examples in here, which is kind of our peer, which is reality. So I was working with a very successful advisor. He’s got a good book probably worth 230-240 clients. And he’s looking at spending a little bit less time outside of the office.

Matthew Jarvis  05:13

A multi million dollar book, right? This is 212 other clients.  They’ll call this preaching, or we’ll call it like trauma resurfacing, because you and I have a long history of like, Oh, I gotta do that better on your point is spot on. I’m gonna duplicate someone’s system, I need to duplicate every single step, just the most minutiae steps, and then it gets working for me. Then I have the liberty to fine tune it, because what may seem totally unimportant might in fact be the deal breaker in that entire process. 

Micah Shilanski  05:20

This is a multi million dollar practice. He wants to spend a little more time out of the office, you know, traveling around. So he’s gonna bring in another advisor and says, I’m gonna say, Great. Do you have one clients? You’re gonna transfer over to them. So we talked about our regular green report, and, you know, he made the revenue report, regular green book, complexity inside of it, which was fantastic. And then we together, and I was like, you have to hide these things in order to choose you’re gonna go to the intruder. He’s like, no, no, I’ll go ahead and do this myself. And he went through, looked at each individual name, and out of the two and eight weeks, down to 70, by the way, out of 2020 he was able to afford 20 to go to the junior that he’s hiring. I was like, why are you hiring a junior? You’re 20 clients. This makes zero sense whatsoever. That’s like, what? Four days of appointments? I was like, You’re not solving for anything, right here. And he got really frustrated at me. I was like, you have to hide the names. Go do these. Micah, you don’t understand. Okay, anytime you tell us we don’t understand, right? You’re emotional point of view, because we have been in the same positions that you have been in, right? You are not really looking at this logically. You were saying you’re unique in your own area that no one could possibly have done the same thing you’ve done before. That’s just a little silly, because in the same shoes that which process is that you have to do things a certain way.

Matthew Jarvis  06:48

It reminds me of one of my favorite lines to use with clients and prospective clients, is that it’s impossible to be objective with your own money, the same as your practice. Right? We talk about this all the time in our masterminds and our coach, it’s impossible to be objective about your own practice. There’s too much emotion. So specifically, the regular green report, when you’re seeing the names of the clients, you’re not looking at it as a business. You’re looking at as Bob and Sue, or my third client, I remember they paid my mortgage, right? Larry and David. I remember when their adult son died, and we cried together over there, over the cancer, whatever it is, and that has a place like, we’re not talking about just being cold hearted. If we are running a business – We need to run a business. And that regular green report that client profitably. Profitability analysis only works. Also take names off of it. Just it will not work either way. 

Micah Shilanski  07:28

Yeah, let’s just fast forward this, right? You got a civil advisor, you know, to crush that multimillion dollar practice. Like, seriously, is that a better option? No, obviously that’s not a better option. You got to bring in other people to back you up, and he wants to spend more time with his wife and his kids, etc. Great things. You got to balance mode, because you’re not hurting the client by bringing in someone who can help them and service them when you’re not available, right? That’s adding more values than like making short, let’s go with that. But they’re going to get no service because you’re going to be gone or 80% of your service? Which is better, zero or 80?

Matthew Jarvis  08:06

And of course, this applies not just to advisors looking to make more time. Advisors bid career as well, where you wake up one day, you really 600 clients, 20 of which are paying all the money, and 580 they’re paying basically nothing. That same red, yellow breed, right? The only time you want to look at the names, the names. The only time is if you’re doing what we like to call a pedo report, if you’re looking for clients that are difficult, you’re looking at your team. Look at it without the numbers, and you’re saying, hey, any names on this where you see their name, you cringe. That’s the only time we look at it. Otherwise, it’s numbers, and we’re looking again if you’re mid career. All right, I need to move up market. My expertise, my skills, are more than they were before. My time is more. All right, there’s clients are not named me what I want, they need to be transitioned to an advisor who will do a job for them. And this, again, comes down to whoever you refer to, like your C client, which you should never have tiers, but your C level client is someone else’s A level client. They’re going to give them better service than you are. 

Micah Shilanski  08:55

That’s 100% case, right? So it’s another period that we lie to ourselves in the process to go through it, right? And this is this example, right here, this advisor, over here. This advisor cheated himself with process, you’re supposed to hide the names, then do the filtering and sorting, etc. Then put the transffer. When you do it that way it works. He’s cheated one  little step, not hiding the names when by line you couldn’t get it done. What’s another example? When you don’t follow the steps on your numbers and understand your finances again. Again, Jarvis we are working with an advisor. When we tell these stories you’re gonna think they are about you  because they are because we’re the same, right? These are not unique things. These apply to all of us, kind of across the board. And by the way, when I’m at my mastermind I really, well, I don’t like it at the time, but at the end, I like it when they called me out on stop our own numbers, tell ourselves, our own lies, etc, which they want to mastermind. So we wondered, by just crushing it, and we asked him what his gross was. Gross. He kept telling us what is gross. So it’s like, no, that’s not your gross. You’re not a gross means the total debit from the client account. But that’s not the way he was. Counting it down to the 400 and he wasn’t even looking at that.

Matthew Jarvis  10:05

In that case, we see this again all the time. So if you think the story is yours, it’s it is also yours, it’s also yours. We see this all the time, right? Because we say the first step is to figure out the gross number is how much money was deducted from the client’s account on all sources. Now, in fairness, Micah, that’s not an easy step to do. There is not a clean report that shows that. So it does take some legwork. We gotta open up client statements, we gotta look at billion files. We gotta do some massive extrapolation out. But again, for this, this advisor, it was a $400,000 difference. Now, once he kind of saw the number, he could say, well, where’s that money going? That 400,000 I’ll go, let’s just say it’s going to a tamp for this discussion. Say, discussion sake, you can then decide, Hey, is that temp bring me $400,000 of value to me and my clients? And maybe the answer is yes, I don’t think so, but if, maybe the answer is yes, but now we can have that discussion otherwise. What heads up? Then we Micah and I ran into this with an advisor one time. We said, Hey, this role that you’re part of, how much are they charging? He says they don’t charge me a thing. How do they keep the lights on? How does he have his private jet? Well, the client pays it. Whatever money the client’s paying is money they’re willing to pay you. And so in his case, the client was paying about 50 150 basis points. He was getting 100 of that. So the role of was getting 50 basis they were even 1/3 plus all their other stuff. Now we have the real numbers. Now we can have that discussion, but you can’t skip these steps. I know they’re difficult, you just can’t skip them. 

Micah Shilanski  10:31

This isn’t saying fire temp, and I’m saying not to whatsoever. But our business owner know what your freaking expenses are, right? Again, don’t play the card. Oh, my client feeds it. It’s not a real expense, nope, because that is 100% your expense. You can’t look for recommendations. You were the one. That’s just the platform. You were the BD? Whatever that is, you have to say, are they delivering? And I’ve met with tons of advisors at BDS, where they like their BD the BDS generate tons of value for them, and they’re fine paying it, and they’re making a good, educated and informed decision. Rock on. There’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t lie to yourself about these numbers. 

Matthew Jarvis  11:59

I think the other place where this manifests itself, right? You mentioned the getting defensive, emotionally, right? Like You understand, right? That’s a warning to me, as either a coach or the participant, that I’m getting defensive. Here another place we see advisors say this. They say, I’m, you know, I’m making enough money, I’m taking enough time off, and so therefore I don’t need to look at this. Now, this is super nefarious, and it really becomes a cancer to your practice, because once you stop turning one rock, you stop turning over two rocks, three rocks, four rocks, suddenly you start telling yourself all these lies. And again, how do I know this? Because I tell myself these lies sometimes, and I need someone to call me out on that. So then we say, Well, cool, when was the last time you reviewed all the beneficiaries for your all your clients? Well, recently. Cool. What was the date? Pull up the report, pull up the oh, it was six years ago. Okay, so that’s not recently, but once we stop being critical and analytical of our practice in one area, it spreads like a cancer to every area. I just never seen it any other way. Micah, I don’t know if you have I’ve never seen any way. 

Micah Shilanski  12:58

Comment from Joe Lucas, which I love, right? Comfort, the cancer of success, and that is 100% the case, right? You’re the coast, and also that cancer is going to erode your practice, and you’re going to be in this falling rock mentality, and it’s all going to be going down like, holy crap. How did this happen? Happen overnight? It happened because the last five years you weren’t doing crap add value to your practice, and now you’re paying the price for it. So these are things that can really add up. You have to be vigilant watching for these things. And I gotta say, the time thing, that’s something that Jarvis calls me on regularly, which is great because I’ll say, hey, this came out like, a couple years ago. He’s like, we’re like, five or 10 or five. Oh, I guess it was that long ago, right? Those things that I just know I’m not really good at knowing the exact time, but I know what our value adds I have scheduled when they go out. We can go pull that stuff up so we have processes in there for things I am not good at to make sure they get done. Because Jarvis, I’d be 100% guilty of that I would say sure did our beneficiaries last year, my standard response. But if I didn’t have a report, I could prove that we can go back and look, when did beneficiaries, when did we do that work? When did we last do our buckets for it? When did we do our risk analysis right? And now we can make informed decisions. 

Matthew Jarvis  14:11

The other place, Mike, this manifests itself, is not setting deadlines right? This is such a critical step. So people say, I’m going to implement surge, I’m going to do value adds. I’m going to raise my fees. Cool. When are you probably next year? Okay, so never, just be honest. You’re never if it doesn’t have an exact date on your calendar. You know, if we pan my camera over to my wall calendar here, if there’s not an exact date, that’s just never going to happen. And again, you think that step doesn’t matter, I’ll get around to another person. I tear it up. No, it’s just not going to happen. If it’s not on the calendar with extreme accountability ain’t gonna happen.

Micah Shilanski  14:42

Because life happens, right? Come up. Justify us not getting things done. You have a team member that’s gonna leave like, holy crap. They were a key team member. I clearly can’t get these other things done. I can’t prospect. I can’t do this. This happened our last mastermind, that someone lost a key advisor in their practice, and so now they’re paying the price for that now, like they replaced them. They’re super happy with that, but they took six months off from prospecting, so they’re not having new clients come in and you took your foot off the gas. Now get a good excuse, but I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done the same thing, but that had a price, because prospecting wasn’t front and center on something you should be active in. That was easy to get derailed. Once it got derailed, it’s so hard to pick it back up. So all of these things, let’s pick surge. We talk to advise all the time to say, I’m doing going to do surge, right? One, what does it mean when you’re doing search? You don’t have to copy our calendar, right? But are you being hyper intentional about your calendar? Hyper intentional about adding value to clients, right? That’s that’s the essence of surge, right there. And if you’re going to do it, when? And don’t say you’re going to do all of these things at once, because these are all big lifts. Like, when are you putting them in years to make sure your practice is up and running to where it should be? 

Matthew Jarvis  15:49

Boy Surge is a great one to touch on. In fact, it’s actually one of the very first master classes that Micah, you and I did together. So if you want to see Micah and I before we knew each other, like it was, it’s two different guys, but surge I was, I was working the other day, and the advice was, yeah, I’m just gonna, I’m just not gonna be with my clients. Cool, neither am I. But have you warned them of that? Have you given them a reason why you want to be in the fall? Have you told them what to do if an emergency comes up? Have you given them a communications policy? No Jarvis. I just did what you did. I saw him. I wouldn’t meet him till the fall. No, that’s, that’s not at all what I did, what I did, process and missing steps, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s what happens to like a jump to the end result. I talked to an advisor yesterday at a conference, and he’s getting ready to launch his own RIA and I said, Cool. How are you going to find clients? And he says, Well, I think I’m just going to do paid Facebook ads. Okay, okay, you could put the money in a rare tax deduction. You could burn the money. Who know that’s done that successfully? He did have one name. And I said, Cool. I know that advisor as well. And I know that guy who spent 10 years, 10 years refining that thing. He didn’t just go call Facebook, we jumped to this end result, and we think that magically it’s going to happen. 

Micah Shilanski  16:48

So an easy example, a month out of the office, right? With the family, walk the Camino, etc. And this wasn’t, I just left for this, right? This was the fall of last year. I was letting clients know, because they often ask, what’s going on with us? Oh, we have a big trip coming up. We’re going to walk the Camino as a family. This will be great. It’s 30 seconds on my life, right? I’m not going into whole detail, but I planted the seeded fall when spring came around, one of the things I added in our agenda after being Hey just as a reminder after tax season wraps up, I’m going to be headed Europe with my family for a little vacation. We’re going to walk. If anything comes up. Here’s how to get a hold of me. Of course, I’m always available if there’s an emergency, right? But I planted the seed with them, then I’m following up with that communication. Now, my office knows the step that if a client calls in to talk to Micah, there’s a way to handle it. And then, you know, I really need to talk to Micah, just absolutely, as a writer, Micah is on a pilgrimage with his family in Europe, but let me go ahead and get a message out to him so you call back. Oh, wait, that’s right, he is out of the country. You know, this really isn’t that big of a deal. Maybe I could just talk to Victoria and she can take this for me. Is this all doing a good service to the client? 100% yes, we’re setting patients. And never once did I tell the client I wouldn’t be able to talk to them. It was the Hey, If this comes up in this emergency, the team can absolutely get a hold of me, get a result. And Jervis, I had zero emergencies come up while it was gone over a month, because we had set it up in advance with our clients. Now we’ve not done that. Had called in, like the daily rate clients call they want to talk to Micah, and Micah out of the country for a month, and they didn’t know about this. That’s now an uneasy feeling. He’s out of the country, and I can’t get a hold of how does this work, etc. 

Matthew Jarvis  18:38

And I was thinking, as you’re you’re sharing that story. Micah, the reason that we skip these steps is that they’re hard. They’re hard. It’s hard to prep your team that you’re going to be on the Office for three weeks. And they have their concerns. It’s hard to prep clients because, again, some you saw that fear. A lot of clients are gonna be excited for you. Some clients are still gonna say, like, wait a second, I’ve never taken a three week trip. I I’ve never had you know, maybe I’m paying you too much so you can afford these. Do these things, right? These difficult steps. Now, the more you practice the more refined, the easier they become. Like you and I cannot do these, you know, offhand, like tying our shoes, but early on, it’s really easy to skip them because they’re hard to do. It seem like taking the names of that’s hard to do. It’s, I mean, functionally, it’s just high column, but in real life, right? It’s a wonderful in real life, it’s really hard. They start playing. I think I know whose count that is by the size. 

Micah Shilanski  19:31

Maybe I should change my decision on this one. Yeah, it’s really hard, but these are the hard things that actually matter, right? What are the injustices that’s that’s done to ourselves? As we look at someone else, we say, Oh, it’s so easy. You know, this person can do it, clearly that can do it. Well, yes, that is true, but are you willing to do the work that’s required to be that successful? Everybody wants the outcome. Are you willing to put in the sweat equity? Are you willing to put in the work to really transform your life and your practice? And that’s a big question. And I got guys that come to me and says they want to make X dollars a year, and I’ll say, Man, that’s fantastic. We can do that. Are you willing to work better there? And I did remember how one advisor paused, and it was really wise, uh, younger kid as well, and he was like, you know, Micah, I don’t think I’m willing to work that hard. What if I just work this much? What type of practice with that music? Okay, great. Now we can have an honest conversation, right? Good job not lying to yourself. This is okay. You can have a great practice. This work level is probably going to be level success. And he’s like, You know what I think right now, where I’m with my family, that’s kind of where I’m at. It’s okay, great. You can have a great success like that, but don’t lie to yourself, because what happens if you lie to yourself now, then you get into this victim mentality later, because you’re not hitting this level of success. What do you mean? A, B and C? People can do it, and I’m out there doing everything that they’re doing. They must be cheating their clients. They must be doing this real negative path when the reality is you just didn’t work to get there. 

Matthew Jarvis  20:50

Yeah, and it’s good point, Micah to own that, and then to take steps related to that. So if you just say, Listen, I just want an eight to five job, and I don’t want to read, you know, 10 books a month, and I don’t want to spend my nights and weekends calling people to get one at a risk of variable. Cool, there’s a lot of great career channels for you. They’re not any that interest me. But again, like you and I, are willing to grind like crazy. And not everyone has that grind, and we can talk about that on another podcast, but this is where we go back to not cheating the steps. So , I want to start my own RIA. Cool. Are you willing to make 100 phone calls a week? No, no. Are you willing to make any No, okay, you probably shouldn’t go this channel. You should probably find a Fidelity office or a big RIA that you can join as a gen two, where someone else is doing the great baking. You’ll make a fraction of the money. You’ll never create real wealth, but at least you won’t get 10 years down the road and still not have money or real wealth, then no health insurance, and be trying to figure out why you’re not succeeding.

Micah Shilanski  21:45

I absolutely love it. You know, what are the coaches that we work with? A lot never done 10 books a week, but we did have a coach that was having 10 a month. Yeah, even 10 a month is a lot of one book a week that we had for a while. And I gotta say, that was pretty intense. I had to really beef up my reading schedule. It’ll really be intentional, but really it holds you accountable. I thought you’re a man of integrity to do what you said you’re gonna do. That’s interesting. What else are you lying about? Right? But rightfully so. I said I was gonna do this thing. Are you really gonna do it? So you need that other person, whether it’s a coach whatever, to hold you accountable to these typical things, or it’s a pure group or mastermind, but someone that’s actually going to hold you accountable and call you out and not give you a pass for in the society and the generation, they get passes for everything they can do. That’s not okay, right? You need to hold up and be able to do certain things, and it’s hard work. 

Matthew Jarvis  22:35

It really is like another step that comes to mind, and I know we need to get to action items on this podcast, is cheating yourself on what your actual growth rate is. Goes back to the numbers, but it’s easy to get I’ve fallen big to that. You say, Well, how many clients you brought up? Feels like 15 or 20. Okay, you had 120 clients last year, and you have 121 this year. Well done. I don’t lose that. Yeah. Okay, all right. She worked with an advisor recently a BA goal to get to a billion dollars of assets, which is a phenomenal goal. We work with a lot of advisors that have that goal, and then we run in the math backwards, and we’re saying, Hey, dude, listen at your current growth rate. It’ll take 17 years to get there. No, no, we’ll get there faster. I’m just doing the math your current growth rate because I’ve seen the numbers 17 years now. That’s still noble. To get there at any point in your life. That’s incredible. But if you’re saying you want to get there in 5 and skip steps like, hey, I want to get there in five there’s these numbers I want. I want them really bad. Therefore they’ll be there and I’ll skip all the steps in between. So you got to have somebody that can call you out on this stuff. I think Micah get more than anything, because you just don’t even see it. Right? 

Micah Shilanski  23:36

If you get to an empire practice, right, your your practice changes right? A 20% growth on a $500 practice is a lot different than 20% growth on a $5 million practice. You know, it’s the same. 20 becomes a much different animal on how you’re going to do that. So, you know, one is to bring 5% clients, 50 clients, okay, that’s a different animal. 75 households. It’s so as you continue to grow towards that larger spectrum, just how you’re doing things, what got you here? We’ll get you there. That same mentality, right? So it’s all of these things are really important to look at and not just think, Oh, I’ve had 20% growth over the last five years. I just keep doing growth, maybe, but probably not. 

Matthew Jarvis  24:08

Micah, one last thought on this. This is my second last time when we talk to advisors at conferences, when we listen to podcasts, when we read books, even like this podcast, in my book, you’re at best getting, like, 1/100 of the whole story. And it’s not because someone’s being nefarious. Understand how they are. Some of those people, they’re rare. It’s not that we’re sitting on this podcast. We’re trying to hold things back. That’s not the case. Just there’s so many steps, it would be impossible to detail them all, and that’s where you can’t ever assume that you know all the steps. You know my own processes. I feel like, oh, you know what? There was a step in here. I didn’t even realize I was doing it every time, but it’s critical to the process. And I just mentioned that because it’s just thinking we found an easy system. I talked to this guy is a five step process. Is a five step process, and he makes a million dollars. He has 500 steps in between each of those steps, and I’ve got to just be laser focused on finding those again and again. 

Micah Shilanski  24:51

I love it, alright? Jars, this podcast is all about action and items. So our last thought is action items. So yeah, what’s the first action item our listeners can take and implement this week? 

Matthew Jarvis  25:01

If I’m in the back, I’ve been a lot of conferences lately. If in the back, I’m like, holding up a sign, like, what are the actions? Like, size quarter, there’s 10 minutes left. What are the action items? 

Micah Shilanski  25:09

I do wonder, like, how much of our audience, or are we making lazy by just summarizing the action items? Right? Because I know the same thing on events. I’m like, Look, I gotta go through all this. Just tell me what I need to do. And I’m like, oh, huh, losing some critical thinking skills here. 

Matthew Jarvis  25:21

Yeah, well, actions, we can control. Action number one, get a physical wall. You’re at a glance calendar. They have a lot of Amazon. We’re midway through the year, so you want to go from like July to June or whatever. And map out your Surge calendar, map out your value adds, map out your personal and professional development, map out your family time. Have that accountability. Mine’s right here on the wall to my left. That accountability is critical. My entire team does this. My family does it. It seems like don’t you know how to use a apple calendar? I do. I have those as well. I have three of them, but I have a physical calendar. It’s a critical step in my progress and my success. 

Micah Shilanski  25:52

Yes, which one you’re looking at? Look at my analysis. Okay, we want to do A, B and C. Then I look at the calendar and be like, Hey, I have all of our events planned out on the calendar. Where are we going to put a, b and c? I’m not saying we can’t do it, but I gotta make some hard decisions here. You have to get things in there now. All right, action item number two, write down your steps inside of the process, right? Or have someone else write on steps and someone else follow up with you when you’re doing something, are you actually doing the steps that you think you’re going to do? So any of these things that we talked about, whether it’s job duties, hiring team members, prospect process, client process, etc. You need to write down every have someone else evaluate doing all of these steps. Which ones are you skipping then, okay, it’s a question. Is that step really needed, or are you skipping it because you’re being lazy and you’re choosing not to do the hard work that would equal success? 

Matthew Jarvis  26:35

Yeah, and I would definitely add on there too. We can do an entire episode on this, which is the steps you will never do. For example, same day paperwork. We never do same day paperwork, right? That’s in our client meeting process. So the last action item Micah, you and I now have been doing this podcast for six, six years, five years. So something that six gotta be sick. Yeah, it’s been a ton of fun with 1000s of advisors listening, but we’re getting ready to make some big changes. We want to make sure, because, in a way, this podcast a lot of fun. In some ways, it does a disservice. You mentioned earlier about sometimes the action items are kind of a cheater. It kind of a cheater. It kind of saves you from the hard work. But again, the podcast teases at the things that need to be done, and some advisors can take that run with it. Most need more, so we’re working on some new improvements for the podcast. If you have suggestions or things you would like to see for the podcast, send an email to lifestyle@theperfectria.com, but stay tuned this summer for some exciting changes. 

Micah Shilanski  27:21

Awesome. Jarvis, as always, it’s a blast, and it’s a nice time. Happy planning.  Awesome. Jarvis, as always, it’s a blast, and it’s a nice time. Happy planning.