Read the Transcript Below:

Matthew Jarvis  

You keep saying this is a goal, but I do not think that word means what you think it means. Today’s episode is brought to you by our friends at BELAY. For the last several years, Micah and myself have been used virtual assistants from BELAY to take over delegation of all sorts of tasks, from clearing out email to scheduling travel to following up with people to booking a car racing trip that Micah and I are going on shortly. All of this is handled by our virtual assistants at BELAY. Now if you’re thinking, hey, I’m not quite ready for a virtual assistant, well, you already delegate 98% of your life. In other words, you did not build the device upon which you’re listening to this podcast. So text letters RIA to 55123, that’s 55123, to get a free copy of BELAY’s ebook on delegation, and then you’ll give them the opportunity to talk to my good friend, Teresa, who will help you find a virtual assistant that is perfectly suited for you. 

Micah Shilanski  

Well, welcome back to another amazing TPR podcast, Jarvis, I’m super excited to be here today with you. Kind of crushed. We’ve got some fun things to talk about. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, we have a lot of great things to talk about. And of course, you and I now have been doing this podcast for seven years now, eight years, six years, something like that. And we’ve also had the opportunity to coach a lot of advisors, well over 1000 advisors. And you and I were commenting before we hit record that we’ve sort of seen two groups of advisors, those who like Neil Diamond’s music and those who don’t wait. There’s advisors that have these, these bee hangs, these big, hairy, audacious goals. And we follow up with them months later, years later, and they have not only hit these goals, they have absolutely crushed them. They’ve destroyed them. They’re looking for a whole new level of B hags. And then there’s another group of advisors who we follow within months or years later, and they’re at almost the exact same spot they were at the beginning, and they’re no closer to that B hag than they were a few years ago. And we’re always trying to see, like, what’s the difference between these groups, right? Why did the one group Excel and just destroy these goals and the other group just hasn’t made any progress at all.

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah, I think that’s a great thing, right? Because they both are excited about it. They both want to get things done. And at the end of the day, spoiler alert, it comes down to work like, are you willing to do the hard things that most people aren’t willing to being successful is not complex. It’s just really freaking hard to do that, and every rung of the ladder you climb, it is even harder, and you really start tending to steer yourself from other people pretty quick, in terms that can be a bit daunting when you start thinking about it with how it affects your social circles and your friends, how it affects your peer groups. How do you be around the five people that you’re the average of? Right? That means you’re constantly changing that peer group in order to find people to bring you up into different ones, or you need very rare friends that are constantly growing at the same rate as you. I mean, there’s social pressure that’s there not to grow. Then there’s just a flat out work that you have to do in order to get there. And you have to think differently, not this, like stop doing 90% of the stuff you’re doing in order to kind of grow more. But there’s actual hard things you have to do in order to grow.

Matthew Jarvis  

There really are Micah and what are the advantages or lessons we’ve had doing with our days, we’ve been able to look behind the scenes of a lot of really simple practices, practices doing multiple millions of dollars of net revenue. And I remember we started this journey. Well, those guys, they hit some kind of lucky story, like they found a Goldman in their backyard, right? The Beverly Hillbillies, they found a will. There you go, that kind of thing. But then every single time, every time with exemption, we pull back the layers and we realize, Oh, these guys are just outworking everyone else. They’re working at a level that public advisors can’t even comprehend, like, they don’t even know that level of effort exists, but it does exist, like, so let’s talk about wherever you’re on the spectrum. What if you’re doing a few 100,000 in production, if you’re doing several million in production, right there? What is the difference between a legitimate goal, like a big, hairy, audacious goal, and just a pure fantasy, like just something your doors, you and I spent a lot of years with real dreams and goals, right? Like, early on I producer this year, I made $16,000 right? That’s really so what’s the difference there? Like, like, what’s the difference between just this pipe dream and something that actually has a chance of becoming real? 

Micah Shilanski  

So we’ve got a whole list of things. Like, as we’re pre gaming, this pre gamer pause, trying to put some good ideas in terms of right? Notice, you’re talking, I’m looking at this list and the list, and the one common theme I think I see here in successful advisors is they can really tell you where they lack. They have integrity. They have honest in what they’re missing. Versus so many advisors that want to be there and are they have these goals and these dreams. They’re not goals. They’re just dreams, right? They dream. They want to be successful. They can’t tell you where they’re lacking. They think they’re fantastic at everything. Like, no Micah, I’m great at collection, because you lost like 15 clients last year. Like, how’s that being possible? Or, you know, like, I really got a greater prospect. Okay, how many should we have run on two clients next year? I’m really great at delegation and team management. Team done. Okay? So you have no idea where your weaknesses are now, right? And so I think it’s that very consent mind which is really kind of coming up and really hampering down, seeing their flaws, whereas I’m looking at our success that are just crushing it. A lot of them are like, Hey, I suck at this. What do I need to do about this? The Germans, they’re willing to take that next step, which is not only identifying the problem, do the work that’s required to fix it.

Matthew Jarvis  

This is walking a tightrope as well. Right? Our work is very difficult work. We’re surrounded by projection. We’re surrounded by the imposter syndrome. We have a lot of time to ourselves. It’s very low. It’s very dangerous. And so yeah, idle hands with the devil’s playground. We have to walk this time above. We need a lot of positive affirmations in our lives, just just to keep us going right, like, just to keep through the next market cycle, or, or that says, hey, how could we didn’t beat the S, P by 10% whatever it is. We have a lot of positive affirmations. But like, at your point, these can get carried away. Goes from like a non from like, inoculating yourself to drinking the best advisors are, I don’t say hyper critical, hyper aware if they haven’t hit a goal. You and I included, we’re looking at saying, Why did I not hit this goal? Not like, who can I blame? Well, there’s a bad market conditions. You know, my broker dealer, my compliance department, blah, blah, blah, they’re just hyper. Like, okay, I’m not closing very well on step five of my prospect process. And step five, why? Like, so what are you saying in step five? And what does that happen? And who is doing that better? How do I learn from that? And then what’s the lever I can pull? They’re just relentless. Of saying, like, this is the lever I pull. I’m gonna pull it again and again and again no matter what. 

Micah Shilanski  

Yeah, and not getting tired of pulling the lever. That’s another dangerous part as well. Of saying, Oh, well, I’ve done this so well successfully, I’m going to tweak it, because then it’s going to be even more amazing. Well, hold second all the results from this one process that you want. Like, every time we do a client distribution, it’s funny. It works, right? The clients know where they’re going to get the money. The correct money comes out of their accounts. The correct amount of taxes estimate is withheld for clients. There’s good communication across the board. We have a tracking system so I can see at any point in time where distributions are with clients, right? And in fact, I had had a client that we could hang out with tell me that he needs money out of his account, right? So there’s always, like a great balance to say, well, now we’re going outside of our process, right? What do we do? Right then with it? Okay, we have a process for what we go out of our process, like, what steps do we need to follow up with in order to make sure we get this done? So I have a process that works really well for sending clients money out. Why in the world would I experiment with it and to see, Hey, cut this time in half if I deleted half the steps right? Like mind blowing. There’s no way you would do that. But as advisors, we do this all the time with our practices, which is all the time with how we want to grow, how we want to set goals, how we’re going to be with prospects, how we’re going to deliver things to clients. We change it all of the time without a proven success model.

Matthew Jarvis  

Like, another iteration of that, some external factor is going to change this, right? So when you’re mentioning, hey, we have this process in our CRM, I was reminded of the number of times I changed CRM, thinking like, if only I switched from this CRM, then, then I would have success even prospect track, right? You can have it built elaborately into your CRM Micah, I know you have that. I know a lot of advisors we push. Or you can just have it on a spreadsheet. A good friend of mine, very successful, multi million dollar advisor. It’s an Excel spreadsheet with zero formulas, and every single week he prints it. If I was Paul Muffet, we had him on the podcast. We talked about he prints it. He sits down with his entire team, and they read it out loud, line by line. Now is that fun for Paul? No, it’s a fund for say, no, no. Is that like their energy building above? No, but it’s the work that has to get done. So every single week, they look at every prospect, they say, What are we doing this week to move this forward, and who is taking care of that? And that’s what it is. And it’s just, it’s pigheaded discipline. It’s not, hey, what do I feel like doing today? Just getting the work done. 

Micah Shilanski  

You know, Jarvis, we should talk about that, right? Yeah. So that episode came out with Paul, and then I was like, oh, that’s we used to do that and stopped. But I guess where we’ve outgrown that we don’t need it anymore. And then shortly after that, I heard some of our advisors being like, hey, well, how come this prospect didn’t get followed up? And how can we this? And this is like, Oh, wait, hold a second. We didn’t outgrow it. I freaking blew it up by thinking we didn’t need it. And I’m sure what happened, right? Here’s my defense here. I’m sure what happened is this life got delayed one week that work, and so we didn’t have it. Then the next, the meeting didn’t work, and so we didn’t have it. Then I was probably like, Well, hey, we’ve gone two weeks and and we’re still growing. We don’t need to have these meetings anymore. Cancel the rest of them. It’s one less meeting, right? And that’s probably how irrational my decision making was. But now we’ve gone back to this as November every morning, guess what? We have a prospect review meeting, and that’s 100% what we do is going through that. The same thing is, we’re going to read this list together. And then I had some advisors recently kind of pushed back and says, Michael, look, this is just like a running agenda. How about we just, like, log on whatever we want throughout the week and look at this. We don’t need a 30 minute meeting slot for it. And I was like, Okay, great. So let’s rewind the clock when we were doing that, right? And how did that work? And they’re like, well, we weren’t bringing on as many clients. I’m like, okay, so we weren’t bringing out as many clients as again, we could justify that something else, what? And they start going through and remembering, like, all of the reasons that it blew up. I was like, This is why we’re coming back to this. Because this is the hard work showing up for the monotonous meetings, right? That’s not like almost a curing cancer. There’s not some revolution happening these meetings. I’m pulling that same lever to deliver value. That is hard work. It’s not like putting on a roof in 120 degree heat, by the way, hard work. So we’re doing hard a little liberally here. 

Matthew Jarvis  

And if we wanted to, not that you need to, but if we wanted to peel back the layer, let’s, let’s think about this one specifically. Going through the weekly prospect tracker is it’s not only not a fun activity, it can also remind you of where you’re failing, right? So it’s easy to have like, Hey, listen, if I don’t look at my prospect tracker, then I won’t know the people who said no, and so I’m just I’m not going to look. So the things that we’re avoiding are the really uncomfortable things. So when you look at the prospect tractor as an example. You say, Oh, I haven’t been looking at my prospect tracker. It’s because it’s not fun. It doesn’t matter. Like you can decide like, hey, I want to have fun, or I want to deliver massive value and change lives. Like we run into advisors countlessly. There’s like, literally entire associations of them. They just want to sit around and hold hands and talk about how their capacity and how they’re trying to fulfill the greater good. And they have four clients between all 100 of them, it’s because they’re just not willing to do the uncomfortable work. This is where there’s been fantasies and goals. A fantasy is something I just dream about. I have a picture of a Ferrari on my wall, and I just dream that someday, if I won the lottery, I’d buy this Ferrari. A goal is something that every single week I’m doing the uncomfortable work and to make the progress towards it. But it’s not something I’m just dreaming of. 

Micah Shilanski  

Step pulling through a little bit more. Yeah, I have please show up those prospect meetings when we have new prospects that have come in. Yeah, it’s like, great with it. How did my content fail? Or we were looking at my YouTube reviews, right? Oh my gosh. I cannot stand looking at my YouTube channel repeating. It’s never going to be good enough, right? It just isn’t, in my mind. It doesn’t matter that the growth on it’s there. It doesn’t matter that over time, we’re bringing it on. I’m looking at that little snapshot of time, and I’m like, holy crap. How come we’re not doing better? How come we’re doing other things, and that head trash kind of really keeps in and so I got to have a system for dealing with that head trash. But that head trash is not an excuse for not doing the activity that’s required to be successful.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Is another thing that distinguishes these kind of this, this lens of fantasies versus goals, is, is there time on your calendar every single week to make this reality right? So we could use a fitness goal as an example. If you have a fitness goal of x, and there’s no time on your calendar to work out you’re not going to get there, right? If you have a goal of bringing in X number of prospects, Dan Sullivan has this great quote that I use a lot of great quotes. And the great quote that he has is, you can never find time. You can only make time so you can never find time. This is an iteration of Parkinson’s Law, right, which is, your calendar will always be full, right? An activity will take as much time as is allocated to it. No time is allocated to it. You’ll you’ll never get to it. But he you and I were recently coaching a group of advisors. We do some enterprise coaching sometimes, and the leader of the group was on a three week trip with his family, which, if you listen to this podcast, three weeks might not sound a lot like a lot for most people, that’s an enormous thing. And so I asked him, we’ll call him Bob. I said, Bob was there simply a three week gap in your calendar where there was nothing going on. He said, how much we do these three weeks? Let’s take a family trip. You’re laughing, right? Because that doesn’t exist. He’s got like 200 advisors report to him, and he says, No. He says I had to beat him down with a hand. I pry it with a shoehorn and a crowbar to find that three weeks. But I just, I just made it happen. Same is true for the prospect trackers. Same is true for making your client phone calls. Same is true for surge meetings. There will not be some gap in your calendar where this magically appears.

Micah Shilanski  

So start going through and saying, all right, where are you deficient in these areas? Right? Now, what do I say? Let’s define what deficient means. If you have done your business planning, which good for you? If you have shame on you, if you haven’t, right? If you haven’t, great news, then join us for business planning, whatever, 2025 but you got to have your business plan, and when our business plan, we’re looking at it, deficiency is, if I’m not on track to beat my plan. That’s deficient, right there. That’s my metric. That’s it. All of my business planning things are measurable, right? It’s not like, oh, I want to touch the lives of a million people, and I can’t quantify that, right? No, I want to be able to quantify, like on py part, we want to transform another 1 million federal employees with our financial planning. Great news. We have a way to track. How are we going to reach that 1 million federal employees? So we’re going to track these other things. Everything going to be measurable. And if I am doing the activities and on track to hit those goals, well then I get two thumbs up. Life is great. And I’m on track if I’m not on track to hit the goal. So they have a new client goal, and I’m not on track to meet that goal. Now I’m deficient. Now I got to have a real good examination. This is probably where I need to pull somebody else in, because I’m a little too close to it. Because if I knew it was wrong, I would have fit right. I need to pull somebody else in. The look is, hey, I’m deficient in this activity. What is wrong with this? Am I not retaining enough clients? Do I not have enough prospects coming in? Is my prospect process too long? Am I getting a guess? But then they’re saying, no, like, like, there’s a million different things you have to look at right here. But it’s all going to start with, where am I not lining up to my goals? 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah. And I think that ties to a bigger discussion on accountability, right? So if you can be accountable to your measurements, awesome, knock yourself out, right? Yeah. If you can be, if you’re finding me like, Hey, I’ve got this business plan, and as the year goes on, I kind of hide it. I look at it less and less and I look at fewer numbers, that’s where you’ve got to have external accountability, right? That could be again, a coaching group, a mentor, a coach, whatever the case may be, but if you’re not getting the results you intended, and especially if you’re not sure why, this is where you’ve got to have accountability, because at the end of the day, nine times out of 10, it’s because you’re not doing the reps and or you’re not being self aware enough about why the reps aren’t yielding results. An example, we’ve talked about Micah on this podcast, and we coach helped him quadruple his business. He was having a lot of DIY ers. They would get to the end of his process, very sharp advice, financial plans, prospect process, the whole thing they would get the end of his process. And they would say, and again, we’ll call them Bob. They would say, Hey, Bob, this was really great. I’m gonna go do this myself, because that was really always my plan. And again, it was his witness. He says, Why keep getting this? Because he was tracking what’s happening. And he comes back to you, and I says, Hey, this is what’s happening. We said, Oh, here it is. Because it’s always easier to solve other people’s problems. We need to add a step back at the very beginning to screen out these di wires, or at least extend them on a path to convert. But again, that was why he was able to quadruple his practice. He was tracking things ruthlessly to your earlier point. Micah, he was always looking, where is this not working? And then, who has figured it out already that I can learn from.

Micah Shilanski  

That’s 100% it. So the measurement is going to matter, right? So it means you have to track these things and jars, you can kind of make fun of me on my tracking systems that we have, and we’re tracking so many things in detail. Why the hell would you do this? Right? Well, you got to do what works for you, but I like being able to have all of the systems broken down. So when a team member would buy it to a client we have, we have all of the steps broken down so we can see it when it breaks. We can clearly see it, and we can see it in advance of breaking and in prospect tracking, we have all of these steps broken down, and we’re tracking off each single one so we can see where does it go wrong? Is that acceptable? Right? Because not every client’s going to prospects going to convert that is it an acceptable loss? Are we outside of an acceptable range? Now, how do we need to tweak that? So should we have multiple advisors? Now you need to look at this and see how are you ranking? Right? So if you’re gonna compare numbers, you never do this at a conference with how many people are lying. But you know, if you could sit down with somebody say, Hey, you actually show me your prospect tracking sheet, and now we can start comparing things and saying, Hey, where are they crushing it? What are some things that they’re doing? But again, this is the hard work that no one really wants to do to track in detail, all of your prospect information, but totally. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Again, when we look at advisors, and we’re going to use just income as a measurement, right? Ultimately, we’re solving for value, right? Our approach is that your income in our model is tied to the amount of to clients, right? So we’re going to set aside outliers or unethical people, whatever the case may be, but always, every single time, the people that are making more money, aka delivering more value, they’re doing that hard work that no one else wants to do the other place. Micah, this manifests itself is, how are you spending your free time? In other words, those hours you’re not working, no, not time. I’m not talking about time with your family. I’m not talking about the time that you’re exercising or working out or doing your hobby. I’m talking about those extra couple hours in the morning or the evening. Are you spending those only in social media? Are you spending them watching Netflix? Are you spending them reading and bettering yourself? I was talking to a great advisor, friend of ours, phenomenal practice. He and I had shared that we were both on our third time through the same book. And I said to him, I said, Hey, we’re gonna call How do you find time to read these books? He says, What do you mean? How do I find time. I’ve all the time in the world, three books. I don’t watch any TV. He says, I don’t, I don’t spend my evenings watching TV. I’m gonna even say I’m either working with my family, exercise, hobbies, or I’m learning that’s at least I don’t, I don’t spend time on social media. I don’t spend time. This is, again, where fantasies separate. Whether it’s work or sports or fitness, you just have to do the work.

Micah Shilanski  

Gotta do the work. You know, speaking to the work, right? This podcast is all about kind of taking so the biggest kind of action item you need to do is take action, right? That’s the biggest thing. Know, where kind of you’re at, you know, become a member of the perfect or there’s my there’s my selfish little plug that’s gonna be in here join us in our coaching programs. Why? Because we want to make a difference in your life. All of these little things that Jarvis and I talked about are things we help step by step, other advisors do and implement so you can transform your life and your clients lives and your family’s lives along the way.

Matthew Jarvis  

 Yeah, the second the caveat I added that, Micah, it’s got to be take action. That Prince isn’t quite the right word, but let’s use a quick working out metaphor. If I get to the end of a workout and I have it sweated and my heart rate’s not up and I’m not feeling sore. That wasn’t a workout. I didn’t, yeah, I just I’m making it harder. Same with with your practice. If the work you’re doing doesn’t hurt, if it’s not uncommon, shoot, you’re not actually growing, you’re growing your practice. So yeah, join us in The Perfect RIA, we’ve now helped hundreds, now 1000s of advisors, double their practice and more. Micah, always a pleasure to work together for all of our sisters. Remember five stars when early vote often is election season, forwarding this podcast to other advisors you know really helps us out.

Micah Shilanski  

Awesome, till next time. Happy planning. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Happy planning.

Amber Kuhn  

TPR Nation when it comes to prospecting, having a process in place, and one that you follow is essential. But what impact does that process have on your prospects? What if it set expectations for them and help them get a glimpse of what it looks like to be a client? What if it helped put them at ease and allowed you to provide an exceptional experience? If you’re looking for a tried and true process, then it’s time to get Matthew Jarvis’s Sleep on it process. This process will help prospects the answers to their critical questions and ensure that they feel confident in their decision to hire you as their trusted advisor. Visit theperfectria.com/sleeponit for your exclusive access.