Read the Transcript Below

Jamie Shilanski  

Wait a minute, I just spent my entire career grinding to make myself so important and single handedly bootstrap this financial planning firm to a multimillion dollar level of success. And now your advice for me is to make myself as useless to the organization as possible. Welcome back to TPR Nation. This is Jamie Shilanski, in an episode of Worlds to Conquer. And today we are going to talk about the third stage that a financial advisor enters into when they are running a successful financial advisory practice. So as you already know, as a longtime listener, Shilanski and Associates is our enterprise office up in Anchorage, Alaska. Our parents, Floyd and Rosa Shilanski, started a company back in 1981 and man, have we just not learned over those 40 plus years of all the trials, tribulations, growing pains, you know, we grew to 20 plus people of support personnel, and then decided, wow, this is really out of hand. This isn’t what we wanted. And we cut a lot of the fat, and now we’ve sort of reemerged as a Phoenix coming out of the embers, because now we know how to do it better. Now we’re taking a second crack at it and making sure we’re defining how, why and when we decide to grow so as a financial advisor, there are only three stages of your career. There is the growth stage, and the growth stage is when you are not working with the number of clients that you want to have ideally, and it’s when you’re not earning the revenue that you want to earn now. We all want to earn more revenue. I want next year’s numbers of even higher than this year’s, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Remember when you started out as a financial advisor and you were like, Man, if I could just make a quarter million dollars a year, if I could just make a quarter million dollars in that a year, that would be amazing. And then you made 250 you’re like, gosh, if I could just get to three or four or five, and that is where we talk about that growth stage. If you’re not earning the revenue that you want and you’re not working with the number of clients that you want to work with, then you should be completely blinded to all other distractions in our industry and focused on nothing but growth and distractions. They’re out there everywhere. Everyone is telling you what to do, how to do it, etc. At the perfect Ra, we are about the pursuit of perfection. We are about making sure that there’s more transparency for financial advisors and community to help each other grow from people that are talking from experience. We have a No BS policy. At The Perfect RIA what does that mean? That means if you come to me and say, Jamie, I would like to talk to you about, you know, merging and acquiring practices, I’m going to say, Hey, I’ve done it three times. None of those times were super successful. In my mind, I didn’t hit my benchmarks. I’m not the right person that you want to go talk to. You want to go talk to Joe. Joe has done it a dozen times, and it’s had a radical success. That’s our no BS policy. So if you don’t have skin to gain, if you don’t have experience, if you haven’t throw it and done it, sit down and shut up and let the people that have had those experiences talk about the pros and cons and help educate others. A lot of times, we’ll go to conferences and there’s somebody standing up there that was a former wholesaler telling you how to talk to clients that’s never once sat across from a client. Never once in their life have they sat across a client and had their livelihood depend on that relationship. So we’re really big about listening to experts, making sure we’re getting coached, incorporating different things, but then also filtering it through. How many times have you done this? Show me what you’ve been successful in this way. So if you’re in that growth stage and you’re saying, okay, you know what, I definitely am not where I want to be in my financial advisory practice, then reach out to us at lifestyle@theperfectria.com we’ve got courses designed just for you that will be focused on how to prospect, how to work with centers of influence, because that is the only thing that you should be focused on. You should be focused on marketing, development, introducing yourself to new leads, new prospects, and then also originally enhancing your client deliver experience. Because if, and this is where people get confused, they think they have to go get new they have to acquire new people to come inside the top, what we refer to as the top of the funnel, they have to broaden their exposure, and that is part of it. But you also have to enhance the experience that people are having with you already, because you already have that client, it is easier to keep a client than it is to go and try to secure a client. So making sure that you’re balancing both sides of the type of experience, at least people raving fan. And if you haven’t read that book, you need to add it to your growth argument. That will be an incredible book for you to digest, but you want to make everyone a raving fan so they can’t stop talking about you. And when they can’t stop talking about you, they’re going to start referring you, and as they refer you, you’re going to watch your clients start to naturally grow. But that’s not just something that just magically happens. One of the things that Shilanski and Associates is I slap a we love referrals on every single out piece of gold correspondence. Why? Because I want to constantly let my clientele know that we are growing, and we love to talk to their friends. We might not be the right financial advisory firm for them, but it’s probably worth an hour of time to figure out if we can help them. And that is the language that I give them, and it’s also the filter. So if they send somebody that I wouldn’t work with, then they know, hey, I’m not right for everyone. That’s okay. I’m only right for the unique people, but I will filter those people out. You just send me everyone, and then if I send somebody, and we instantaneously know that they’re not going to be a good fit for RIA, guess what we do. We deliver so much value. We knock their socks off. We make sure that they know that we have provided so much value in their life, that they are like, Man, I really want to hire you. Really want to hire you. And then it becomes self selecting. Hey, you know, we can’t actually help you right now. We’re, you know, full, or we have these different things, or, you know, we’re cost prohibitive for you guys, but go and do these things and you’ll be in great set. And this is hard for people. They’re like, if you knew that somebody wasn’t going to be a good fit, why did you deliver massive value? Because what’s going to happen when they get done meeting with me, they’re going to talk to my existing client, and they’re going to say, how was your experience? And if we didn’t knock their freaking socks off, how do you think I just dried up that referral line Sure did. So we deliver so much value to them that they say, Wow, this was incredible. This was amazing. You know, I’m not the right client for them, but they help me in these different ways. They problem solve for me. Think it means I think about ahead of time, and you knock their freaking socks off. If you enter into a conference room with somebody, you have one mission, deliver massive value, deliver massive amounts of value to them. So they leave an absolute raving fan of your professionalism. Because, remember, there are a lot of devices, machines, software programs out there that a lot smarter than all of us combined. People are hiring us for our opinion. People are hiring us for our advice. Make sure that advice is worth listening to on every single occasion. So once you have the number of clients that you want, you have making the revenue that you want, you’re still going to be growing. So it’s never that you’re coming out. It’s kind of like turning your birthday right. How’s it feel to be 16? Well, it felt the same as did yesterday when I was 15. You don’t ever leave that you’re just now leapfrogging onto a no place, and that new place is freedom, because when you’re growing, you’re freaking grinding your butt should be in the office, outworking every single other person. If you want what other people only dream of, you have to work harder than they ever imagined was possible. So when you’re in that growing stage, don’t you cry to me about having to work on Fridays or having too many appointments. That’s the only thing that you should be focused on, because if you want freedom, genuine freedom, you must be committed to the discipline and the grind that takes to get there. So now that you’ve got your deal number of clients, now that you’re making good revenue, you’re never leaving those principles behind, but now you got more freedom. Now you’ve got things that allow you to take those Fridays, to take vacations, take time, to not be in the office, maybe as much as you had to do during your grinding phase, and when that becomes the case and you’re in that freedom debate, the only things that you should be focusing on is systems, policies and processes. So you grew and grew and grew. You’ve learned a lot of lessons from a lot of different clients and prospects and center influence now. Document, them. Document, document, document, yeah, no, what is that quote? You don’t ride your goals. You fall to the level of your processes, right? We’ve been able to systematize things, so then you need to take this was one of the greatest exercises that we did in our practice. We were going to hire somebody to come in and document all of our processes, and they quoted us like $25,000 and I said, Okay, you’re going to come in here, and how are you going to know what the processes are? And I said, Oh well, I’m gonna sit down. You’re gonna go over them step by step. And I was like, Wait a minute. I’m so sorry. My polish is shining through a little bit. Did you just tell me I was gonna pay you $25,000 to write down what I was gonna say? And they’re like, yes. And I was like, move over. I’ll write it down. And so I began to document every single thing. Now, when I came up with a template, and this is where we got to jump from that freedom to that enterprise stage. So that’s that’s the next stage. The next stage of a financial advisor’s career is enterprise, and that means building a practice that’s going to be sustainable beyond your existence. So many times, advisors love to die at their desks. They bring in a junior, keep that junior and that junior capacity for 510, 1520, years. And said, don’t worry when I retire. By the way, they’re never going to retire. So if you’re in that situation right now, and you’re waiting for that senior advisor to retire, and you don’t have a contract agreement that starts tipping the scales on commission that senior advisor has an exit strategy. Guess what? Retiring? They’re dying at their desk, and they’re fooling you into thinking otherwise they’re waiting for some catastrophic event to befall them, and then they will stop working, and otherwise they’re going to continue to work if they don’t have a retirement date. And think about it with your clients. Think about with your clients, think about with your clients, when they talk about retirement, how excited are they? They’re like, Oh man, I want to retire. I want to retire the same date. I want to retire this age. I want to retire this time year. I want to retire, etc. But if you’re working with a senior advisor and they are not as excited about retirement, that’s because, guess what? They’re not excited about retirement, don’t want to retire. There’s a significant feeling of purpose that goes around being able to work with clientele, and they might not want to give that up, and that’s totally cool. In fact, as Shilanski and Associates, Floyd Shilanski, who started the firm, who’s our founder, Micah and I, have been co CEOs for the last, you know, decade, but we don’t let them use the R word. In fact, when clients come in and we’re in a joint meeting, and they said, Floyd, you know, what are? What are you thinking about retirement? I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, Mr. Client, don’t use that dirty R word in this office. Everything was going so nicely. And I make a joke out of it. And they say, Listen, our greatest ambition is to make sure that we set you up for successful retirement and achieve your goals. But we just love what we do around here. We we don’t want to retire. And then I lean and I say, You know what? This is my deal with my dad. He can retire the day he’s no longer of use. He can retire the day he’s no longer useful to this organization. And then for us, because we have such a family firm, it resonates to so many people. And I’m like, Man, I just they one, I respect my father. Two, they see his value and worth despite his gray hair and three it also tells him how passionate we are about changing lives and helping people. So that’s a good line for me. But if you’re not in that same situation, if you are waiting for a financial advisor to die at their desk, you got to have strong conversations, conversations you don’t want to have, and then you got to ink those conversations because paper, it’s not in writing. You know, a lot of people, I’m gonna get a lot of flack from this, from senior advisors, so I just know it, the best way to know how serious they are about transitioning their book is to see how much of their commission they’re willing to give up. That’s really where it comes down to, because they’ll 100% allow you to take on all the appointments service work, building the plans and calls. Because, guess what? That’s not the fun part. The fun part is meeting with clients and helping them achieve dreams. That’s the fun part, doing all the data entry, analyzing things, looking at portfolios, making different moves. That’s not fun for most financial advisors. Most financial advisors love, love, love, meeting with prospects and helping them develop a financial plan. It is the conversation aspects of helping them. It is not the sitting behind the computer doing busy work. That’s not what does it for most great financial advisors. So of course, they’re going to let you come in and do all the service work, because that’s not the fun part. But the second that they start having to maybe diminish the level of AUM and the commissions that they’re getting now you’re going to know how serious they are about clients to you, because now you’re in their checkbook, you’ve created a strategy. I like a five year transition plan. I think that works best for clients, and that’s what I’m solving for number one. Two, it also helps both parties on the cash flow side of things. And three, you know, you got to remember, like, if you are somebody, that’s a quote, unquote Junior advisor, which is a term I don’t like because it sets up this hierarchy that maybe you don’t have as much time and experience. But this isn’t playing so, you know, if you’re in this quote, unquote Junior we call them protege advisors. It takes a lot of work to go get a client, and it takes a tremendous amount of work to keep a client for several decades. And we run on our KPIs, our key performance indicators, the lifetime value of a client. And first landsca Associates, we set our bar at 10 years as a lifetime. But I gotta tell you, our lifetime could justifiably be 20 to 30 years with most of our clients, because that is the type of firm that Floyd and Rosa built, is that we have lifetime relationships, and we now work with adult children. Because of that, I cannot tell you how many times we’ve sat in Rome and they’ve said, hey, just so you know, if anything happened to us, we already told the kids to call you guys first. You’re the first call. And that has happened more and more, especially as my dad’s older book begins to age, is that we have adult children come in and said, No. Mom and Dad always said, to call you if something happened. I’m so thankful that you guys have this all in order, and it’s so easy for me. So the important faucet of how we built our practice. And so when you’re in that protege capacity, you don’t have that 1015, 2030, years, you haven’t watched their first child be born, and then maybe you know them have to take in a nephew because their sister is a drug addict, and now they ended up fostering a kid that they didn’t plan on. You don’t have that lifetime of living and working with these people to solve certain situational things. You don’t know that the widow, who’s been a widow 10 years, hired Floyd the day after her husband died, they had already had an appointment set. He died unexpectedly in his 30s. She came into the office, and it was the first time that she had cried since she heard the news. She was still in shock. And she’s been a client for 35 years. Since you don’t have that history with those clients under your belt, you must earn it. And so I think a five year transition is a good way for you to earn all I think a good way for you to get up to snuff, if you will, on a client, is to go through all of the notes and dictation and read back as much as possible you can, and then sit down with that advisor and say, Hey, tell me how you met Bob and Sue. And tell me how what kind of guy are they? What kind of gal are they? You know, do they have kids? They have grandkids? And let that senior start talking, because what you’re going to find is there’s a lot of information on a client not captured in tation. And then I immediately go back after a conversation with a senior on advisor of something I didn’t know, and I open up my iPhone, I get my dictation app, and I rattle off all that information so it has a place to live, so that that way in the future, somebody else knows this history. Somebody else knows why this matters so much. Then very, very critical. So when we’re on a five year, if you will, buy out, one of our roles is that if a senior advisor has to be in the conference room, you don’t get any of the money. Do you get the money when it starts to transition? Maybe that works for you. Maybe it doesn’t. If you strike as a five year succession plan and says, you know, the first year I’m just, I’m grinding, and I don’t get any money. So if I’m the quote, unquote Junior, I’m at zero, and that other advisor, the senior one’s at 100 the next year. Now, we start raking up. I get 20, they get 80, and you start going down the path until that fifth year where you’ve put in half a decade’s time of working that relationship with someone. And then it also begins to allow that senior professional to have the transition time to adjust to no longer having that because cash flow is king. Cash flow is king, and it matters to us as financial advisors just as much as it matters to the retirees. So as you build out an enterprise office, you might have more clients than you have time to necessarily work with, so you’re going to have to start bringing some people in, and then it becomes your choice whether or not you want to transition some clients to them. Maybe they need to go and feel like what it’s like to hunt for themselves most successful enterprise, I’m going to raise my hand right here, and I know PJ Denuzzo has a hell of a enterprise off as well. We’ve got a really great one. We’re constantly learning from danuzo. He does a phenomenal job. Hell of an advisor, great coach. And just, I can’t imagine being a mentor if we were on that side of the country. Just amazing person to be around. And they built out a successful enterprise track, and I believe that they even call a lot of their financial advisors coaches, because that’s what this is. It’s coaching. It’s coaching people through different stages of their lives. So as we built out at Shilanski and Associates, our enterprise office, we wanted to do a lot of that as well. Now here’s the good and bad part. The good part is that when you become a financial advisor with Shilanski and Associates we feed them leads. Now the good part is, we feed them leads. We feed leads constantly. I think most of our financial advisors, golly, I’m going to underestimate it, because I don’t want to over inflate this number, but they meet with at least 20 prospects a year. 20 prospects a year. They get set up on appointments our relationship manager handles that. Micah and I and the advisors play an active part in this too, but it’s mostly Micah and I driving. Micah is my baby brother. You’ll hear him on Mondays with Matt and Micah when they’re on the pod together, but we drive most of the content, and most of them for our particular niche. So when you come on and as a financial advisor, we’re feeding you now, that’s the good part, because you don’t know how to feed yourself. You know, if you want to attend, it to a baby, a baby doesn’t come out of the womb. Annoying. How to use a spoon, you got to figure it out. Now, the bad part of it is there is a lot of knowledge, and there is a lot of lessons that you will learn when you have to learn how to feed yourself and figure it out. Everyone could go the grocery store. Not everyone cannot. And so we try to make sure that we are in we are imparting the discipline lessons because they’re really, really important about how to feed yourself, how to develop marketing, why content matters, why delivering massive value, even if you know the person is not an ideal client, is so important. So those are all of the lessons that we are our financial advisors. And by the way, Micah and I might be running the firm, but we are so actively learning too. We are so and that is what sets us apart from so many people, because we are more concerned about being interested than interesting. When I meet you, I want you to tell me everything. Tell me something, anything I want to learn. You have some piece of knowledge that I don’t have, and I know it. I feel it down in my bones, and I want to learn from you. And then I want to collaborate and I want to share information. I want to take little tips and say, Great, now, how can we go implement those? And that is what led us to our enterprise level, and our enterprise level, that means we’re bringing on more advisors and more team members. That’s that next stage of leveling up, and when you hit that area, that’s really, really tricky, because now you have to do this. You have to decentralize command. You have to make yourself replaceable, and you just spent the last 1015, 20 years making sure you were the only one at your practice that was irreplaceable. So yes, TPR nation, now I’m telling you, once you’ve hit this drive, this area, you have to decentralize command. You have to empower other people. So it’s not just you the helm. You might be the one that Captain running it, but you need a whole entire crew making sure they’re going where they need to you chart the course they’re pulling on the horse. You got to have that in place. So how do you do that? Freedom stage, we were documenting everything, but once you document it, it’s not documented and done. In fact, we have a brand new batch of employees. We are really lucky. For about seven years, we had the same staff. We didn’t have any turn on our new faces, really, and one or two here and there, but we had the same core team members. So we all knew what we knew. We all build this out together. We don’t document our processes. We all had a down in place, but now we have the organizations that don’t have that institutional knowledge. And it’s simple things, simple things like this. If you’re on phone with a client and the covid is getting frustrated with the technology, can’t find out what the way you’re referring to when they log in, the client should not give you their username and passcode. Now, we didn’t think about putting that as part of a training, because why would you Well, who would ever do this? But the second bad way? And that’s what’s kind of beautiful about having so many people please. The second that our employee was put in that position, it was instantly shut down by somebody else’s institutional knowledge. Sorry, Mr. Mrs. Client, I appreciate you wanting to do that. However, we are prohibited from accepting your user your passcode. We cannot log into anything as you however, if you want to schedule a service appointment with one of our team members and bring your machine in at hotspot, because we don’t allow anyone on our network, even our own clients, and we would be happy to sit down there with you and show you where these are. And it was just updating a beneficiary. Website had completely changed, and they didn’t know where it was at. But we don’t, you know. We We had this institutional knowledge, but it took a team being able to be like, Whoa, hold on, stop. Red flag. We do not do that, because a brand new person isn’t going to do that, especially when that brand new person has spent the last 30 days drinking the Kool Aid of we deliver exceptional value. We take care of our clients. We go above and beyond, and they might not know what they don’t know. We have to be able to train and teach them. And so here’s what we do differently than what other people do. We didn’t just flag it and grab it say, no, no, we can’t do that. It got circulated up and said, Hey, by the way, I think we should add this to the training manual. This is what occurred, and this is what we need to make sure happens in our onboarding compliance training. Great. Pull up the onboarding compliance training. Let’s take care of it right now. Let’s do it now. We don’t sit and have 85 meetings on we talk to the employee, we make sure that it doesn’t happen, and then we make sure it doesn’t happen again. That is the decentralizing of command, and the more knowledge we put into our learning management system, the more training tutorials we compose, the better we make our team, the less important it is to have one single person running that organization, and that is the goal of an enterprise office, because, like I tell my team every year at our retreat, I know for a fact that Micah and I could touch X amount of heartbeats and we could, we can make an impact. But I know that if we bring up a group of financial advisors who still believe that character and values matter, we can multiply that by the 10s of 1000s, and that is what we are after. That is what when you build the enterprise office that is your core focus. These lines command and go impact as many heartbeats out there as you possibly can, because there might be a lot of quote, unquote financial advisors, but we all know there’s not a lot of really good financial advisors that will lose sleep over your finances. TPR nation. This is Jamie Shilanski, an episode of worlds to conquer. Go find people who share your values and change the world.