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Jamie Shilanski  

You will never in your life have more time to do something than you do right now. Welcome back TPR nation. This is Jamie Shilanski, an episode of Worlds to Conquer, and we are going to be talking about really important question that our podcast curator brought to my attention from one of our members here at The Perfect Ria. And they have been talking to Amber and said, You know what, I have a really hard time attending professional development and going to conferences. I’m worried about engaging, renewing memberships and doing all of these different things in the professional development networking side, because where we are at in the stage of our lives right now is we are raising our kids, and when I leave town, when I dedicate myself to professional development and continuing education, it really hard on my wife. Lord Almighty, do I not understand better than most, how difficult it is to be raising a family, doing things pause, trying to get ahead in your career and get certain licensing, continuing education development, go to networking, go to conference, events that you’re always looking for. What can I give up? What can I not commit to in order to make it easier for whoever is at home. And so I have one child, but we were instrumental in raising my nephew and niece. And my nephew is the same age as my child, and my niece is four years older. So oftentimes we would have them. We would definitely have them Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the school year. But then intermittently, we would have my niece also, unexpectedly, you know, probably three to four nights a week we would have her plus, at that particular time, my mom and dad were building a property out in big lake Alaska, and needed a lot of help. On the weekends, there was a commitment to those type of projects. And then, in addition to that, during all of this, my spouse’s brother ended up moving in with us for a little while not to be of help in this capacity, but instead, because he needed a little bit of help getting back on his feet in life. So there’s always these familial obligations. There’s always these things tugging, eroding, eating away at our time. And often, if you are a lot like me, if you are very empathetic to the person that you are in a relationship with, you are trying to look at ways to mitigate their stress. You’re trying to reduce how much burden you put on them. And I see this a lot when it comes to attending conferences. And people say, Well, you know, what? Do you have a virtual event? Can I stream that online? Can I just tune in and watch it as a webinar? Are you guys going to record this session and I can go back and watch it at my leisure. Now, I’m not a big fan of doing that, of having recorded sessions, or attending webinars, or doing things like that, streaming online, because I don’t think that you get the same level of engagement. I don’t think that you show up you as the as the person participating, as an audience member, with the same level of commitment that you would have if you were physically there in person. But what do you do when you’re being pulled two different directions? What happens when you know that it would be so good for your network and your growth as a financial advisor to be attending some type of conference or professional development event, but at the same time, you have all of this guilt because you’re going to be leaving somebody else saddled up with all the responsibilities at home, and that could be animals, that could be kids, that could be parents, that could be volunteer work, that could be church commitments, whatever it is that is pulling at your Time and taking you away from being able to dedicate yourself to growing in your career. Well, guess what? Most people you meet have some other responsibilities outside of their career. You’re probably not unique in that capacity. The difference is, those people are showing up to advance their career, because they know that where they want to get to, who they want to become, has to start somewhere, and it has to start some time. You can keep putting off events, and you can keep saying, You know what, when the kids get in school, I’ll go when the kids graduate from school, I’ll go when my mom and dad, you know, move into assisted living, or maybe need a little less help. God forbid, the Lord take them away too early, and then I’ll be able to dedicate myself to my career. Life doesn’t happen that way. I’ve I’ve never been around where, you know, one year seems a lot slower than any other year before. Now what I have experienced is looking back and saying, my goodness, I had no idea how much time I had then compared to where I am today. And if you share that experience, if you share looking back through that glass with me and say, You know what, I thought I had no time, but I had all the time in the world a few years ago, I could have been doing this. I should have been doing this because now my plate and my cup, they run it over, and I have no idea how I’m going to get it all done. Then let’s talk about how some of the top advisors out there are still elevating their careers without sacrificing their family time and commitments. Because one thing that we are really, really big on here at The Perfect RIA, in our pursuit of developing a perfect investment advisory firm, is making sure that we don’t keep saying we are doing this for the people that we love the most in the world, and then all of our actions contradicting that sentiment, and for us, that means being hyper intentional with our time. Hyper intentional with our time. So we normally plan out by October, we have all of the following year mapped out for us. So what does this look like? Well, by September, I’ve already asked my executive assistants I want the next year as a wall calendar printed down. Our surge schedule is decided by October, 1 of this year for the following year. Now, most of the time our surge schedule says pretty good cadence. So let’s talk a little bit about that. So surge, you already know, is a specific time block, period of time and which you are doing nothing but back to back, meeting with clients and delivering massive value. Now actually, landscape associates are a up and Anchorage Alaska, our surge schedule runs, we have two big surges, and then we have many surges. So I’m going to talk first about the big two surges, and then we’re going to go into those minis. So our first big surge of the year is March 1, and that’s going to last until tax day into April 15. So it’s about six weeks of surgery now in that big surge, and we call it the biggest surge of our year, because this is when we are the most strategic about going and getting information from our clients. We asked for every single document that we have longed for all year long. And guess what? Got a really high success ratio of getting those documents from clients. And why? Why are we so successful in getting documentation on financial plans during the month of March and April, because it’s tax time. And guess what? Mode most clients are in. They are in the hunting and gathering stages of getting their documentation, getting their financial affairs in order. And so they will be going out and they will be downloading 1099 they will getting paid pay stubs. They’ll be looking at employee benefits. They will be seeing how much they contributed to FSA HSAs. They’ll be pulling how much mortgage they have left on their house for their 1098. They are in massive hunter gatherer mode for financial documents, and this is a great time to ask them to send our office a copy of them now, inch landscape associates, we do not currently prepare client income tax returns. We did it for a few years. It became incredibly laborious for us, so we ended up outsourcing a lot of our clients tax returns to our partners over at retirement tax services. They work exclusively with financial planners, and you want to hire their tax professional team to do your clients taxes. You have to be a member of the retirement tax services because that’s their exclusive relationship. One thing that they do a lot different than most senior firms is they want to work with the financial advisor. And so what this means for me specifically is if we’ve got a big red flag on a tax return, and let’s just say that the client owes more than $25,000 so all of a sudden we know we have a $50,000 liability. Instead of calling the client the CPA saying, My god, did you know that your idiot financial advisor caused you to have a $50,000 tax liability because they did a massive Roth conversion, instead that CPA calls me and says, Hey, Jamie, I was just working on Bob and Sue’s income tax. I’m sure you’re already aware, but they’re going to around $1,000 this year from the Roth conversion before we reach out to them with the tax return. This excellent opportunity for you to remind them how we’re going to satisfy that tax bill totally take the home run, and to call them and say, Congratulations Mr. Mrs. Client, because you were so forward thinking and doing this amazing Roth conversion, we’re finishing up the tax return with your CPA. They’re going to get everything finalized to you. Hey, just as reminder, don’t forget that we had talked several times about this tax bill that we’re going to have, and here’s how we’re going to pay for that. So when you get that giant return, make sure that you notify our office and we’ll get that estimated payment right. out, or that payment burned out to the IRS. And the guy who’s like, Oh my God, thank you so much, I would have freaked out. If I had seen that big bill, and I didn’t know. So, when I tell you, March and April, was an excellent time to search. March and April is an excellent time to search. surge is amazing for us. So then we come out, and then we do our next surge is going to be during the October, November time frame. So we’re going to start it somewhere around the first week of October, and we’re going to end right before Thanksgiving. And the main concentration for October November is going to be estate planning. And I love talking to clients about estate planning beneficiary designations, kind of reviewing the net worth reports, if we need to, and making sure that we’re making all the changes in their employee benefit plans if necessary during that time frame. Why? Because a couple of things on the calendar are working in my favor. One, open enrollment for a lot of employer agencies is in the month of November. And so we make all of those reviews. We make all the changes we look at all the income and cash flow employee benefit plan on that side, I also love talking to clients they planning during October, November. Why? Because the holidays are right around the corner, and there is no greater reminder that you want to make changes to your estate planning when you bring your entire family together under one roof and go, I am not leaving you all my money making some changes right away. This is what estate planning attorneys tell you they are. The busiest is October, November, December of every single year. So we like to coincide the schedule with that. Now, outside of that, we do mini surges. And mini surges are for about one week every single month. When we first started doing this, we thought about just doing like a June, July, August, big surge, kind of like how we do so we’re meeting with the clients three times a year. We discovered that that was too infrequent. And what that meant was not because of our clients found that it was too infrequent, but instead, what we discovered was our team was super, super uncomfortable saying, Mr. Mrs. Client, you scheduled for an appointment April. Jamie doesn’t have another availability until September. Would you like to schedule your appointment? So like everything we do, we listen to our team at Shaleen, see us for feedback. What’s working, what’s not working, what’s working for clients, but maybe isn’t working for you. So clients didn’t have we had a couple of clients that that really didn’t like how long it took to get in for an appointment when we were running that schedule, and it made our team members just feel uncomfortable. They didn’t like the response of saying there was no availability. So we sat down and we looked at the calendar and said, Okay, you know what? There’s 30 days in the month. Do you need all 30? Nope, I don’t need all 30 to make appointments. Great. Do you need three weeks? Nope, I think three weeks is too long. Do you need two weeks? You know what? And we start off with two weeks, and then as we progressed went down, they said, You know what, I think I only need one week. I need one week to know that clients can make an appointment, you can return phone calls, and we can concentrate on that is a wonderful and so we open up those mini search times. Now, are they always full? Maybe, maybe not? Depends. We also put prospects in those mini search times. So if we get hired by somebody in March, you know, we don’t want to wait until October to do the planning, so we might bring them right back in during the month of May, and do a lot of mini surges inside of there, getting those second, third and fourth appointments. So we’re really hyper intentional about our time. So as I’ve got my wall calendar out in front of me, and I block out all of my surge schedule, then I want to start my conference planning. That becomes the next layer of this. And so then I’m looking a year and ahead and saying, all right, what events do I want to attend. What professional development do I want to be a part of? Now here’s the important part of it. I am not somebody that’s a conference junkie. I think somebody who was telling me, I think it was Matt Jarvis, maybe it was Steven. He was telling me that kids is attended something like 34 conferences a year, physically, in person, not stream. Went there and attended them. No way, no how. I appreciate that vigor. I can’t I could not imagine committing to that, but I know that I want to do one a quarter. And so two of these, I tried to make it live. So the first two out of two of those quarters, I’ll try to go somewhere and be in person for a couple of days and attend those events. The other two, I might take a course online. I might do some other professional development in that capacity, but I want to mix it up with at least four ways that I’m educated and elevating myself. And so when I go to somebody, when I’m going in person, I’m blocking out that time, and I’m looking at the calendar, and I’m planning on where these trips are going to be. Now if you have ever noticed conferences always take some type of like, I don’t know who does all the conference planning out there, but they always seem to be in similar locations. So for a while, everything was in Vegas, then then it was Arizona, and then it was in Nashville for a while, and and so all of these conferences tend to, oh, yes, of course, Austin. So go into these habits of every single year we’re going to go to this location, this area, and so what I’ll do is, after get my conference is mapped out, and block out my time of what I’m going to do my professional development, I will loot my spouse in and I will say, okay, great, let’s talk about family trips. These are the times I cannot go because my work comes as the priority. I don’t put the family trips ahead of my work schedule. Because guess what? My work schedule pays for the family trips, guys, it pays for the family trips. And so I must prioritize being able my number one responsibility is to provide for my family. And I provide for my family by taking care of my clients and running the businesses as I’m supposed to be running them. And so I’ll say, here’s all of the weeks I cannot do anything, I cannot commit to anything, because I’m dedicated towards client time, and I’m get educated towards many surges. And so then here’s my time. I got to have professional development. Would you like to go on any one of these trips? My spouse loves to dirt bike. Big dirt biker hates to travel, but loves to dirt bike. Well, we live in Alaska, so guess what? You cannot dirt bike all year long. So sometimes, if I’m attending a conference in a winter state, they might tag along with me and do one or two days of some type of dirt biking or skill training. Hi, we’ll hire a coach in that particular area, and they’ll get a scratch that itch in that way. Why I go do something now, here’s my plan. In doing that, when that occurs, I make sure that during the days of the conference, they’re busy with an activity, that way I’m not getting blown up about what time are you done? Can we have lunch together? Can we go get, you know, dinner, or When are we meeting back up? Their day is filled with occupation, and I want my day filled of occupation, so then that way, because a lot of times what I’ll see at conferences is people be like, Oh, I’m gonna go meet my wife. I’m gonna go meet my spouse. Now I would much rather have lunch with my spouse than anyone else at a conference, but I am supposed to be there to network and to mingle and to listen to ideas. And sometimes the ideas don’t come from the keynote address. They don’t come from the breakout rooms. They come from just chit chatting with people and hearing one or two ideas, or learning about what people are doing different, or what they’re going to change in their practices, or where they’re at, what’s working, what didn’t work. So that I can take that back home and implement it, and then what I’ll do on days that my conference does attend is will plan to stay two days after that event. I am a big believer, if your conference wraps up Friday at noon, don’t you dare catch a two o’clock flight out of town. You need to stay one more day at that conference, and you need to pound out all of the ideas that you are buzzing about before rushing back to town. So many times, people feel guilty about being gone, and so they’re in a hurry to get back home. But the problem is, you get back home and you’re not really there, because mentally, you’re thinking about all of the things that you just learned and you want to get done. So instead, give yourself the extra two or four hours to stay at that venue. Pound out all of your information, outline things. I mean, I will write email campaigns. I will do marketing events. I will change policies and processes. I will record loom videos for our team. I will do all of the research and get all of this brain dump out of my head. Now, Jamie, I can do that on the airplane. Oh, okay. Well, I live probably the furthest away from most conferences, being in Alaska, and I will do a significant amount of work on the airplane, but I won’t have done all of it. I will not have done all of it because travel gives us different you know, opportunities for testing our patients, like, is the flight delayed? Is it on time? Do you have internet? Do you have not internet? Are you sitting next to a super chatty person? Is there a screaming baby? Do you not feel good? Are you tired all of the things? So I would rather prioritize. I already went through the effort. I already paid all this money to attend a venue. Why am I not then implementing all the ideas that I just learned about? So that’s a big hack of mine. Now, if my spouse is with me, we’ll stay one or two extra days after that happens after that decompression, and go do something fun together. And so it becomes a trip as well as an education event. If my spouse is not with me, then after I’ve decompressed and I got all my ideas and information out, then I’ll go ahead and take off and go back home, because I want to be with my spouse. I want to be back home. I love being back home, but I also want to be really intentional about my time, because if you’ve attended a conference and you come back home and and you’re just kind of annoyed, because now you’re you’re dealing with all of the household obligations. Now you’re dealing with all the household things that need your attention, and you’re mentally somewhere else, well, that’s not balance. That’s not a good way to show up. And it took me a long time to realize that, because my spouse ended up coming to me one time and saying, Hey, if you’re not going to be here, then don’t care yet. If you’re not going to physically and mentally be present with us, then don’t come home yet. Because when you come home, we’re really excited to see you, and we’re really excited to share with you everything that’s happened and to hear about your trip, but if you’re thinking of a million other things and you’re there instead of here, then don’t come home yet. Take that extra time so that when you are here, you’re present. And that was a really good slap in the face. That was because I felt obliged to hurry up and get back home, but didn’t realize getting home was costing my family when I wasn’t decompressing, when I wasn’t getting all these ideas out, when I wasn’t showing up and returning back home fully present. So make sure you have a good balance about that. All right, let’s talk about some of the tricks and hacks that I have learned over the years because because it’s hard when you want to attend these professional development stuff and you want to grow, but you feel so bad because you know it’s causing so much stress on your spouse, on your parents, on all these other people because you’re not there to help balance. All right. So let’s talk about those puppies, those puppies that we treat like children. So if you’ve got puppies and you feel that you know that you are one of the caregivers, and it puts too much responsibility on the other one at home, super easy. Hire someone to walk them, find a doggy daycare, take them their vet, get them their regular shots before they go to those places, and have them go to a doggy daycare during the day. It exhausts the puppy, it’s good socialization for them, and it takes a world of trouble off of your spouse. Now let’s talk about the real children, the one with hopefully two legs. All right, so when it comes to the kids, you know, one of the things that I see a lot of financial advisors start to happen is once they once they get their career going, they become a single income household, and single income household with multiple children. And so then we’ve got multiple sporting programs, school programs, bedtime routines, and it’s a lot to have to juggle as a single parent. And so what I like to do here is I want to make sure that we’ve provided enough support in different capacities. And here’s what that means. Sometimes, even if your parent is a stay at home parent, if the spouse is a stay at home parent, then looking at outside resources to help you know neighborhood kids that can come over for two to four hours out of the afternoon, just so that one spouse can get a break, go to the grocery store, get laundry done, entertain the kids, whatever that looks like, maybe a part time nanny. I’ve seen that in a lot of capacities. So then that way, if you’ve got four kids, two of them are little, the nanny is staying home with to the two little ones, and you’re going to the sporting gimbins with the two older ones, looking at some type of assistance. Now, if that’s not fitting of your lifestyle, that’s not something that you want to accommodate. There are other things that you can do that are of significant value, like bringing in somebody to help clean the house, even if you have a stay at home parent, bringing somebody in to help clean and take care of the property and do all of that, if that is yard work, if that is housework, if that is laundry, services, grocery delivery, I am the sole cooker and our family, so I make all of the food. My spouse often tells me that they were long capable of making food before they met me, evidence I have yet to see, but they are still alive, so clearly doing something. But what I like to do before I go on a trip like that, because I don’t want to hear about it is I will make one or two meals ahead of time. I will make sure that there’s food that they know how to cook inside of the house, and I’ll stock the house with groceries. And then the second thing that I like to do, especially if I’m at a longer venue, so if I’m going to be gone for a week, is right in the middle of the week, I’ll just have a meal delivered. I will just be like, Hey, I know you’re holding down the fort. Thank you so much for supporting me, and I’m going to have food delivered, and I make sure that my EA, Instacart, DoorDash, all those things make it incredibly easy to do that, but if not, my EA has got my back, and she’s watching out for that as well. And we make sure it’s taken care of. So doing those little things of what, what do you do in the house that now becomes really the responsibility of one individual ahead of time, and then how can you mitigate that? How can you find all of these little services that we have available to help that person feel a little supported during your absence? Now, another big thing that I like to do with my spouse already mentioned that I roll out that wall calendar, and we look at all of the client appointment dates, then we look at the Education dates, and then we put our family trips on. This is we have great conversations when we do our year in planning together, and we talk a lot about like, hey, what do you want to learn next year? What goals do you have for the next five years? What are we accomplishing? We’re both really big into learning. And so what do we want to learn about? What do we want to have more information on what do we see this going and I will sit down, and I will talk to my spouse, and they’ll tell me about what they want to learn. And then they also have begun to ask, what businesses are you thinking of doing? What? How many businesses will you be owning next year? Because I have interest in several different companies, and they also know that that’s going to take up a lot of my time. And so if I do a new business, if I do a new obligation that takes away some of my family time, and we have balanced conversations about that. I had this killer business that I sat down, I was just giving the person advice, and then because they had a couple of questions about how to get started, and then by the end of the conversation, they said, Hey, would you be my business partner? Like, if I gave you half a stake of equity in the company, would you come in and do this and let me do the service that I know how to do best, and you run the business? And I said, you know, I’m not sure. Let me sit down and talk to my spouse about it. And we looked over it, and we, we’ve kind of got this. I have an ethos for how I engage in other organizations, and I have a checklist, like, hey, this one has to be doing this. This one has to be doing that before I take on any anything else. And we looked at it and we said, You know what, I’m kind of in an okay spot. And they said, but you know what, we really want to travel and do a couple of other things. I’d love to go fishing. I’d love to go camping a little bit more this summer. And if you take that on, we’re not going to be able to do that. And I said, You’re right. And so I passed where, conversely, sometimes I sit down and say, Hey, this is what it takes, and this is a month that is going to obligate me. And they said, You know what, I’m super busy in my career at that time. So if you’re occupied doing that, I have no objections whatsoever. And so we have those conversations. And if I say, Hey, I’m going to go and do this. This is what it means for us to achieve that goal. Then we’re coming at it together as a team, and then they’re also having a voice and a say. But guess what that means? I have to listen. I don’t always like to listen to the voice and the say, but that’s part of making sure that nobody’s resentful when we are leveling up, when we are committing ourselves to go to different educational things, and when we’re goal setting, you know, sometimes we’ll have really big goals, and I’ll say, Hey, if you know, for example, if we want to buy that motorhome, that means that I have to do X, Y and Z, are we both committed to that? Because that’s going to take me out of the house. And if I’m out of the house, that means that this, this, and this is going to fall on you. Yep, I’m on board 100% and then we have an agreement, or I get to hear, no, I’m sorry. I’ve got my own things going on. That’s too much time away. I really need you to be here during that period TPR nation. I would love to sit here and tell you that there’s going to be a perfect time in your career that you could attend all the professional development you can make, all the advancements in the world, and that it’s going to get easier. But guess what? It just doesn’t. Because after your kids are grown, your parents are probably going to start needing some help. You’re going to have other things going on in your life. God forbid, you have an empty nest syndrome happening in the household, and that’s really difficult, because when you’re raising your babies, those littles, your focus as two parents and a household, one thing survival of raising those children, but when they go out on their own and they become adults, the two of you have to refine each other. You have to refined each other and figure out what that means to be together and independent when nothing else is taking up the focus of all of your time, you never have more time than what you do right now. So order the wall calendar. Map out search. Map out your conferences. Have those conversations with your spouse. Figure out what needs to happen when you are gone. Make it okay for you to continue to learn. to get where you need to be in your career. TPR nation. This is Jamie Shilanski, episode of Worlds to Conquer. Go find people who share your values and change the world.