Purpose,Vision, & Focus

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Defining your purpose, your vision and your focus sets the stage for accelerating your success by giving you clarity about your most basic motivations, your vision for what you want to achieve and a focus for your day-to-day activities.

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Clarify your Purpose

Many financial advisors are often so busy serving clients that they fail to take the time to think about why they are really in business. Ask yourself these key questions to help clarify your purpose as a financial advisor:

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• Why are you in this business?

• What do you want to accomplish with your business?

• What is important about your business success to you?

The most common response we hear from financial advisors to all three questions is “To make enough money to have the quality of life that my family and I want.” But that only scratches the surface. Delving deeper into the “why” behind what you do will sharpen your clarity of purpose and draw you confidently forward as you build the practice you have always wanted.

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Think about the unique qualities of your business that would make people proud to be a part of it. Consider the legacy you want to leave behind. Tap into your original motivations for becoming a financial advisor—you may have to think all the way back to your childhood for these, but you may find that they are your truest inspirations for doing what you do now.

Understanding your deepest motivations for being a financial advisor is not simply an exercise. As you will see later in The Elite Wealth Manager, being able to clearly articulate your motivations is critical for drawing qualified prospective clients to you and then for building trust with them over the long term.

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Define Your Vision

Our goal for The Elite Wealth Manager, is to help you build a simple and elegant wealth management business where you become indispensable to the right affluent clients while enjoying a substantially higher quality of life. Every action we recommend leads to this single goal.

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Knowing that you want to build a simple, elegant wealth management business and have a higher quality of life is not enough, however. You must also set clear, quantifiable business goals to help you gauge your progress and keep you accountable to your higher vision.

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For perspective, consider that most financial advisors want to achieve more when it comes to the five important goals of significantly increasing their incomes, the value of the equity in their practices, their assets under management, their revenue and the number of wealthy clients they work with. (See Exhibit 1.1 for a summary.)

 

To be effective, your goals must be defined in terms of specific measurements. Clearly delineate your goals in each of these three areas for both 12-month and three-year timeframes:

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• Assets under management

• Net new organic assets under management

• Number of clients

• Net new ideal clients

• Personal annual net income

• Number of days off per year

As you quantify these goals, think big. Incremental thinking will result in incremental growth. We challenge you to redefine progress completely and to set true breakthrough goals. Put yourself on the line to make a major difference in your business, in the lives of your clients and in the lives of your family and team members.

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Setting breakthrough goals should take you out of your comfort zone. Significantly raising the bar should make you nervous. In fact, if you are perfectly comfortable with your goals, they are not big enough. But the territory beyond your comfort zone is where real changes and real breakthroughs happen. Go there.

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Focus Your Activities

Of course, just setting a breakthrough goal does not mean that you will actually perform at the level required to achieve it. Turning that possibility into reality takes commitment and an ability to stay strictly focused on the activities that will enable you to reach your goal.

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However, this level of focus and purpose is rare. Exhibit 1.2 illustrates the four different ways that leaders and entrepreneurs approach their businesses.

Quadrant 1 is where most financial advisors are. They get through each day just as they are, doing the same things over and over again. They have become complacent. If we are not careful, this can become the default quadrant for most of us.

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Quadrant 2 is where many successful advisors get stuck. They work very hard at doing the same things over and over again, and then mistake their positive results for having a great business. Recent market gains have made them feel more successful, but in fact they are not creating a bigger future.

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In Quadrant 3, financial advisors are willing to try new things, but still do not reliably achieve significant results. Why? Because their goals are uninspiring. They have not envisioned a bigger, better tomorrow, and so are left tinkering with what they have already done.

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In Quadrant 4, impact meets vision. This is where true breakthroughs happen on the way to the best possible future. What once seemed impossible becomes reality.

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The fact that you have committed to The Elite Wealth Manager is evidence that you are prepared to operate in Quadrant 4. You are not complacent. You are open to change. You are driven. You are awake at the wheel and willing to set breakthrough goals and run your business in new ways in order to achieve those goals.

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In The Elite Wealth Manager, we give you a clear track to run on. Through our industry research and experience in coaching thousands of top advisors, we know what works. We will ask you to focus only on the activities that have been proven to help achieve significant goals. For a downloadable action plan that will help you stay sharply focused on the precise activities that will bring you great success, select the Welcome tab above and then select Action Plans.