During this time of year many financial professionals take time to focus on growing their business for the next year. Unfortunately, many advisors take a backseat to planning their business's future. Just like my first car, a '56 Chevy, when it comes to planning for business, many times it takes rolling up your sleeves and being hands-on to fix problems and fine tune your business for maximum performance. It's what we call reaching maximum "RPMs" (revenue per month).
Three choices can be made when going for maximum RPMs.
- Ignore the issue and hope it goes away. That would be like ignoring the warning sign on your car's dashboard, which usually leads to bigger problems.
- Get advice from someone else on how to solve problems or increase results.
- Or an advisor can take charge with a do-it-yourself approach.
Getting outside help often makes sense but always comes at a cost, so let's focus on the DIY approach first:
- Conduct a SWOT analysis. With your team members, write down the internal strengths of the organization, internal weaknesses, outside opportunities and outside threats. For us, our great brand, The Retirement Guys is our strength. A weakness is the need to add more staff to support our growth. An opportunity is capitalizing on networking, and a threat is government regulation. Build the list in each category as long as possible. A good rule is a person can't single out another individual.
- Track everything. A business coach taught me every time I measure something, the results jump 20 percent. We track sales and marketing efforts and business development, just to name a few. This year we added break-even point and RPM to our tracking formulas. Be as specific as possible. Although getting a new person to a seminar is a good thing, what specifically does that mean for BEP and RPM? Everything comes at a cost, but measuring results helps everyone stay focused on specific goals with deadlines.
Your business runs the same way as a car; it's either firing on all cylinders or there will be problems. Take this time of year to tune up your results and get ready to drive forward.
