Almost everything I know about automobiles, I learned from my first car. It was the '90s, but I bought a 1956 Chevy. Big tires and rims, a loud stereo, dual exhaust, a powerful engine, all decked out with a blue and white paint job that made my first car stand out everywhere I drove it. I can still remember the roar of the engine and smell of the gas dumping into the carburetor when I stomped on the pedal.
That car loved to be driven and ran the best when it was fined tuned for maximum performance. Unfortunately, because I was only 16, at first I really didn't understand how to run the car most of the time at peak performance and often ended up blowing up something. From changing the engine with my friend Kenny in mid-January to learning why a master cylinder is important when it comes to brakes, I learned it all firsthand. It was a learning experience, and by the time I sold that beauty, I knew the ins and outs of running the car to near perfection.
It's during this time of year many financial professionals are taking time to focus on growing their business for the next year. Unfortunately, many advisors take a backseat to planning their business's future. When it comes to planning for business, just like I learned from working on my car, often it takes rolling up your sleeves and being hands-on to fix problems and fine tune your business for maximum performance. It is what we at our office call reaching maximum RPMs, but in our case, its stands for revenue per month.
Three choices can be made when going for maximum RPMs:
- An advisor can choose to 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.
- The advisor can get advice from someone else on how to solve problems or increase results. Yet, just like taking a car to the shop, having someone else solve the problem can be costly. 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 a do-it-yourself, take-charge approach first. Step one: Complete a "SWOT" team exercise; a diagnosis, if you will. This can be done by an advisor and team members writing down the internal strengths of the organization, internal weaknesses, outside opportunities and outside threats.
