Listen to your Business

Listening is the ability to accurately receive and interpret messages in the communication process. Good listening allows you to demonstrate that you are paying attention, even when you are surrounded by distractions and white noise.

Quite often practice owners will rack their brains searching for the ideas that will deliver business success. They will faithfully attend conferences and professional development sessions and may even engage a business coach, but to no avail. Their business results never seem more than just average.

Back Office Hero (BOH) recommends that you simply ‘listen to your business’ to find the answers.

The context of this framework is similar to taking a ‘helicopter view’ of your business and removes you from being obstructed by the day-to-day urgency within the business. It involves thinking about the bottlenecks slowing down processes, the quality and completeness of your data or underutilisation of technology. Just like the power of a mantra, you should be continually asking yourself,  “If my business could talk, what is it telling me to do?”.

BOH suggests that you may hear any combination of the following:

• Build a business system.
• Incorporate compliance checks in procedures.
• Use existing technology more.
• Reduce human error by using checklists.
• Increase client engagement.
• Only invite clients if they fit the Ideal Client definition.
• Collect clean data.
• Increase staff enjoyment by outsourcing repetitive and menial tasks.
• Increase business valuation.
  
  

If these are the high-level goals that your business wants achieved, as the practice owner or manager, you now have a unique set of goals and objectives to achieve:

• Train staff to better utilise Xplan.
• Build procedures that deliver your compliance requirements.
• Outsource menial and repetitive tasks.
• Build a system that combines your outsourcing partner using your compliant procedures in Xplan.
• Provide a consistent client experience across each client category.
• Outsource your investment solution via managed accounts.
• Outsource investment portfolio management to an administrative ‘wrap’ platform.
• Use the time saved through efficient processes, to further engage clients to the point where many become advocates of the business, referring more ideal clients.
• Continually improve the above.
  
  

The theme throughout these messages is about ‘consistency, with quality’.

By using managed accounts via an administration platform, for example, you generate and receive the following consistency:

• By selecting a single managed account provider, a consistent risk & return outcome is delivered for each risk profile (e.g. Balanced).
• All clients of the same risk profile will have identical portfolios.
• Each financial planner learns the investment philosophy of just one manager.
• The same PowerPoint presentation of the portfolio construction method is used by each planner for all client meetings.
• Your administration staff have just one administration platform to get thoroughly familiar with.
• The business holds one set of application forms for the platform and managed account manager.
• You manage data feeds to Xplan from one administration platform.
• Your ideal client definition states that each client must have access to email, therefore allowing DocuSign to be used in the practice to sign application forms.
• The clients Annual Review document contains reports just from Xplan (or just from the administration platform).
• You deal with just one investment manager BDM.
• You deal with just one administration platform BDM.
• There are no more Records of Advice to produce.
• At your annual client presentation you invite back each year the same fund manager from your managed account manager.
  
  

When you think of consistency in a business, you cannot go past McDonalds. They are not in the restaurant business, nor the food business, they are in the property business, but with one interesting twist. The franchisees who lease the properties from McDonalds must then follow the same strict procedure in making identical hamburgers and fries and they do this in over 100 countries globally.

McDonalds are after consistency. As consumers, we learn about their consistency and feel safe enough to enter and eat at any McDonalds Restaurant worldwide. As the owner of a financial planning business, it will be the consistency of your services that will turn clients into advocates, who refer even more ideal clients. As you provide your consistent service offering to clients year after year, they too feel safe enough to refer friends, colleagues, and family, knowing full well what their friends will receive from your ‘business system.’ Furthermore, if you were to franchise your business, wouldn’t you also be insisting that franchisees provide the same consistent level of service that you do?

There are many people who have never visited or eaten at McDonalds. That’s fine because McDonalds has never wanted to sell a hamburger to every living person. They just want to buy another property, build a McDonalds restaurant, and have a franchisee pay a license fee for the privilege. But the franchisee must use the same system because McDonalds just want a reputation of consistency and quality.