Can you coach yourself?

Coach says: First of all, my heartiest congratulations if you have been able to achieve your current level of success without help from anyone. The financial advisory business can be tough at times and, although I have always found it of great value to have a coach, mentor or colleague for feedback and guidance, I am envious of those who seem to have thrived without much support around them.

Second, I agree with you that much of the advice I offer isn’t profound or groundbreaking in its application. It is, in many instances, as you suggest, common sense. However, as the old saying goes: “Sometimes common sense isn’t all that common.”

I believe there are three primary benefits that coaches should bring to the table in our work with advisors:

1. Objectivity. A coach should be free of biases and preconceptions about what works and what doesn’t in an advisory practice. Every advisor has unique needs that cannot be addressed with a cookie-cutter approach. Of course, there must be a disciplined process for determining what is required in each situation, and certain patterns show up with enough frequency to say they are “common.” That does not, however, naturally lead to the same prescription for dealing with them. Our belief is “standardized process, customized solutions.”

2. Accountability. Although some of the strategies that a coach suggests might be familiar to you, the discipline to implement them is often a losing battle. The complexity of your business can make it a struggle just to keep up, let alone allocate time to make substantial changes in the way you manage your practice. Funny thing, though: for most advisors, knowing that their coach will be checking their progress regularly seems to motivate the advisors better than anything to do the things they must do to change the course of their businesses.

3. Resources. The multiplicity and diversity of issues that affect individual practices means that a wide range of potential solutions and action plans must be considered. What works well in one practice may be totally the wrong thing to do in another. By definition, then, we should not expect any coach to have all the answers to every question at his or her fingertips. What we should expect, however, is for the coach to be a resource centre for information, tips, strategies, tools and insights gathered as a result of that coach’s experience in working with a number of advisors, access to references and databases, attendance at professional-development events and general “student of the business” awareness of the latest trends and techniques.

To be sure, you can “coach yourself.” We do it all the time. Take, for example, personal fitness. There are many more people exercising in gyms on their own than are using personal trainers. Yet, most of us recognize that an experienced professional can help us get more out of our time at the gym by helping us to develop a program and motivating us to work at it.

Professional trainers cost money, as do professional coaches. Although that could be a valid reason for some people not to use them, for too many people, I think it’s more the hard work and accountability that stops them.

I am somewhat biased, of course, but I think that any advisor who is determined to reach the highest performance levels would be advised to engage a professional coach. After all, if this is your life’s work, why not take full advantage of people and resources that can help you make the most of it? Perhaps, however, you are one of the fortunate ones who have worked out what you should be doing and are sufficiently motivated to follow through to the end of your career. If so, I offer the following steps that many professional advisor coaches help their clients take:

STEP 1: PAINTTHE BIG PICTURE

There is an old adage that goes something like this: “If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you have arrived?”

As a financial advisor, what personal dreams and professional ambitions have to be realized so that you can say you and your practice have arrived? Don’t be surprised if you can’t verbalize these. Most advisors don’t have a clear mental picture of how they want their future to look. Consequently, they can’t articulate an appropriate long-term strategy as part of a comprehensive business plan.

So, ask yourself this question: “If my business did not exist today, how would I invent it?” How big would your practice be? What type of clients? What would your role be? Who else would work with you? What would it feel like to be a client? What would be different from today?

STEP 2: TAKE STOCK OF TODAY

Planning a successful journey works only if you know the starting point. That requires you to analyze the current state of your business, considering such topics as: how big; how many clients; what type of clients; what works and what doesn’t; how you spend your time; what you are not doing that you should? And so on.

Unfortunately, most advisors do not have a good handle on what makes their business work or what might be holding it back. They don’t know, for example, the effectiveness of their marketing, the success of their sales process or the efficiency of their client service.

If you haven’t been in the habit of keeping such records and performing the analytics, I encourage you to dig deep into the metrics of your business to develop a good sense of how big the gap is between where you are today and where you want to be at some specified point in the future.

STEP 3: SET “SMART” GOALS

Use the SMART acronym to structure your goals. SMART stands for: Specific. For example, 150 clients with combined assets of $100 million.

Measurable. Use quantifiable data instead of words such as “better” or “more.”

Attainable. Is this goal achievable, given your time, energy, knowledge and resources?

Relevant. Will achieving the target matter? If not, it will not be motivating enough to keep you going when things get tough.

Time-based. By when? A target without a completion date isn’t really a target at all.

STEP 4: DO IT!

The most highly developed strategies will be wasted if they are not properly implemented in a timely manner. Create a written action plan that identifies:

Things you must do. Critical items that must be addressed to ensure the success of your plan. These are usually around core aspects of your business, such as marketing, sales or operations.

Things you should do. Important items you could get along without doing but without which you are unlikely to achieve your full potential. For example, hiring more staff to reduce the time you spend on administration.

Things you’d like to do. Desirable items that will make your life easier or more enjoyable. For example, redecorating your office won’t directly increase your business but it may improve working conditions for you and your team.

Create a scorecard that lists all your action items according to their priority. Then, for each, determine: who will do it; when it will be done; and how it will be done.

In my obviously biased opinion, for complex career or personal issues, there’s no substitute for working with a qualified, experienced coach. However, if you understand the approach coaches use when working with their clients, you often can go a long way toward working through challenges on your own.

George Hartman is CEO of Market Logics Inc. in Toronto. Send questions, comments and opinions on any aspect of practice management to george@marketlogics.ca.

© 2012 Investment Executive. All rights reserved.