July 24, 2008, marked the passing at age 47 of Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His “last lecture” in September of last year became an Internet sensation and led to an appearance on Oprah and a book currently topping the best-sellers list.

Among the topics Pausch covered in his lecture, he talked about overcoming challenges. “Brick walls are there for a reason,” he said. “Brick walls are not there to keep us out; brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Brick walls are there to stop people who don’t want something badly enough.”

I was reminded of this comment in a recent conversation with a financial advisor who had joined the rookie-training program with a bank-owned investment dealer slightly less than five years ago. He is struggling to build his book and was looking with envy at some of the other members of his training class who have accumulated two or three times as many assets as he has. But a major focus of his time and energy has been working on his chartered financial analyst designation; he had just passed Level 2 of the three-year program this spring. Now, he notes with a certain amount of chagrin, despite his superior knowledge and qualifications, his less-qualified colleagues are more successful than him.

I often run into advisors who talk about targeting the highest level of success in their businesses. Less common is seeing those same advisors willing to pay the price to achieve that success.

There are three keys to achieving real success:

1. Identify ambitious goals.

2. Pinpoint barriers to reaching those goals.

3. Make a commitment to do whatever it takes to overcome those barriers.

As an aside, I’ve talked to many advisors who don’t aspire to make huge dollars; rather, they’re looking to make a respectable living at something they enjoy.

Choosing a less ambitious goal is an absolutely legitimate decision. It may, in fact, lead to happier and better-rounded advi-sors. There is a level of obsession needed to compete at the highest level, which is not for everyone. However, for those driven advi-sors whose goal it is to hit the peak of success in the business, the obstacles to success and price to be paid to overcome those obstacles fall into a number of categories.



>  Working Harder. Sometimes, paying the price of success means working longer hours than colleagues or adjusting your schedule to those of your clients.

One of the speakers at the recent Top Advisor Summit in Toronto talked about using Sunday afternoons to touch base with hard-to-get-a-hold-of clients. I’ve talked with other advisors who work an evening every week or two to meet with clients for whom daytime meetings are impossible to arrange.

Following the summit, there has been heated debate among some advisors who attended about the “workaholic” tendencies of advisors who work Sundays or weeknights on a regular basis.

I take a different view of this issue. Being a workaholic is like any addiction: it means you can’t control your urge — to drink, gamble, smoke or, in the case of workaholics, to work. Most advisors who commit longer hours don’t fall into this category. Rather, they have made a calculated decision that working the odd Sunday or evening is what it takes to achieve the level of success to which they aspire, and they have decided that this is a price they’re prepared to pay.

I talked to another advisor some time after the Top Advisor Summit who had decided to experiment with Sunday-afternoon calls to clients. She is astonished at how responsive clients are to her calls — and how relaxed many of those conversations are compared with those that take place when clients are at work.

Talk to any highly successful entrepreneur and chances are you’ll see someone who had made a single-minded investment of time and energy to get his or her business going. In many cases, the entrepreneur is still working long hours in order to move the business to the next level — although, often, this is a function of choice and habit rather than necessity.

Along the same lines, a member of Canada’s Olympic gold medal-winning eight-man rowing team recently told an interviewer: “We didn’t win the race today on this course. We won it on those early morning workouts, when our bodies were frozen and we were rowing through hail and sleet — and it was just us and our coaches on the water.”

@page_break@Succeeding as a financial advisor at the highest level requires commitment and sacrifice. If you aren’t willing to work hard and invest more hours than average, you’re dramatically limiting your prospects for attaining the highest level of success.

One advisor who is a multimillion-dollar producer with a bank-owned investment dealer is a case in point. This year, he’ll take eight weeks off to pursue high-cost hobbies and exotic travel, leaving his business in the hands of a capable team. When he was starting out in the early 1980s, however, it was a very different story. One January day, his branch manager offered stacks of free passes, worth $10 each, to a financial services show targeting consumers. This advisor was the only one in his office who was interested.

This advisor and his wife spent that weekend standing outside the entrance to the show, freezing their butts in the process, offering attendees a free pass in exchange for their contact information and an agreement that he could call them the following week. Not anyone’s idea of a fun weekend — but, almost 30 years later, some of his biggest clients came from those two days.

> Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone. While paying the price for success can sometimes mean working harder, just as often it means changing how you spend your time.

Paying the price can mean moving out of your comfort zone to focus on areas of importance to your business — such as prospecting, which exposes you to rejection and disappointment. It means having the discipline to abandon activities that are not directly tied to success, such as acquiring professional designation after professional designation, devoting lunch hour after lunch hour to fund-company presentations, meeting frequently with clients with whom it is easy to talk and avoiding those with whom conversations are more challenging or spending the first hour of every day at the office reading the newspaper or scanning the Internet.

Some of these activities are important; but for too many advisors, they are avoidance behaviour — an excuse to put off what they really need to do. One successful advisor makes it his rule to scan daily papers during his early morning workout. Once he shows up at the office, his focus is on talking to clients and prospects.

Very often, advisors whose businesses are struggling have fallen into the trap of focusing on what they like to do, not on what they need to do. Unless you have the discipline to make the things you need to do your first priority, no matter how uncomfortable they might be, you’re not going to realize the full potential of your business.

> Don’t Focus On The Short Term At The Expense Of The Long Term. Many advisors focus on activities that provide short-term reward while neglecting those that offer longer-term payoffs without the gratification of immediate reinforcement.

Achieving success can require investing the time to upgrade qualifications and skills, as painful as going “back to school” at an advanced age might be. It can mean committing the time to cultivate professionals who are future sources of referrals even though that is unlikely to yield results in the near term. Paying the price can mean allotting two mornings a week for activities that will position you as the go-to resource within a community of clients in your market. Or it can mean touching base with prospects who are ensconced in a relationship with another advisor to ensure you’ll be considered if those prospects ever make a change — even though the chances for any return in the short term from those calls are slight.

> Don’t Focus On The Long Term At The Expense Of The Short Term. At the other extreme are advisors who spend all their time on activities that will pay off in the long term — while ignoring the need to generate revenue to pay the bills. The key to building a highly profitable business is to have a balance of activities that provide short- and long-term payoffs. You won’t achieve peak success without focusing on the future; you may not survive to enjoy long-term success without attention to immediate realities.

> Investing Money. A key obstacle to success for some advisors is the focus on short-term income and the reluctance to invest for the longer term. This can be reflected in many ways — for example, waiting to hire staff until it is absolutely critical or refusing to pay a premium for better-quality support. Spending another $5,000 annually for the right assistant can be the best investment an advisor can make. That additional amount can make a huge difference in the clients you attract.

Another way reluctance to invest in your business can show itself is stinginess in the amount spent on client acknowledgement and marketing to prospects, or an unwillingness to spend on courses for personal development.

> Building A Team. Talk to highly successful advisors and chances are you’ll hear them reflect on the importance of the team they have built around themselves. But just having the right people supporting you isn’t enough. Paying the price can require getting out of your comfort zone to delegate contact with small and mid-sized clients to someone on your team, thereby freeing up your time for higher-value activity.



As you think about Pausch’s advice on scaling walls, you might consider taking a piece of paper and dividing it into three columns. In the first column, write down in as much detail as possible what you’d like your business to look like three or five years from now. In the second, write down the walls you need to scale to hit those goals. In the last column, write down the specific things you have to do to surmount those obstacles — the price you’re prepared to pay to move your business forward.

If you have ambitious goals for your business, only by scaling those walls will you achieve the success you desire.

To join the millions who have watched Pausch’s lecture, Google “Pausch” and “last lecture.” IE

Dan Richards is president of Strategic Imperatives Ltd. He can be reached at
richards@getkeepclients.com. For other columns in this series and to access Dan’s blog, visit www.investmentexecutive.com.