How Business Planning Affects Your Bottomline

As one of the top leading edge researchers to the advisor industry on business planning, Littlechild says you have to realize you are no longer managing a practice. The need to manage more effectively means taking a hard look at the way you manage your team, invest in technology and communicate consistently with clients. Business planning makes a difference.

Advisors are not coming to the realization they must make the transition says Littlechild, this is one of the many common mistakes being made. Advisors continue to work as they have in the past on the assuming that everything will work out fine. The hiring practice you employ is another mistake Julie Littlechild feels tends to lead to problems in the business.

For example, many advisors do not sit back and ask themselves what kind of people and skills do they really need to round out your practice. What commonly happens is hiring of more and more of the same positions mostly administrative.

For some reason advisors are also very slow to embrace and take advantage of technology in their practices. important tools such as a contact management system are not being utilized, advisor are not taking the time to invest and understand what database information they need to gather.

The lack of structured contact with clients has a lot to do with not adequately segmenting the clientele. Taking into account just assets and sales a client has with you is not enough. This leads to confusion to whom your best clients might be. Your best clients may actually be those clients who send referrals and that fall into a particular target group where cross selling opportunities might arise.

While no two practices are the same, the basic information you need to track on your client base include segmentation, interests and hobbies' and all the things that are going to allow you to communicate and help solidify your relationship with the client. Another mistake says Julie Littlechild, is many advisors are not very proactive the definition of a high level of service means answering the phone anytime it rings.

This means you could be spending up to 60% of your day with low priority clients and not being in control of the process. Ask yourself what is the 3 or 4 things you should be doing to drive your business?

Have you taken the time to analyze how your time is being spent? The key then is to shift anywhere from 70-80% of your time to those revenue-producing activities. This means more than just contacting clients, the ultimate goal is to find ways for you to facilitate a process working in conjunction with your team recommends Littlechild.