How can advisors accelerate success?

Advisors who’ve achieved success in their businesses and lives often want more. They have a drive to continuously improve and do something bigger, better, and more meaningful, explains Chris Venn, Head of Advanced Markets at Financial Horizons.

So, how can you reach your goals at a faster pace? Venn details several steps you can take to make an impact on your business, clients, and well-being.

Q: What do you hear from successful advisors who want to accelerate success?

Chris Venn: We get to work with great advisors. All of them have had wins along the way, and setbacks (like any entrepreneur). What we hear most often from those who want more is, “How can I get to this result? With the clients I have, the team I have, the skills I have, how can I do this?”

“Be absolutely clear about your goal. Until you can name it, you cannot have it.”

Q: What advice do you give these advisors?

CV: To be clear, these advisors are going to get to where they want over time. But there are a couple of fundamentals to move toward success faster. The first step is to be absolutely clear about your goal. Until you can name it, you cannot have it. Write it down, and make a plan on how you’re going to get there.

The next step is to be very deliberate about whom you hang around. For instance, if you want to get in shape, you hang around people who are getting in shape. So if you want to be really good at serving your clients, for example, find somebody who’s really good at serving their clients. Hang around them, spend time in conversations about what they’re doing, what their conversations are, and how they look at things differently. And then adapt that advice into what works for you—because no two advisors or businesses are the same. How do you want to show up for meetings? How do you want to engage your clients? How do you want your business to look?

Q: Can you explain Financial Horizons’ Success Accelerator program?

CV: Success looks different to everyone. Our Success Accelerator program focuses on what that success looks like for the advisor. It’s a group program where advisors get to be surrounded with peers that are on a similar level in their evolution, but get to work on their specific goals.

The program is held locally and in person, and it begins by helping advisors get clarity about what they want their future to look like. We help them take a look at how they’re using their marketing and sales process to get to that result, and tune it appropriately. That’s followed with six months of coaching. It’s all shaped around helping them accelerate that success as they define it.

We also have additional opportunities to dive into practice management. We look at their client service model. How are they approaching segmentation? What does the operation look like? What decisions have they made about how their team is composed?

Q: Can you share success stories of advisors who’ve completed the program?

CV: There’s an advisor who’s extremely diligent, and does all of her own service work. The challenge was that she’d built such a great reputation that more people wanted to work with her, and she didn’t have the capacity.

A couple of hours into our first session, we discussed what she wanted. She realized she needed to hire someone. Otherwise, she’d be a long way off in reaching her goals.

When she took time to consider what she wanted and why it mattered, she realized she needed to build a team that upholds the promise of her business values. So, within six weeks, she made an offer to someone. Now that she has a new team member, she’s able to have more conversations with the clients she wants to work with because she has time to do that.

We’ve had other advisors who’ve reshaped their target market focus because the program helped them realize their existing market was in decline. Other advisors, after years of focusing more on the wealth side of their business, have made leaps in growth in the insurance side.

These are just a few examples amongst many who’ve made positive impacts to their goals by following our unique Success Accelerator program.

Q: Do you have any final tips?

CV: There’s an equation for getting stuff you want. First, define what you want. Second, calculate what that costs, and what it will take. For instance, will it take time, energy, or training? Third, pay for it. If it’s something that really matters to you, get clear on what it’s going to take to do it, and then do the work. There is no shortcut for the work.