Read The Transcript Of The Episode:

Speaker 1:

This is the Ultimate Advisor Podcast, the podcast for financial advisors who want to create a thriving, successful and scalable practice. Each week, we'll uncover the ways that you can improve your referrals, your team, your marketing and your business operations, helping you to level-up your advising practice, bring in more assets and create the advising practice that you've dreamed of.

 You'll be joined by your hosts, Bryan Sweet, who has more than half a billion dollars in assets under management, Brittany Anderson, the driving force for advisors looking to hire, improve their operations and company culture, and Draye Redfern who can help you systematize and automate your practice's marketing to effortlessly attract new clients. So what do you say? Let's jump into another amazing episode of the Ultimate Advisor Podcast.
 

Brittany Anderson:

Welcome back to this week's podcast, where we are talking here with your Ultimate Advisor Podcast, Mr. Draye Redfern, Mr. Bryan Sweet, and we are continuing on the discussion about how you can set yourself up to end your year strong.

 Now last week, if you didn't tune in, you need to press pause right now and go back and listen to how you can keep your focus, because it's going to be essential when we talk about today's topic and next week's, so trying to set you up for absolute success.

 Today, we're going to talk about tying up loose ends. Now full disclaimer, you need to make sure you have a system for focus. That's why I asked you to listen to last week's before you can really tackle this.

 The nice thing about looking at a 12/31 deadline is it can give you a little push and motivation that you might need to clean up some of the miscellaneous things that you've been thinking about or saying you're going to get done for some period of time.

 For me personally, I like to tackle some of the more cleanup projects. It might be getting some files in order, and I use that term loosely because that can be virtual files, cloud files or physical, so getting things cleaned up and organized.

 It can be having more of a focus on QT days, so quiet time days, where you really go head down, you have no interruptions and you really make sure that you have the dedicated time to wrap up some of the things that you maybe haven't gotten to yet.

 This can be, as Draye and Bryan both touched on last week, a time where you focus on delegation, so a loose end can be a delegation process. Maybe you've known for quite some time that you need to find more who's per se, that you need to find people to either add to your team to maybe get some things off your plate. Maybe there's certain elements that you can outsource that you've just been procrastinating on.

 So this is a great of year to look at and do a self-assessment to say what are the things that have been sitting on my checklist for forever? What are the things that I've been ignoring on my Outlook calendar because I want to get it done or I want it to be done, I just don't know that I really want to do it? Those are a couple of things that I think are really important to look at when you're rounding out the year.

 But, again, the premise to this is, is you need to make sure you can maintain the focus on the few key initiatives that are going to add to the success of your business. So those are still your priority items, but sometimes you need a little forcing function in your life, and there's nothing like the end of the year to allow you to really clean up some of the things that just have been pending on your list, or that feel more like housekeeping versus big needle-movers.

 Bryan, we've set up a system at Sweet Financial and really been honed in over the last couple of years on continuing to make this even better. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that process and that structure and what it's done for the business.
 

Bryan Sweet:

Yeah, it's interesting. When I was listening to you talk how the year-end does seem to be a time when you feel I won't say pressure, but you at least think about having to clean up stuff that you hadn't gotten through the year. And for whatever reason, a year-end is that deadline and you want to get to it and get it accomplished to check off your list. As we've alluded to before, sometimes those lists get very, very long and it can be very frustrating when you're not checking off the items that you want to check off.

 That's where our new planning platform that we're using with EOS or Traction has been so, so helpful because it allows us to really focus only on three big items every 90 days. What seems to happen is when you focus on those big items and the things that you need to do to get those three items done, the little stuff kind of gets done right along with it. When you get at the end of the 90 days and you look back and you go, "Gee, a lot of those things just kind of went by the wayside, and I used to have to worry about them week by week, or day by day, and they were just part of the overall picture."

 So if you're not using some kind of a platform to help yourself keep structure for your week and your team and all the different projects that you want to accomplish, we've found that that Traction or EOS system works amazingly well. Literally, what it is, is that we have one meeting every single week, it's scheduled every week at the same time for the same amount of time, which is an hour and a half. Sometimes it doesn't take that long, but we at least allocate that. Then we have four quarterly meetings that are a full day. Then in June, we have our annual planning meet.

 Now that sounds a little weird in that an annual planning meeting in June, but we found is that a lot less going on, you don't have the holidays interrupting and that's a really great thing that we've found. During that daily or weekly hour and a half meeting, we go through the big issues and what's happening with, they're called rocks, which are the key essential things that you're trying to get done. Then all those little items just seem to kind of disappear, if you will.

 What we've found it's amazing the amount that you can get done in a year when you focus only on three items a quarter. Now that we've been doing this for a while, we're so much more productive by focusing on so much less. It's almost hard to imagine and the little things seem to kind of go by the wayside. Some of the times things that you're worrying about are things that actually aren't even important after a while and they just disappear so that's, I've found, really, really critical.

 I don't know, is there anything you'd like to add on that, Brittany, because it's been such a helpful thing for us.
 

Brittany Anderson:

Yeah. No, I completely agree, Bryan, and I think that that's been a huge catalyst for keeping focus in the business, but also I want to add a couple of things here.

 When Bryan says EOS, if you haven't followed us on the podcast for a while, what he means is it's Entrepreneurial Operating System. So, really, the whole premise is, is just putting structure to how you do your planning. This is the thing that I kind of chuckle to myself about all the time, because there are, literally, thousands of business plans you could choose to follow out there, thousands, and I bet we followed probably like 1,001. We've tried just about everything to see what works, and I will tell you for us, and it may not be the same for every business, but for us, EOS has been the one that's resonated with the whole team, that has stuck and that we haven't looked at it and gone, "Mm, you know, I don't think this is really working. We don't feel like we're getting traction," which is funny because the creator of EOS is Gino Wickman, who wrote the book Traction, which is what Bryan has referenced a couple of times here.

 The thing that I think is interesting about this is that in having that 90 days, like Bryan said, number one, it's always on the calendar, it's the same time, same day of the week, but when you go through it and if you follow the structure that they put out, which you can find all of this on their website. They give everything away, their best stuff for free, which I think is excellent and speaks to the quality that they put out. But the neat thing about it is that you follow a certain structure, you keep a pulse on the company, you hone in on the key initiatives to make sure that you're making that continual progress, but then also you have kind of an open space, what they call an issue time.

 Like we've talked about in the last episode about kind of that open file syndrome, that thing where you know there's a bunch of things you kind of need to get reassurance or closure on, you actually have space to address it. And you can keep it in a really organized fashion so that you don't have that squirrel moment or the shiny object syndrome happen where you start going in a totally different direction because the whole meeting is focused on your key initiatives. It's focused on how you can make sure that you're driving closure to those.

 So I think that's something that's really important to point out is that it gives you a space and it gives you a time. And it, hopefully, cuts down on some emails back and forth on getting updates because you know you can just bring it to the table. You're going to be talking on Wednesdays at 9:30 or whatever time you choose, and all of those things can get brought to light and get, hopefully, closed.

 Draye, I would love to hear from you, too, on some of the things that you do with your team to wrap up loose ends before year-end.
 

Draye Redfern:

Yeah. I love this topic. Number one, because it's just I love the year-end. We talked a little bit about that last week. All of the things go around with it.

 But one of the things that we often do is have a day away, so a day or two planning the next year, but doing it away from the office, away from the dings and rings and Slack notifications and emails, all of the other things that end up going off. So we'll do that again this year. I've got a couple places in mind what we're going to end up doing that are probably way cooler than we normally do. I don't want to say it because my team is the one who edits this podcast, and I'll only to give it away. But it'll be fun, and we'll talk about it after it happens in the new year.

 But that's one thing we do that that helps to add some pizazz, too, things to look forward to for the team, going to new places, at least in this instance, but also out of the environment, you have different ideas. And I think that, as a leader or as a visionary, you're not entitled to every good idea, and it's really important to sort of have that realization sometimes. So getting the team outside of the normal comfort zone can really get the creative juices flowing as far as ways to take things to the next level. Some of the things that we've done over the last year are just things that come up like, well, what if? Well, what if, what? Then it creates the dialogue and the conversation around things like that. So that's as far as the new year and planning.

 But for each week, and I've talked about this to a certain degree, I do office hours with the team one day a week where I basically have blocked a three-hour block on my calendar that if they need me, if they have questions, they can Zoom in and get me, if they're virtual, if they're in the office, they can come see me, but that's the block, the primary block.

 Then Mondays, we sort of have a meeting sort of teeing up whatever they need, the big items that need to get done for the week. That's an all-team meeting, so everybody's on the same page. They're short, 15 to 20 minutes, usually, not a very long amount of time. Then we have a Friday meeting at the end of the week where it's more of a celebration. We celebrate the wins. We celebrate wins that individuals have had personally, we celebrate client wins, business wins, all of those things.

 So perfect example, we had somebody on the team who has been with me for quite some time, ended up getting a sponsorship for bodybuilding. So she's got this sponsorship she's super freaking excited and pumped about it. It's not going to be your primary thing, but she's super excited about it as a side thing, she'd been doing it for quite some time. That's a win that comes up. The whole team gets to rally around that and they uplift her and really just make everybody feel included and that they matter as a human and as a person, and not just an individual in the company. So that's a really big thing that we do to end the week, wins and any other big action items that need to get done the following week and just celebrate and that really ends the week on a high note for us.

 But I'd say those are the few big things as far as planning is those two meetings a week, one big meeting at the end of the year.

 I like EOS. Our model does fit it quite as well and we're like Brittany and Bryan that we've done a thousand different things and at least that's the stuff that works for us. So to each their own, EOS and the whole Traction system are absolutely phenomenal. I can't recommend it enough, especially if you're an advisor listening to this podcast. But like Bryan said in the previous episode, he's basically adapted his own daily planner and journal. So you may find a system and then adapt it to fit your own specific needs. Maybe you amalgamate some of the things that you've heard from us today. But that's the long and short of it, I'd say for now, Brittany.
 

Brittany Anderson:

You know, Draye, I think you brought up a couple of really great points. Number one, when you talk about adapting a system, I mean, the thing I would say is, even though we follow the Traction model or the EOS model, we have absolutely adapted it to us. A lot of what's in the book, especially when they give some explanation, more applicable towards more of like a manufacturing-type industry, so we had to make it fit our industry. So I could not agree more with what Draye is saying. You just have to find something that works for you and go after it and just commit to it. So I think that's a great point.

 The other point that I want to press on for a minute is the importance of going off-site for your quarterly and/or annual planning meetings because, let me tell you, email is a beast and sometimes when you're at your desk, that's a little bit harder to pull yourself away from. Even just the daily interruptions or the thought process, or I guess I should say mindset that happens when you're physically in your space, you're thinking about the day-to-day, you're thinking a little bit more in the whirlwind, you're working more in the business versus on it. So having that very level playing field where everybody meets, your leadership team meets outside of the office, it's a common shared space, it's something that you're totally disconnected from the day-to-day so you can really hone in, in the working on versus working in the business.

 So I think that's something that's really, really important that if you don't do anything else from this particular podcast, do that, right? Just commit to that and find a space, rent a hotel banquet room. If you have a nice space in your home, go there, whatever the case is, but find a space outside the office.

 The thing that I want to really drill on before we go into wrap-up here is that when you look at tying up loose ends, because that is the theme of today, this is not, or should not be like race to the finish line type projects. This isn't a time where you're like, "Oh, these 15 projects that we were going to do throughout the year that we decided not to, maybe we should revisit that and try to knock them all out because then we're really going to feel good about our time." No, you're going to stress yourself out, you're going to set yourself up for disappointment and you're going to totally derail.

 This is a time where you hone in, again, as I said earlier, more of the housekeeping-type things, the things that are just going to make you feel like you can start kind of fresh and you've got some of the mundane things off your plate, whether that's through completion yourself or through delegation, like we've talked about, but those are the things I really want you to hone in on.

 Thing for me, I'll just give you a kind of minor or miscellaneous-type task, is I like to have a clean desktop. So if you're like me, when you're working on a project, you just dump it on your desktop because it's easy to find, it's quick access and you can go back to it.

 Well, what happens is, is you end up accumulating this cesspool of miscellaneous things and you get to the end and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I can't even focus anymore because my desktop is so messy." So thinking about that from your computer space, how can you clean that up? How can you get things to where they need to go? Some people have a major problem with their email inbox.

 So part of a housekeeping is not to just delete a bunch and then hope that it doesn't happen again next year or next quarter or next month or tomorrow, but rather creating a system. So having something where maybe you create a couple rules within your email provider where miscellaneous emails go here, and the only thing that comes into your inbox is from clients and you have a team inbox, for example. So that's something that you can do that's going to make you feel good about your progress, that's going to, hopefully, help prevent running into the issue again.

 But that's what I mean by housekeeping items. I don't want you to decide that you're going to completely transfer to a new CRM because it's been a good idea. That's something that needs to be planned out in advance and made into a true company initiative versus something you tackle before the end of the year, because it makes you feel good. So I just wanted to give a little context to that, to make sure that you understood what we were talking about when we talk about some of these housekeeping items.

 So Draye, Bryan, anything else you want to add before we wrap?
 

Bryan Sweet:

Yeah, Brittany, I have one thing. I just wanted to maybe overemphasize something that you and Draye both said. I just think it's critical that when you have these quarterly meetings, that they are offsite. We even go to the extent of not allowing cell phones to be on during the meeting. If you're having a break, you can certainly check them.

 But I don't even like that because I don't want people to be distracted that day. I want them to be in the moment thinking where we're going, what we need to do. What's going on back at the office will be there tomorrow. So the more you can do to create an environment where all you're doing is thinking about your big picture and what you're going to do the next 90 days, the more successful you'll be.
 

Brittany Anderson:

So good, and I could not agree with Bryan more. So on that wonderful note, we're going to wrap up today's episode of the Ultimate Advisor Podcast. I'll catch you right back here next week, where we help you set up for an even greater successful new year.

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