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 A.: Hello and welcome back to the Ultimate Advisor podcast. This is Brittany Anderson here with Draye Redfern and Brian Sweet. And we are so excited to round out the 12th tip in Top Characteristics of Top Advisors. So today we want to talk on how a top advisor, a successful advisor is never fully satisfied with the status quo. Now, what that means is that they are always looking to do more and to do better for clients, for their team, and for their business overall. Now I thought that the great person to kick this off is the man who was, let's just say born with the blessing and the curse of never being quite satisfied, of never sticking to that status quo. So Bryan, I would love to toss this one over to you and have you kick us off.

Bryan Sweet: Well, I would agree depending on who you talk to, it definitely is either a blessing or a curse. I think my wife thinks it's a curse not being satisfied, but I would tell you, I really believe it's a blessing. So I think one of the interesting things is if you're never satisfied, it really forces you to always be on the lookout for how to make things faster, better, easier. Or if you've listened to the podcast before, you've heard us talk about this elf concept, which is easy, lucrative, and fun. And so being one who never wanted to be complacent, even at this stage in my career, I really want to change the way that I was focusing my attention because I'm also in addition to running the business, I've got these other business ventures. So it's just been one of those things where you really need to be clear on your vision and where you want to be.

 And there was an interesting comment that I heard a while ago and it's kind of one of my favorite sayings and it goes like this, hell on earth would be to meet the man you could have been. And so if you think about that, there's so many things that we all know in our business that we could be doing better, that we're not addressing, and when you're not getting better or moving things forward, what you're really doing is letting yourself, your team and literally your clients down. And if you do that long enough, actually your clients are susceptible to looking other places and maybe leave you at some point. So I think just getting in the habit of never accepting that status quo and getting comfortable with the lifestyle that we have is a really good thing.

Brittany A.: You know, I think it's interesting, Bryan, I know you joked about your wife maybe getting frustrated with that constant chase, but here's the thing that I want to point out here is that not being satisfied with the status quo, not being complacent in life in general, and not being complacent and not moving towards a vision, it's not about being in a negative state of mind. That's not what it is at all. It's just an understanding that if you're not growing, you're dying. And that applies to not only your business, but as you as an individual. Think about, as a total one-off spin, think about retirement and a lot of our audience members, you deal with people, you coach people in retirement or leading up to retirement. Now, what happens, statistically speaking, when people don't have something to strive for anymore, well, they start dying.

 Their body starts shutting down, their brain starts shutting down. All of these things start happening. So it's the same thing in business. And that's why this is a characteristic of a top advisor. They're never going to just be happy with, "Oh, all right, well I've made it. I can just kick my feet up on the desk now and I don't have to do anything." That's not the case.

 Now something else that I want to tie this back to, because we also talked about how this applies to you, how you treat your team. Now we have a couple of tools. One in particular from Strategic Coach where we, anytime we have a new experience, if it's an event we're putting on, if it's a prospect appointment, even when it's just going through our initial process of onboarding a client, we use a tool called the Experience Transformer.

 Again, this is from Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan, but what we're looking at is even if an experience went exceptionally well, we come from the perspective of saying, "How could it be even better? How could that experience knock their socks off last time in a whole new way? How could our team deliver on an even better basis?" So that's where this mentality has become essential in training and coaching up your team, getting them to level up their game as well and just encouraging that as an overall culture. And I think Bryan, you've done such a great job of that at Sweet Financial that it's just become second nature to say, "Okay, what could we do next time that's going to make that even better?" I mean, I think about even down to little gifting strategies with the packaging, the presentation, the how we present it to our clients, we are constantly looking at how we can tweak that.

 So it spills over into every single aspect of your business and I think that is important to understand that it's oftentimes the little tweaks that make a really, really big difference. Now because I can't help spinning this into the team aspect even further, another great way for our audience members to actually take this and implement it immediately is if you have offsite or just quarterly meetings or retreats with your team members, if you don't do it, I highly encourage you to, but when you have those quarterly meetings with your team members don't have it be all about the business. Your team members need to feel like they are more than just a pawn in your game. A pawn in your game to achieve some proverbial level of success. So what we've done at Sweet Financial is we have incorporated personal activities, things that help them understand, "Hey, here's my why."

 And they have ground. They have a safe space to be able to share things that motivate them. And it doesn't always tie back to the business, but it impacts the business. So just taking that little bit of time to show your team members, "Hey, you are important. You as a human being matter to me, and what matters to you matters to me as an employer," that is how you can create that overall culture, that overall climate in your office of never accepting the status quo.

 Because what happens when you start treating your team members like the amazing, beautiful individuals that they are, they're going to start replicating that experience onto your clients. They're going to start treating your clients in an even better manner and it's going to happen inherently. It's going to happen without effort, which makes it feel even more sincere on the client's end because they are feeling the same way that your team is feeling because they're being treated in the utmost way, like they're actually human beings that have their own personal motivation and why and you're hearing that. They're going to be able to turn around and replicate that.

 So if that's one small tweak that you could take from today is replicate this onto your team, create that environment for them to have a safe space to share who they are, what their hopes, what their dreams are for the future, it is going to impact your business tenfold. I see that happening so frequently. Anytime anybody actually implements this little tiny tweak in process, it makes a big impact.

 Draye, I want to bring you into this conversation because I've been going on about teams for a while now and I think that you have an interesting perspective in how marketing and how automations can actually help you achieve this never ending or never accepting of the status quo. So I'd love to have you jump in on this.

Draye Redfern: Thanks Brittany. So you know there's a quote by Daniel Gilbert that he says, "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think that they're finished." And it's this idea where individuals think that, "I'm good. I've grown to the max that I'm going to grow to," or you know, "I have achieved all that I can or probably would achieve." But if you were to look back 10 years ago, most likely you are a dramatically, a drastic different person than you were then. You've grown more, you've become more, you've done more, you've achieved more, all of these sorts of things. And that's incredibly important because we've talked about before, it's really important to become comfortable being uncomfortable. All of that uncomfortability is associated with growth. There's actually a really interesting story sort of around that, around being never satisfied with the status quo. 

 And one of that is, if you want to grow and you want to do more, becoming never satisfied with status quo is an important way to go about doing that. But the interesting thing is is many people find that it's an interesting idea, the status quo and how to improve that, but there's not always the commitment. There's a quote by a guy named John Assaraf, who's a top business coach and online marketer and all of these sorts of things, where he talks about the idea of this, this mentor originally proposed the idea of interest versus commitment. And while I'm interested in doing this and I'm interested in doing that, I'm interested in doing the other thing, but what are you really committed to? Because whatever you're really committed to is what you actually will follow through on because it's commitment.

 You've made that decision versus an interest. And for Bryan and Brittany and myself, we can all say that we are all committed to never being satisfied with the status quo. And that's masterminds, and that's coaching and that's all sorts of other groups and things that we do and are a part of. But I want to take that to a different slant on things because in my mind, I think that in order to consistently elevate and consistently push through a lot of the obstacles is that in order to be a maximalist, you need to be a minimalist. So in order to maximize your potential, in order to maximize your results, you need to be minimally specific or narrow your focus on what it is that you're doing.

 One of the things that I talk a lot about are singular actions. And so an example of a singular action is something that you could do once and it's like a dividend. It'll keep having rewards being reached for you time and time again in perpetuity into the future. And so that could be a singular action, could be a really great website. It could be a wonderful client onboarding process that once your team is trained up on it and once they know how to do it and facilitate it that that process can run without really having to have too much oversight or management. Really anything in your life or business that can continue to reap rewards.

 And so automation is a perfect example of that. Of never being satisfied with the status quo. So as an example, we have all sorts of automations that we build out for ourselves and our clients, but at the end of the day, those things are always ... It's a once, a singular action, it's a build out, but we always look at it through the lens of how could this be better and how could it be better because we're not satisfied with status quo? How could it be better in a sense of elevating the client experience? Or how could it be better deepening the relationship or creating more rapport or inducing more reciprocity and then really having that lens of what singular action can I do to consistently elevate everything in my life and business?

 And you don't need to do it all. Remember, you don't want to be a maximalist. You want to be a minimalist as far as what are the things you can really move the needle on, that your existing clients will just rave about you even more than they already do. Or your interesting prospects, it will convert them into clients significantly faster because that's the lens you want to have all of these things through and you want to make that commitment to doing that in your business and not just an interest.

 Because of it's just an interest, you're going to listen to this podcast, you're going to say, "Oh, that that Bryan guy and that Brittany gal and that Draye guy, they shared some really interesting stuff and it's interesting, but I'm not going to go implement it." We want this to be a commitment. We want to round out this 12 week series with the idea that you're going to commit to several of the things that we've talked about during this 12 week series to really help you inside of your business to level it up on all fronts so that you are running a practice that's efficient. Where your prospects can't wait to start working with you, where your clients love to talk about you and rave about you and they love their annual reviews and that your team supports you as the principal or as one of the advisors in your mission to grow the business.

 So all of that being said, each of us wholeheartedly believe, and I think this is a great way to end this series out, that you should never be satisfied with the status quo and you should always look for ways, whether it's a singular action or not, to increase your business, to help your team, to help your prospects and clients and really elevate everyone else around you. So Brittany, there's a lot there that I probably, we could probably take and unpack, but I'll turn it over to you.

Brittany A.: Yeah, Draye, actually, when you were talking, I thought of this analogy that I heard recently. You know they say that the most accidents, like very bad car accidents, happen within a mile of your home. So there's this whole thought process that a lot of times the reason for that, when people actually get injured, is because they're comfortable. They're close to their happy place, they're close to that safe zone so they don't wear their seatbelt. So that's actually what's happening there is that people don't wear their seatbelt because they're so close to home. I'm a mile away on two miles away.

 Well, I think that the same thing can be applied to business is if you get too comfortable, you get too comfortable and you're just nearing that final destination, that great point that you've been striving for, that that's actually when things can blow up. So that is the whole core point I think to this conversation is that when you are not going to accept the status quo, when you are always going to look to improve the way that you serve your clients, improve the way that you treat your team, improve the way that you are a business owner and all and how you act and make decisions, it's just constantly pushing you outside of that comfort zone and making you as an individual get even better. So I just thought of that analogy. I thought it was, it kind of hit home for me. So I thought I'd share.

Draye Redfern: It's a good one because one of my accidents that I was in was a about a mile and a half from my house. So I know very closely what you're referencing.

Brittany A.: See it's a real life example. So before I round us out and give a few takeaways from the day, Bryan, Draye, any final tidbits that you want to share?

Bryan Sweet: My only thing is not really to add anything, but just the exuberance for which you and Draye talked on this today just shows the magnitude of the commentary that you had and why not letting the status quo take over your life is so important. So kudos to both of you.

Brittany A.: Thank you. I think it's that energy that just keeps us going.

Draye Redfern: It is. It's one of those things that just loving the idea of growth and that the quote you had earlier, mentioned earlier, Bryan, about hell on earth being meeting the man that you could have been, I actually have that on a gallery wrap in the front of our office because that quote, it means so much. I think that the idea of never being satisfied with the status quo is definitely a really good takeaway for our listeners to garner from this episode for sure.

Bryan Sweet: Yeah, I read that every single morning, so I never do something opposite of that.

Brittany A.: I love it. I love it, love it. So, let's round out and give our audience members a few key takeaways. Number one, Bryan mentioned this earlier, get a vision, have a vision to aim for and just understand that it's not something that's finite. It is not something in the future that is like a brick wall that you're going to hit and be done. It is always moving. It's always adjusting just like you're continuing to grow as an individual.

 The second takeaway, again a small change, big impact, is implement the personal element with your teams. You will see an immediate immediate change in the culture in your office. If you have not done this, if you are already doing some aspect of it, just add more to it. Throw more time at that and allow them time to again be the humans that they were born and put on this beautiful earth to be.

 And then finally, as Draye was talking about, deciding what you are really committed to versus what you are just interested in. I think that this question alone and posing that in every decision that you make is going to actually help you say no a heck of a lot more to the things that are maybe not as powerful and impactful for your business. So to go hand in hand with that, once you've made that commitment of this is what I'm committed to versus this is what I'm just interested in, then take one singular action to move you towards that bigger picture. That rounds out this episode, the final in our 12 week series of the Top Characteristics of Top Advisors. We will catch you right back here next week on the Ultimate Advisor podcast.

 Hey Brittany here. We hope you got a lot of value out of today's episode. To access the key takeaways, the show notes and any deliverables, go to ultimateadvisorpodcast.com and while you're there, check out the Ultimate Advisor Mastermind if you want to learn ways to maximize your income, your impact and your legacy through an automated practice, a self managing team and a killer culture the clients can't stay away from. We look forward to seeing you back here in next week's episode.