THE ULTIMATE ADVISOR PODCAST

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EPISODE 12:

How To 10x Yourself

In this episode of The Ultimate Advisor Podcast, We focus on ways to 10x yourself and business. We discuss the benefits of the power of technology for automation and marketing to put you in multiple places at once, as well as strongly impact your business growth and clientele. So, push PLAY and join us as we delve into how to use Technology in your favor to 10x yourself and grow your business.

 

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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 Redford, who can help you systematize and automate your practice's marketing to effortlessly attract new clients. So, what do you say? Let's jump in to another amazing episode of The Ultimate Advisor Podcast.

 

Bryan: Welcome back to The Ultimate Advisor Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about you 10x. Most people would think, "Boy, if I could 2x my business, I would just be thrilled to death." But today, we're going to talk a little bit about how maybe 10xing yourself is actually easier than 2x.

 One of the things that you probably have figured out so far listening to the podcast, is I'm a big fan of coaching. I would just say over the last few years having been involved more and more in different parts of coaching, especially being involved in the genius network, it has really, really opened my eyes to new ideas on automation, marketing concepts, and how impactful they can be in your business to put you in multiple places at once through the use of technology. And the problem with scaling a business is you either have to multiply yourself many times, which means you either got to hire an awful lot of advisors or hire an awful lot of staff, which works really, really well. It's just more costly and takes a lot more time.

 Or you can use technology in a very great format to multiply what you do many, many fold. And it allows you to literally get thousands and thousands of messages out to the ideal clients, or the avatars that we had been talking about. And do it in a very simplified method. Now, it does take a little while to get it set up, but once it's running, and once it's set up in doing the things that you want it to do, it really just runs on its own, and allows you to do other things while this is getting your message out to your ideal prospects.

 So today's advisor is really at an advantage because of the fact that they don't need to go door to door. You know, years ago they had the cold calling and that's how you got business. You'd sit on the phone for hours at an end and try and get somebody that would talk to you and accept some product that you were going to sell. But that's virtually an impossible way of 10xing yourselves. And through technology you can do a lot of things just internally other than just getting your message out to your prospects. Things like doing mastermind classes on video. I just signed up for how to create a mastermind group with a couple of Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi. And it's all on video.

 So you can do it at your leisure. And there's things like this throughout the industry to help you grow your practice and obviously we have lots of those things in ultimate advisor coaching. I'm going to turn it over to Draye and then I'll jump back in some time later here. But go a little deeper on maybe that video idea.

 

Draye: Yeah, yeah, Brian, I love, love, love video. Not only because video is ranking as one of the best ways to rank to be on page one of Google these days, at least the fastest. Because Google owns YouTube, and if you have a really great video that could shed light on particular topic, subject, pain, experience, or whatever it is in your area it's very easy to then rank number one or page one on Google for video. So that's a first great little side benefit in and of itself.

 If we take it to the next step, video is also great way to see how individuals can almost get to know you, interact with you, and almost feel as though they know you before they ever actually meet you. So what do I mean by that? Well, first off, we recommend and use video for a variety of reasons. So with coaching clients and relationships, even if the other person doesn't necessarily have a camera, where on camera because it helps build that rapport that they have for us. It helps to strengthen that bond or that relationship because when you can see someone you can see them talk with your hands, you can see how into it they are, you can see if they're busy playing on their phone that whole time, or if they're not paying attention. It really goes a long way to build that rapport. That's just one of the ways.

 Other ways are the ways that you can use video to interact with clients or prospects. One of the ways that [Swee 00:00:00] Financial does this is each advisor has their own separate URL, their own separate domain name for that specific advisor. I don't know if I necessarily want to give each of those URLs out on the podcast here, but essentially what happens when you actually visit one of these URLs is that it's a nicely designed page with the advisor's information and contact information, but then there's two very distinct buttons that allow that individual to segment which type of person's visiting the page. Whether it's a prospect or whether it's an existing client.

 If it's a prospect you obviously don't know if you're going to be a good fit, so you don't want to have a 30 minute or hour long or 90 minute meeting, so you want to keep it short. See if you're a good fit. If you're a good fit, then you could obviously go to the next stage. So someone selects prospect in order to basically protect the advisor's time, there's a 15 minute meeting where they can essentially evaluate this person over the phone or one a video meeting to see if they would be a good fit. And then obviously protect their time. Now if they're an existing client they can click that button and it takes them to a separate page where existing clients get a video walking them through like, "Hey, it's me. Looking forward to our annual review or our upcoming meeting. We're going to talk about bum, bum, bum, bum." All the points they're going to cover in the meeting. This is what you need to do next.

 So by having this sort of segmentation and personalization it really alleviates a lot of the administrative burden that exists out there because you don't necessarily have to be following up all the time. You can shoot one link, one time. They can choose the day and time that works best for them. There's a video saying specifically what the agenda's going to be, how they can move forward, and the action steps that are required. And that eliminates a lot of that back and forth like, "Does Thursday at 3:00 PM work?" "No, Thursday at 3:00 doesn't work. How about Friday at 1:00 PM?" "Not 1:00 PM. How about that following Thursday, five Thursdays from now, or whatever it is, and we'll do it then?"

 It's super annoying and we've all been there probably 100 times. There's ways to create more of that automation with the personalization. I actually call it humanization automation because you're still keeping that high level human touch, not B to B, or B to C, H to H human to human, that high level human touch in an automated fashion that helps to create more of that deeper rapport and these sorts of things. So that's just one of the ways that you can use video. But there's all sorts of other things that you can use.

 In some of the previous episodes we've talked about how you can send emails out and share or disseminate content or resources. If you like being on camera, if it comes naturally to you, you could have a video that goes out every week and you could have a... just teaching a different financial concept of one of your niches. Walking them through the particular pain points or whatever it may be in that niche. So they can see you on camera. They can see how you dress. They can see how you talk. You can build that rapport with them even though you actually haven't met them, but it's almost like a unilateral rapport for the time being because they feel, in the comfort of their own home, more workplace or environment, they can get to know you on their terms. Not you shoving your content, or sitting them down to a forceful meeting. That way it really just makes it significantly easier to have those sort of interactions. Build that rapport. And video is just by gosh one of the best ways that you can do that.

 So that's one example. You can also 10x yourself by just creating more systems and processes for the way in which your calendar runs in and of itself. As an example, for me I have two separate call links. So if someone wants to book a spot on my calendar, if I know them or they're a referral, they get one particular link that allows them to go straight out of my calendar, pick the day and time that works best for them for an initial 30 minute meeting. Great. Awesome. Easy.

 If I don't know them, if they found me through one way or another they get a separate link, and that separate link essentially says, "Book your spot. In order to solidify your spot please pay a $250 meeting fee." There's a particular name for it. I don't remember what you call it. Usually most of my stuff is in a super awesome exploratory call with Draye or the best 30 minutes that you spent all day with Draye. We make it fin and entertaining, but for that particular other meeting is basically they have to pay $250 to get a spot on my calendar. If they actually show up then it basically means that money is refunded to them, no big deal. It's easy. It just gets them to show up. And by simply doing that we have never had a cancellation because then people have skin in the game.

 And we use video. We walk people through some of these things step by step, but that's a simple way of creating an automation that allows you to save time, protect your calendar, and allow you to focus on the things that really offer the biggest impact to your business without having to waste time on no shows. That's just another example.

 One other thing I'd like to throw in there, and this regards to 10xing, is that being in Genius Network and Bryan's been in strategic coach for a really long time also is that these days as an advisor you're not paid to crank levers, produce widgets, or lift something from place to place. That's not your role. That's not what you should be doing. You're paid to think. That's what you're doing. You're paid to think. You're paid to talk. You're paid to know and provide guidance to alleviate some of those burdens.

 And as an advisor thinking better and more effectively and more efficiently really does go a very, very, long way in order to really tee you up for success. We could probably dedicate a whole episode to it on different ways that you could do specifically this, but I think that as you go through this, as you crave more of these systems and processes, as you 10x yourself, you've really also got to find the ways that you can invest in ourself to also think more effectively, more clearly, more efficiently, and surround yourself with people who do the same but on a better or higher level because that will help you enforce you to level up some of your thinking and those sorts of things.

 Lots to sort of cover and touch on there. We talked about video. We talked about how you can automate some of these things. Why you're paid to think and not necessarily crank levers anymore. Brittany, anything that you want to touch on there as far as how someone could actually take this and spearhead some of these things towards implementation?

 

Brittany: Yeah, Draye, I think you said it perfectly. In the financial advisory world you're dead on. We are paid to think. We are paid to offer advice. We're paid to be educated in regards to people's finances. So what that means is that you should not necessarily be spending your time figuring out how to best shoot a video, upload it, get the systems built behind it, get the email champion all figured out. Oh, my goodness, that's a lot, right? So Draye just touched on quite a bit of things. In the last couple episodes we've talked a lot. We referenced different softwares you can use, different sequencing that you can set up. But here's the bottom line. There's only so many hours in the day. And where we see people struggle with this you 10 times concept is when they try to do it all. It's just not possible and it's not the best use of your time.

 So there's a couple different ways that you can go about implementing some of these great concepts that Draye has been talking on in regards to your marketing. One thing that you can do... If you're a smaller team, if you don't have a ton of manpower behind you right now there are different outsource websites that you can go to. Just throwing a couple out there: getleverage.com, it's a paid subscription where you can find people to implement some of these things for you. There's Fiverr. Fiverr is literally what it says. It's $5.00 per transaction. So there's a ton of people out there that can help with it. Under ultimate advisor coaching, under our platform, we have one particular way of working with us. We only open up a handful of slots each quarter because it is labor intensive. And again, you can only be in so many places at once.

 But we can actually do a lot of this hands on for you where we go in and we're your implementers. So again, there's so many different ways that you can accomplish the bigger picture of getting these automations set up. You just have to decide where you're at in your business, how much time can you dedicate to it? How much time do you want to dedicate to it? And then you can go from there.

 I think back to there's only one particular example I can think of with all the financial advisors that we've worked with. We had a gentleman who said he was... "Yeah, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to do this. I'm ready to implement." And he was short in implementation. Did not really want to dedicate any time to it. Didn't have an implementer on his team. So that's the only time that I've ever seen somebody struggle is that they don't have a key implementer, somebody to kind of just spearhead the project to kind of keep things rolling per se. That's where some of the frustrations come about. So you as a financial advisor, you need to be allocating your time to what's going to generate revenue. You need to be doing the things that keep your energy up, keep your excitement level up, keep you growing and scaling your business.

 And then you need to find the who to essentially implement all of these key things for you. So I think that's something that I can't stress enough. And again, we touch on this throughout our coaching. Throughout the couple modules that we have available we do talk about how the implementer and how getting them geared up to be able to take these concepts and run is just so essential to the success of your business.

 And Bryan, before we had Draye kind of round us out here, I actually think that you have so much insight around the who versus the how, or really finding who can help you get to the next level instead of trying to do it all yourself. So I think that if you could just jump back in and talk a little bit on that I think that would be really impactful just for the audience to hear.

 

Bryan: Yeah, I'd love to do that, Brittany. It's probably the best concept that Dan Sullivan at Strategic Coach has ever come up with. And it's really pretty simple, but I would tell you it's business altering to think about that and build your practice with that mentality. And it's simply instead of you figuring out how to do whatever it is you're trying to do it's finding who out there is already an expert and how can you work with them to have their expertise brought in to what you do. It's had some remarkable results on all sorts of projects that we've worked on. The nice thing about it is it doesn't take your time or the team's time to figure out what it is. And then you know right from the get go that what is going to be delivered I's going to be excellent because that's already their niche.

 As we all know, any time you do something the first time you're never going to be really, really good at it. If that's what you're going to deliver to clients you might disappoint them. So by working with somebody that's already an expert in that you'll appear to be an expert when in reality all you did is connect with somebody that's doing that for you. So literally anything that you're doing, if you're doing it in house, ask the question: Is there somebody outside of my firm that I can connect with that can do that much, much better?

 As Brittany eluded to there's these services like Get Leverage and Fiverr, and lots of other services. Who have you met that is really, really good at something you're not really good at and maybe you can create a relationship to build things out. Just that mindset and that thought process, it's just amazing if you just ask yourself that question: Before I dive into this who is somebody else that I should talk to before I figure out how am I going to implement this?

 I would just tell you that is remarkable what positives will come out of that. One other quick thing and I'll turn it over to Draye to wrap up. For those people that don't have a lot of people, or just want to make a big impact, one of the things that I would tell you would really, really help reinforce an initial meeting or with a prospect if you just sat down for the first time and you've gone through and you've talked about them and how you can be helpful to them, give some thought to doing a video, you could do this right on your iPhone, of yourself saying, "Hey, it was wonderful to meet with you. Here's a review of the things that I think we discussed. This is what I'm going to be doing for you in the near future."

 As you probably do already, most of us send that in the format of a letter and the summary of what we do. Just think how different you'd look if you did the same thing but delivered it in a video reinforcing everything with your face, your voice. Try it once. I think you'll be real surprised. Draye.

 

Draye: There's so many... Oh, I love that so much. In fact, Bryan, you know a lot of what we advocate on, and that's basically doing as much video, personalized video like that as possible. And I think that compliance can be a challenge, sometimes yes, especially if you're trying to create one off videos for each specific person then each video's got to be approved by compliance. And it can create some challenges there. But exactly what Bryan said could be done really quickly and easily in this manner right here. We'll probably leave you with this. It's the last little tactic for today.

 You could basically shoot a video once, it would be you in your office saying, "Hey, I really enjoyed our meeting. We covered A, B, and C," just like Bryan said, "and this is what you can expect from me next." Perfect. That video could then be... it could seem informal because it's on your iPhone or whatever it is. It could seem personal. And when you send that video, or that email with that video attached to it you could say, "Hi, Susan," or "Hi, Bill," or whoever the name is, "I really enjoyed chatting about boom, boom, boom." You put that in the email with whatever those talking points may be. And you could send the video that way. That way you don't necessarily have to have the video approved every single time by compliance. And you have more of that customization and personalization.

 And frankly, no advisors send video, so that in and of itself is a massive differentiation. It'll help to really convert more of those prospects to clients, establish a deeper relationship with those existing clients, and really just make you stand out in the marketplace. And that's just one of probably 10,000 other things we could cover in regards to 10xing yourself. 

 In order to leave you with some great stuff today, really encourage you to remember you are paid to think, not to crank levers, so surround yourself with those people who can help you level up. That's involving you finding the who not the how. That's doing more video that can help you more or less replicate yourself while creating amazing humanization automation facets to the business, and really helping you level up the entire advising business as a whole.

 That being said, thank you for listening in this week. We really are so glad and privileged and honored to have you with us. And look forward to seeing you next week on another episode of The Ultimate Advisor podcast. We'll see you there.

 

 Hey there, Draye Redford here, and before you go we just wanted to say thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Ultimate Advisor podcast. If you enjoyed this episode then please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or Spotify, and be sure to rate us five stars on iTunes because when you do you'll be entered into a monthly drawing for our ultimate advisor coaching program, which is a $2,000 value. And if you would like to access more of the show notes, additional resources, and our free premium content, then please visit ultimateadvisorpodcast.com. We look forward to seeing you in he next episode of The Ultimate Advisor podcast. We'll see you there.

ABOUT THE

PODCAST

The Ultimate Advisor Podcast was specifically created to help financial advisors unlock their ultimate potential by providing invaluable information and resources to improve your income, and the management, marketing and operations of your financial advising practice

The Ultimate Advisor podcast is a business podcast for financial advisors who are looking to grow their advising practices with greater ease and effectiveness. Ultimate Advisor was developed to help financial advisors master their marketing, sell their services with greater authority, generate repeat clients, and additional revenue in their business.

 

Each week, your hosts Draye Redfern, Bryan Sweet, and Brittany Anderson will share some of the closest guarded secrets from successful financial advising practices across the U.S.  

YOUR HOSTS:

DRAYE REDFERN

Draye is the founder of Redfern Media, a direct response marketing agency that helps professionals to improve their marketing, attract new clients, generate more referrals and consistently "WOW" their clients. 

BRYAN SWEET

Founder of Sweet Financial, CEO, Wealth Advisor, RJFS,  Creator of The Dream Architect™

Co-founder of Dare to Dream Enterprises

Creator of Elite Wealth Advisor Symposium

Author of 3 books – Dare to Dream: Design the Retirement You Can’t Wait to Wake Up To, Imagine. Act. Inspire. A Daily Journal and Give & Grow: Proven Strategies for Starting an Running and Effective Study Group

BRITTANY ANDERSON

Director of Operations at Sweet Financial, Office Manager, RJFS,  Co-founder of Dare to Dream Enterprises Author of two books – Imagine. Act. Inspire. A Daily Journal & Dare to Dream: Design the Retirement You Can’t Wait to Wake Up To

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