Financial Advisory: A Case Study
Welcome to our very first case study of the year! As we mentioned in January, we will be sharing stories each month about the great businesses we have an opportunity to work with, the challenges they’ve experienced, and the way we were able to help them.
Our goal with these stories is not so much to pat ourselves on our collective back (pat pat), but to give you some tangible, useful actions that you can take into your own business. Whether you are working in the same industry or profession, you’ll find familiarity in the experiences of these business owners. You may also find nuggets that you’ll want to take into your own personal gold mine, to polish up and use for yourself.
It’s worth noting that - even if a case seems like someone you know - we’ve mucked about pretty severely to create anonymity, while providing you with real-life, actionable, executable solutions we have actually put in place to build success. There’s never just one business in our stories, since we work with a lot of businesses in each industry we’re writing about, and never just one business owner. Without further ado, let us introduce you to The Financial Advisor (if you are thinking of someone specific who might be kind of close to Admin Slayer, no, it’s not that one, we’re smarter than that).
Introducing…. Samantha
Samantha has been working as a financial advisor in a rural community for several decades. Throughout most of her career, she worked inside a major financial institution, but a few years ago, she decided to strike out on her own. She loved the freedom that came with this new way of working, but soon realized she was missing something pretty key: support.
Her previous employer had systems, staff, and all kinds of processes in place. Samantha had always just focused on what she was great at: providing financial advice. Now that she’s running her own show, she gets to do that in the way she thinks is right - but she feels like she’s building from the ground up, and she’s overwhelmed.
The Challenge
Samantha was spending a lot of time researching CRM systems, phone systems, trying to find a place to work and meet clients, locating errors and omissions insurance, moving her licenses to an independent channel, updating her address with every single regulator, and so much more - all the while, trying to keep her financial head above water.
Eventually, she realized that the most important place she could spend her time, for the good of her business, her clients, and herself, was actually with her clients. But how could she get away?
Samantha decided to fire herself, and hire a brand new “boss”.
The Questions...
Samantha liked the flexibility of a virtual assistant and loved the idea of a team with complementary skill sets. Not only would she not have to be in charge of training or oversight, she wouldn’t have to worry about when people were off sick or on holiday. She could just focus on doing what she does best.
But wait…
What if I need to send a letter?
Will my clients be able to tell that my assistant isn’t sitting right beside me?
How will my assistant know what I need? How will we communicate? What if we’re not in the same time zone?
...and so much more. Instead of tackling one question at a time, we decided to just take a look at where the stress points were and see what Samantha genuinely needed the most help with, and then determine how to tackle it.
Core Stress Points
Calendaring (Yup, a verb, just go with it)
Samantha hadn’t identified this as her biggest problem, but from all the work we do with high-touch, client-centric businesses, we started by asking our questions here. Samantha’s focus is on maximizing her time, so that she’s spending it in the best possible way.
She’s found that sometimes she will have a lot of meetings focused on business development in one period of time, which is followed by a lot of meetings that produce direct income to her business. It seems to see-saw, because one feeds the other, but she’s always feeling like she’s chasing, catching up and working backwards.
Samantha’s team took her through a couple of exercises that we like to call Perfect Day and Perfect Week. They’re just what they sound like - a way for Samantha to describe to her team exactly what the ideal days and weeks look like, broken down into blocks of time. We asked Samantha to think about this from a “what do I like to do best and when do I like to do it” perspective, but also from the perspective of equalizing the different types of meetings she has so she can create balance in her income, as well as in her schedule.
We all know that no week or day works out perfectly; however, knowing what the ideal looks like helps everyone working on Samantha’s team (including Samantha) really know what direction she wants to go.
Samantha gave thought to the type of work she does every week, month, quarter, and throughout the year; from preparing for meetings, to taking and making calls, attending different types of meetings, networking events, speaking events, volunteer work, and much more. Of course, she’s travelling and eating as well, so those times must be considered.
At first, Samantha was a little daunted by how little time she actually had when she looked at it, but she eventually found that it gave her more clarity about what she could and could not say “yes” to - and actually made it someone else’s problem to respond all together.
Scheduling Appointments
We asked Samantha how much time she spent coordinating her own appointments, with back-and-forth emails, phone calls, and managing last minute rescheduling. At first, she didn’t think it was all that much, and she was confident that her contacts really wanted to be communicating with her, personally, to coordinate.
She paid attention for about a week though, and realized that she was in fact losing hours to coordinating appointments - and she was often finding herself driving long distances, without time to park, eat, or use the bathroom.
When our team started coordinating this on her behalf, Samantha found that it not only made her entire life easier, but that her contacts thought she was more professional - not less personable - when she had her team booking on her behalf.
“It was as though I suddenly had three to four more hours in my week - and just a lot less to worry about in general.”
Since Samantha’s team had gone through the Perfect Day and Perfect Week exercises already, they could manage Samantha’s schedule well, knowing that business building meetings would all occur on a particular day, and direct meetings with clients would work on other days - keeping her business on track while also keeping Samantha focused on what she does best.
On top of that, frustrations around people not showing up for calls or meetings started to disappear. Samantha’s team sends out courtesy emails the day before (and in some cases, several days before) a meeting - confirming time, location, parking and any other items, such as paperwork, that are key for this meeting.
As the team began to learn Samantha’s processes, they started booking Samantha’s calendar far in advance. They were not only adding in all of her meetings, but also including blocks of time required for Samantha to complete the preparations and proposals she needs to create ahead of these meetings. By booking actual work time into her calendar, Samantha had clarity about what she needed to do and when. She knew the team was able to advise clients, colleagues, and business contacts what information Samantha needed to do her work, and to have it available to her right when she was ready to work on it.
To make Samantha’s life even easier, her team organizes everything she needs for every block in her calendar. If she is working on a file ahead of a meeting, she has links to all of the information, emails, and communications she will need to reference during that process. Templated documents will have already been created and placed in her digital file server, ready for her to simply show up, and start working.
All of her meetings also come stocked with everything she needs to show up and go, whether it’s a link to driving directions, the verified phone number, conference line, or video chat link, and of course, reports and other pertinent information. On top of that, digital meeting notes are pre-populated and ready to go, organized based on how she runs her meetings, with a task list that she can fill out with directions to her team about what should be happening next. At the end of the meeting, she simply clarifies the tasks… and closes the file. Her virtual administrative team reviews the tasks, sends updates and necessary paperwork to the client as requested, and schedules follow ups and tasks in Samantha’s CRM system.
Speaking of a CRM System...
Samantha had been keeping all of her emails in various folders in her inbox, and all of her follow ups in her calendar. There was some tracking attempted in an excel spreadsheet, but she never had time to update it. She was terrified that service - the most important aspect of her business - was starting to fail. Samantha had worked with CRM (client relationship management) programs before, and always felt that they were far too time intensive, requiring so much management and data entry to get it right.
In addition to the work we’d already done together creating Samantha’s perfect day and perfect week, the Admin Slayer team had also mapped out Samantha’s ideal service process, with all the steps that were required to get her clients happily into and out of meetings, with all their money in the right places, and all the proper forms filed.
With all of this information at our fingertips, knowing how Samantha liked to work, what her work flow looked like, and her frustrations with systems she’d used in the past, we researched and located a CRM system that would allow for custom-created automated tasks, great reporting so Samantha always knew what was going on with each and every client, and all of her clients in aggregate - and the system uploaded all emails to and from clients, without the need for heavy data entry.
This system was key for Samantha to feel she could truly delegate and feel confident. It’s hard to really trust that someone is doing the work you want unless you can see it. In a virtual environment, it’s much harder to feel confident - since you really can’t see the person doing the work! The system we set up for her allowed her to view every single action that the team was completing on her behalf, right on her dashboard. If she woke up worried that an email or a letter didn’t go out, or that a follow up or reminder wasn’t scheduled, she could simply go into the contact and see - in her own time, at her leisure - exactly what had happened last, and what was planned to happen next.
But Wait… There’s More…
Once the core systems were up and running, Samantha started to delegate even more.
Professional proofreading and formatting of letters, client presentations, and other materials was instituted, allowing Samantha to write in the free-form style that suits how she thinks, without worrying about whether a typo or a misplaced bullet point might appear in the end product.
A content creation system was implemented, allowing Samantha to reach out to her network through newsletters, blogs, and external publications without having to learn all the nitty-gritty details. With that, social media management came in, with our team coordinating social posts, curating interesting articles that Samantha’s audience wants to read, managing inquiries that come through all the different platforms she’s on, and even creating cool graphics for events she is hosting or important dates she wants to note.
Bookkeeping systems were set up with company expenses, taxes, and year-end activities running on schedule - without Samantha having to learn the details, but providing monthly reporting so she always knows where she stands in relation to her goals and plans for the year. Unique reporting was set up inside her systems to help her with cash flow projections, which allows her to determine exactly when she wants to hit the gas or the brakes in her business.
Finally, a solid file management system was created. Samantha knows exactly where to find everything she needs, as it follows a hard-coded system that her team manages in its entirety. Samantha doesn’t file any documents herself, but instead scans or forwards any documents that require filing directly to her team for management.
A Winning Formula
With systems like these, Samantha had a powerful foundation from which to grow. She began to hire and today has a team of advisors who work within her system, increasing overall revenue and allowing her and her team to work in their best place: helping clients.