Participate in Elixir Consulting’s Adviser Pricing Models Research.

Are you keen to understand the different types of pricing models in the market, and specifically, how much other advisers are charging for the similar types of clients that you service?

What about what other advisers do in relation to commissions and fees when advising on risk insurance – with or without other areas of advice?

How about the fees charged for ongoing services? And what do other advisers actually provide for those fees?

You can receive all the answers to these questions, by participating in Elixir Consulting’s Adviser Pricing Models Research. It’s been two years since they last collected this data, so the time has come again to collect the numbers and insights.

Elixir Consulting has updated their research questions to suit the current pricing environment, and they are offering participants the chance to enter the draw for a $2,000 travel voucher.

As always, they will protect the identity of all participants and will only release the aggregated data. The survey will take 10 to 15 minutes to complete, and all valid participants (ie advisers only – and those who provide legitimate answers) will also receive the insights report free of charge.

Click here to complete the survey.

The survey closes Thursday 14th August.

The post What do other advisers charge? appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Avoiding burn-out

It’s about that time of year that some business owners begin to notice “burn-out” creeping back in.

You know the feeling. That washed out sense there is too much on and you’re being pulled from pillar to post, unable to focus your energy on one thing for more than a short period.

Running an advice business is challenging. From the problem solving aspects, analysis, multi-tasking, managing people and the host of other cognitive plates to keep spinning, there’s lots to think about.

If you’re growing, that challenge is amplified, as things continually change along the way.

Where work requires brain power, mental tiredness follows. And where there is mental tiredness, physical weariness is never far behind, sometimes followed by ill health.

The reality is that you as a business owner add most value to your business when you are top of your game. So how can you maximise that time?

By doing nothing.

A gentleman who knew a thing or two about fast growth businesses once shared with me a routine of his. Each quarter, without fail, he would book three days in a small, sparse cabin in the Blue Mountains. A log fire, a bed, lots of walking tracks and, importantly, no Internet.

Those three days, he told me, were the most productive of each quarter. They were an uninterrupted opportunity to cut out background noise, get into the flow and just THINK.

It gave him time to do the really important planning, like to:

• Consider whether the business was heading in the right incremental direction.
• Think about whether he had the right staff doing the right things.
• Review how things might be done better, both in himself and the business.
• Identify which activities were likely to make the biggest positive differences.
• Decide the things to start doing and the things to stop doing.

Admittedly, he was both single and managing a business large enough that he could take time away from everything. For others with smaller business, families and other time-intensive demands, it can be hard to make the commitment to take time off.

But that’s what it has to be, a commitment. Something you book in the diary in advance, as concrete as an appointment with your best client, the date the BAS needs to be in or the review date for an important insurance policy. A non-negotiable part of what makes you a more successful business owner.

An old Zen adage states, “You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day — unless you’re too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.” Whilst meditation might not be everyone’s cup of tea, the core of the message is that it’s harder to achieve peak performance – business or otherwise – without taking time to step away from the noise and into a clearer state of mind.

If that’s the case, with the burn beginning to show already, maybe now is the time to think about your next time-out, and recognising that your own state of mind is as much a driver of business success as any other key performance indicator.

Stewart Bell is a Business Coach with Elixir Consulting

The post Can you feel the burn? appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Setting and achieving your goals.

Goal setting. You’ve heard all the one liners….‘If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else’; ‘Fail to plan and you plan to fail’; ‘A goal is a dream with a deadline’…

In my post “The problem with goal setting”, I reveal the single biggest contributor to achieving your goals, and why writing them down just isn’t enough.

Here, I would like to share some more hints and tips about how to ensure your goals aren’t just some wishy-washy motherhood statements that end up being more frustrating than motivating. There are four key actions you can take to solidify your goals and make the likelihood of reaching them much greater.

1. Define them as clearly as possible – treat both your personal and professional goals like KPIs in a job description. Make them measurable and specific. “Reach and maintain a goal weight of 64.5kg by March 30” is much harder to avoid than “Lose some weight.”
2. Don’t just define the end result, ensure you also specify the activities you will complete to reach that destination.  Keeping your focus on the things you can control will empower you to do what needs to be done. In the previous example, focusing on ‘exercising four times a week and sticking to eating plan’ will result in a better outcome that purely looking at the scales every day.
3. Share your goals with someone other than yourself*. Articulating your goals to yourself is the first step; sharing them with either a friend or your team mates will cement them in your mind as commitments that you are really going to strive for. Naturally, if your goals require the assistance of team members, you’ll want to keep them in the loop about their participation!
4. Make sure your goals are achievable. I’m all for stretch targets – staying in your comfort zone is booooring. But if you can’t see specifically how you will achieve your goals, they are unlikely to be fulfilled. There’s no point aiming for a goal weight of 64.5kg if that puts your BMI in the ‘underweight’ category (or the ‘for goodness sake, eat a hamburger!’ category). Similarly, if your goal is to achieve CFP® status within a year and that requires completing 5 units of study while working full-time, you might want to revise your time frame.

It is also important not to set too many goals. If you try to do too many things, your focus gets diluted, which may result in only making a small amount of progress on a lot of things. A better result is absolutely nailing your top two or three, before you focus on the next set.

*Sharing your goals is important, but don’t worry if not everyone supports you. It can be helpful to have some healthy honesty from someone with your interests at heart, especially if that means you remove your rose-coloured glasses and get a fresh take on your goals with some realism thrown in. Their comments will probably come from a place of love, but be aware that not everyone might share your energy.   It is fine to re-evaluate based on other people’s thoughts, but don’t keep second-guessing yourself, and don’t let their concern pull you down. Rather, use it as a motivator to push yourself forward.

When setting a goal, ask yourself –

• ‘Do I really want it?’
• ‘Can I see what I need to do to achieve it?’

If the answer to both of these is ‘Yes!’ then go for it and don’t let self-doubt hold you back.

If in the end you don’t achieve a goal, don’t get disheartened or beat yourself up. There is a big difference between making excuses and setting dynamic goals that are updated. Readjust your reality, perhaps even change your goal completely if need be, and then celebrate what you learned and achieved along the way.

And when you do reach your goals, celebrate your achievement and enjoy the sense of satisfaction, then think again, about where to next, and set your new goal(s). Using momentum is one part of this point, as is the depleting sense of anti-climax when you have been so focused on a particular outcome, then when it’s achieved you find yourself with a reduced sense of purpose.

Finally, don’t put so much pressure on yourself that your life becomes single-dimensional and you forget to enjoy your journey on the way to achieving your chosen destination. While ‘life balance’ is a term that varies in definition from person to person, ensure that you still participate in the things that are important to you, and spend time with the people you hold dear, as they form part of your journey. To end this post as we began it (with a quote), after all: ‘life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.’

By Sue Viskovic

The post 4 things I wish I was told about goal setting appeared first on AdviserVoice.

So here are our top 5 tips for how to get control over your workload and start enjoying better productivity and efficiency in your business.

1. “Caught up in circles, confusion is nothing new” – Time After Time – Cyndi Lauper.

Ever thought of how much time is wasted getting your “head back into” a piece of work that you half completed or scoped at a previous time? You can save a tremendous amount of time by completing a job in a single sitting. And if this isn’t possible, make sure you write (or record) thorough notes. By the time you get back to the project you may have had your focus on 20 different clients/jobs, and the quicker you can recall the project in detail, the faster you can get productive on it.

2. “Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind” – Memories – Elvis Presley.

The first concept is further proven with file notes after a client meeting or call. This is so incredibly important it gets its own point here. Make a habit of writing or dictating your file notes as soon as your client leaves, while your discussion is still fresh in your mind. The best way to ensure this happens is to block out sufficient time after your appointments for your notes. It doesn’t matter how you choose to record your file notes, whether you type them into an iPad app like Evernote, or dictate them, or ‘scribble and scan’. The three keys to a good file note are:

• Make sure your note is thorough and detailed – the more detail the better, and ensure you include notes on what you said, as well as what the client said;
• Write your note while the meeting/call is still fresh in your mind; and
• Stipulate action items that have come from the discussion so that you know your suggestions and commitments will be implemented.

3. “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em” – The Gambler – Kenny Rogers.

Be deliberate about the time you will spend working on projects that will require your focus. Block out time in your diary and keep the appointment with that project. There is one exception here – if your project is a creative one and you find you just can’t get into “the zone” at the time you have scheduled, you will be better placed to reschedule for another time rather than bashing your head against the keyboard trying to force it to happen.

4. “Always something there to remind me” – Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

Turn off email alerts in Outlook. These can provide a huge distraction that causes your mind to lose focus, and it is not a good look if you are showing a client something on your screen. Dedicate times throughout the day to review your emails and you will stop being controlled by them and start getting productivity back on your own terms. This will help you achieve points 1, 2 and 3 above.

5. “Why don’t you come to your senses” – Desperado – The Eagles.

Allow people to do their job. Too often we see businesses with staff who are employed to complete certain roles, and yet the business owner has decided it is a better use of their own time to do it themselves, rather than invest the time to train the staff member properly (or in some instances, replace them with someone who can). It is a great theory to position yourself to do what you do best and to surround yourself with good people to do everything else, but if you get in the way of them doing that and don’t have good structures that allow your team to communicate, you will not get the optimum performance from your staff, and the whole will not be greater than the sum of the parts in your business.

If you adhere to these 5 simple tips, you will quickly see both your own efficiency, and that of your entire business, increase dramatically, and you will have some great songs to listen to as well!

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A little secret about business plans…

Okay, I’ll share my dirty little secret about business plans.

After running our first webinar yesterday where I helped a group of advice business owners to write their business plan, I’m compelled to share some discoveries with you, and let you in on a little secret.

Let’s start with the discoveries.

I asked all the participants if they had a business plan in the previous two years, and two thirds of the group had not. Of those who had written a business plan previously, not a single one of them had achieved their targeted outcomes.

There were a number of consistent issues that people shared across the group:

• Many were challenged with finding enough quality referrals
• Some found they were in need of systematising their processes
• Still others struggled to find the passion, focus and clarity to achieve significant change – they wanted to, but found the daily reality of working in the business was quite different to their aspirational desires.

In a nutshell – most struggled with time and money – they had not enough of either.

And you know what’s interesting about that? Almost every client that engages us for coaching is struggling with either not enough cashflow or not enough time – usually both…and by bringing a new perspective to the business, we can always help them to find more of both – by doing a few things differently. Many make a significant commitment – some might say take a risk – to find the funds to pay our fees, as it can be counter-intuitive to pay additional expenses when cashflow is tight. They end up thankful that they did – it takes different behaviours to achieve different results!

So how do you know if you’ve got a great business plan? I’ve come up with an acronym that summarises a good plan – a good business plan gives you the SMARTS. It will be/have:

• Single page (it doesn’t have to be war and peace!)
• Multi-dimensional, MEASURABLE outcomes (using both qualitative and quantitative data)
• Activities – that are clear and measurable (targets without the activities that will achieve them are just wishes)
• Revised regularly – and adjusted throughout the year if your planned activities aren’t working
• Tracked as a team (your whole team knows what you’re aiming for and can see your regular progress towards the planned outcomes)
• Seriously celebrated. (I just couldn’t bring myself to mis-spell celebrated to fit the acronym!)

And now I’ll share my secret with you.

You see, I took a leap of faith. I know we can work with a business face-to-face to create a brilliantly effective business plan – but could I do it in a group webinar situation?

I wanted to run a webinar where I could actually help people write their plan – not just talk about it.

I’ve done it in face-to-face workshops with advisers, and received great feedback, but could I do it in an environment where I couldn’t see people’s faces, or watch where they were up to at any stage?

Then we questioned whether people would pay to attend a webinar to do this? In today’s ‘content marketing’ age, when any self-professed expert will give away their knowledge to attract potential clients, there is a fine line between a free webinar where people share enough knowledge to whet your appetite and prove they know what they’re talking about; and a paid one where they share their intellectual property that they would otherwise charge for if they consulted to you in person.

(On that point – we are now doing both. We run free webinars where we will provide thought leadership, inspiration and general knowledge from both Elixir consultants and other industry providers and advisers that we respect…and where we have a topic that falls squarely within our absolute field of expertise – a session that will enable attendees to walk away and implement things, rather than increase their knowledge, we think it’s only fair to be paid for those. The next question is how much to charge? If you get a full house they can be profitable but there are no guarantees – so we threw analytical pricing to the wind and winded up with $100 as a nice round number that is comparable to other educational webinars.

Turns out, the answers to all these questions were a resounding Yes – it worked! I was thrilled when the first round of feedback came in and I received a 100% score for presenter quality. Of course I counted my chickens a bit too early – a few more people completed the feedback survey later in the afternoon and that dropped a little…we ended up with an average of 94% for quality of presenter and 86% for ‘Did you get value from this webinar?’ Not bad, considering that for the first time EVER our technology failed us for about 4 minutes!  (except, ironically, the sound – so whilst I thought the whole system was down and rushed out of the boardroom to reconnect at my desktop, attendees could hear my dialogue with Nick my wingman – thankfully everyone took that in good humour!)

Undoubtedly, we will provide greater value to a client if we work with them one-on-one, but I’ve now proven that we can indeed help people in a webinar environment to get some focus and a good business plan.

It all proves my point that getting a great business plan needn’t be complex. It’s not some secretive skill that you only learn in Consultant-school along with words like ‘SWOT analysis’, ‘elevator test’ and ‘strawman’.  It can be a simple process that boils down to “what do you want to achieve and what will you do to achieve it”? Of course a great coach will bring you ideas that you may not have considered, or fresh perspective when you’re just too close to see things clearly, but not having a coach shouldn’t hold you back from having an effective Business Plan!   It’s well-worth taking the time to step away from the business and create your plan for what you want to achieve this year. If you have a plan and it’s ineffective – revisit it. We asked all the attendees what was the best idea/answer or distinction they took from the webinar, and these are my favourite answers:

“Just get on with updating our old business plan that hasn’t been effective to date.” 

“Spend more time organising myself, and perhaps outsource more.”

“Break down the annual strategic directions into a 90 day plan.”

“Break down your big ideas into small bites and focus on what you actually need to do to achieve them.” (or in another’s words, “don’t focus only on the big picture – set stretch targets then focus on the individual activities that will generate the results.”)

“Keep it to one page and share it with the team!”

So over to you – have you got an effective business plan that articulates what you want to achieve and HOW you will achieve it? If not, take the time to create one – unless, of course, you’re happy with your current reality?

If you’d like to join our webinar on the 10th of July,  there are still some spaces available.

If you need any convincing here are my 2 favourite feedback quotes:

“At $100 this was good value and priced to tempt our inertia.”

“Great use of technology to get an important process happening. Your knowledge of the industry makes you believable(!) and the execution and delivery is top shelf. Well done.”

—–

By Sue Viskovic, Managing Director, Elixir Consulting 

The post A dirty little secret… appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Sue Viskovic from Elixir Consulting

Elixir Consulting are offering two webinars to assist advice businesses in better understanding how to structure business plans and share some ideas that will set advisers up to achieve great results next financial year. As an inexpensive alternative to business coaching, the webinars are running on 2 July and 10 July.

Click here for registrations and further information.

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