Just Getting Started Guide (1 of 5)

By Timothy Iseler, CFP®

You just launched your brand new financial advisory business and are excited to hit the ground running! There’s just one problem: even though you have the required knowledge and accreditation, no one explained exactly how you’re supposed to turn that expertise into the nuts and bolts of delivering a consistent, reliable experience to your clients.

This guide will help you as you get started, sharing how to create your own process playbook and making Elements a central hub of that process making it easier & faster to grow your business.

What we will cover

• New advisory owners have seemingly endless decisions to make but limited time & attention.
• Building a consistent, repeatable process makes it easier for you to deliver value to your clients, easier to set expectations for clients & prospects, and easier to document your work for compliance purposes.
• Elements makes it easy to build out your process playbook through creation of personalized deliverables, relevant conversation prompts, and focusing your attention on the most important & impactful factors of financial health.
• This guide will show you  step by step instructions for creating your own process playbook.
• Your process playbook can also be used to build out your marketing calendar and demonstrate the value you provide to prospects.

The Problem

As a new business owner, you have a million decisions to make. From your website to your tech stack to marketing funnels to portfolio choices, the buck stops at your desk. 

While certain tasks can be outsourced (some examples: a TAMP for investments; a marketing expert to run your social media; and bookkeeping & tax filing), you can’t outsource the most important thing: your process for actually serving and communicating with clients. That has to come 100% from you based on your ideal client base, your personal preferences as an advisor, and what you want your business to be in the long term.

Every client is different, with unique strengths and challenges. But that doesn’t mean your approach to serving clients needs to change every time. You might be able to manage an ad hoc system for the first 5 or 10 clients, but once your business starts to take off it becomes really, really difficult to juggle all of your responsibilities – and that slows down your business growth.

What you need is a reliable, repeatable process that allows you to deliver consistent value to clients (and communicate that value to prospects) while also making the best use of your limited time & energy. The good news is that, as a new business owner, you get to define that process however you want.

Fortunately, Elements is perfectly suited for that task. 

The Solution

A defined, repeatable, and dynamic process will help you manage your growing business. Whether you call it a service calendar, a workflow, or even just a checklist, a documented process is the key to get the most out of your limited time. It’s ok if it evolves over time (pro tip: your process will absolutely change over time); you can update it as you learn and grow, refining your process as you build experience. 

Having a consistent process lets you:

• Stay on top of your responsibilities as advisor
• Effectively set expectations for prospects & clients
• Plan out client communications, including meetings
• Deliver timely, personalized deliverables for each client
• Give regulators a clear outline of the value you provide to clients
• Understand your true revenue per hour per engagement
• Map out a marketing calendar based on the value you deliver

And once you have an articulated, repeatable process – even if you continue to refine it over time – you spend less time thinking about what to do and more time doing.

Here’s an example: 

Let’s say you’re meeting with a new financial planning client to discuss goals. Together you identify the three most important – retiring in 20 years, paying for the kids to go to college, and eliminating debt before retirement. Those topics are all within the scope of financial planning, but where do you start? And how do you know when you’re done? What about all the other things that impact your client’s goals – things like insurance, estate planning, taxes, and investment allocation? Where do those fit in?

Having a defined process answers all of those questions and gives you a roadmap for how to deliver (or over deliver) value to your clients. A little time spent defining a process now saves you a ton of time with each new client.

But what about all the other stuff that you could be doing with your limited time – especially the stuff that seems more important, like bringing in new prospects and growing revenue? Can’t you just figure out the process part later once your business is up and running?

While lining up new prospects and growing revenue are important, your business won’t last long if your new clients are unsatisfied with the value they receive. One consistency across financial advice firms is that the best, most reliable source of growth is first-person referrals from existing clients and other people in your network like centers of influence (COIs). Consistently delivering value to clients is one of the best growth strategies around.

And remember: having a defined process can help you quickly get up to speed, but that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. You can continue to revise & refine your process as you notice what works (or doesn’t) with each new client.

Tip: want an easy way to build out your process playbook on the fly? Use your actual communication with and work for clients as templates in your process document. If you find yourself sending the same email, doing the same task, or having the same conversation with more than two clients, it belongs in your process.