If you are like most advisors, you have aspirations and dreams to build your business. You may have thoughts of creating business plans to assist you in reaching your goals. However, ask yourself this question: “How many times have I created a business plan only to file it away or lose my motivation to follow it through?”
Oftentimes, advisors start out their business plans with the best of intentions, only to get sidetracked by the day-to-day operations which leave those plans unattended and ultimately unfulfilled. If this has happened to you, rest assured that you are not alone. So what is the solution?
No matter what time of the year, no matter what stage of your planning, a business plan is not enough, you need a business blueprint!
Think of it this way, if you were to build a house, would you only have a general floor plan focusing only on the end result or would you have an architect draw up full blueprints?
The obvious answer is that you would have blueprints created because of the amount of detail designed into them. Similarly, building your business blueprint is about designing your business with the end result in mind by including the details of “how” you will accomplish your desired outcome(s) and assigning time horizons to the sub-tasks. The difference between a business blueprint and a standard business plan is all about the details.
Where most business plans fail is in describing “how” to sustain the daily activities needed to accomplish your desired goals. This is why most advisors lose their business plan momentum.
Use the following Business Blueprint Strategies to create your ultimate business.
Business Blueprint Strategy 1: Sharpen Your Ultimate Business Vision
Goals are an important part of any great plan but think back to the blueprint analogy of building your dream house. You would need to have a clear vision of what the house looks like in order to have the architect draw up the blueprints.
Sharpening your ultimate business vision is very similar. It is about knowing exactly what you want your business to look like at specific time horizons, say twelve months, in the future. In addition, you must know why you want this business vision to be fulfilled so that you can have some emotional attachment to the destination.
Business Blueprint Strategy 2: Compartmentalize Your Ultimate Business Vision
Once you know what your ultimate business vision looks like, it is time to compartmentalize it so that you can create quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly goals. By doing so, you in fact make the journey much more obtainable and the destination a by-product of your actions.
Business Blueprint Strategy 3: Anchor Your Ultimate Business Actions
The secret to sustaining your daily activities is anchoring which means creating a strong enough reason for you to accomplish goals (the carrot) and a strong enough reason why not to avoid accomplishing them (the stick).
It is interesting to note, that having an accountability partner will ensure that you actually reward or punish yourself. Otherwise, you may be tempted to not do so which results in less activity and a higher probability of not creating your ultimate business vision.
Business Blueprint Strategy 4: Systematize Your Business Actions
Once you have your business vision, daily actions, and anchors in place it is time to simplify your process by systematizing it.
One simple example would be to identify one of your primary prospecting methods, one that is aligned with your business vision, which might be doing seminars. Here is how it might sound:
“My ultimate business vision is to accumulate $12 million in new assets from new clients in the next twelve months. I will do so by having one seminar a month and acquiring $1 million in new assets from it.”
Now that you have determined how many seminars you wish to have in the upcoming year, you must determine the seminar dates. Next, determine how many steps there are to accomplish putting on a seminar.
Then, determine the seminar dates and where they will be. Next, determine how many steps there are to accomplish putting on a seminar. Let’s say it takes six weeks from start to finish. What are the weekly steps and when, (on what date) do you need to accomplish each step in order to have your seminar? Finally, why is it so important to do each step? Now that we have this information it is time to put our plan into action!
Business Blueprint Strategy 5: Automate Your Business Actions
Put each step into your contact management system as a time-sensitive pop-up to-do. This will ensure that you systematically do each step because you have automated the process! Once you get the pop-up reminder, drop what you are doing and focus on the next step in your seminar prospecting process.
Business Blueprint Strategy 6: Evaluate Your Business Blueprint
Every great architect knows that you have to evaluate the progress of the plan in order to ensure the quality of the construction. Your business is no different. You are the architect of your own business vision and as such you must determine if your business actions are effective.
The way to evaluate your business blueprint is to determine if your business actions are getting you the results for you to accomplish your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. If they are not, then it is time to…adjust your business blueprint.
Business Blueprint Strategy 7: Adjust Your Business Blueprint
One of the best things that you can do for your business is to take time to work “ON” your business while you are busy working “IN” your business. Adjusting your business blueprint is a time to do just that; a time for evaluation, reflection, direction, and execution.
Where to Go From Here
Although we can’t predict the future, one thing is certain; if past business plans have not been effective, using the same process will probably get you the same ineffective results. Instead, build your business blueprint and watch your business goals get accomplished!
You can listen to the podcast episode dedicated to this topic on the Advisor Solutions website.
