Is your practice growing or shrinking? Are you tracking the metrics which keep you informed of its growth or decline? Whether you are a partner in an RIA or an Advisor with a broker/dealer or an accountant or attorney specializing in wealth management, your practice is your own small business.

In this pandemic, small businesses have suffered more significant losses than larger companies. Is your small business hurting? A practice cannot achieve perfect equilibrium and remain static, neither growing nor shrinking. That’s impossible. It’s either growing or shrinking.

 In this stressful and difficult time, you might think it unseemly to take action to book more business. But you need to because nothing lasts forever, and this pandemic shall pass.

Five Easy Steps

1. Make a commitment to prospecting. Motivating yourself to prospect can be difficult but think of it this way: wouldn’t many people be doing better financially if they had you as their Financial Advisor? If you don’t believe this about yourself, then you need to ask yourself why you don’t. Usually, Advisors who feel this way don’t have enough knowledge, and knowledge brings self-confidence. If you read about personal finance for one hour a night, four nights a week, you will have sixteen hours of learning more about your profession at the end of every month and 192 hours after one year.
2. Avoid selection bias. Many of us first decide the type of client we are looking for and ignore people who might be right under our nose who don’t fit our model. Advisors often fall into this trap. Your clients don’t have to look like you or have a background like yours. People most want someone who will listen, question, and give them well-informed financial advice.
3. Start prospecting with people you already know. A great way to do this is to hold family meetings with Zoom or whatever technology your client prefers. Because of COVID-19, almost everyone in a family is available to meet. You want the parents to invite their grown children to the meeting to introduce themselves and get their contact info which you will need to set up the meeting. Because many families are scattered around the country, you need to impress on your older clients that they have a duty to inform their children about their assets and their estate plan.If you have a family with two or more grown children, then have a sibling meeting, especially if one sibling is already a client and will bring the others along.
4. Ensure your webpage and social media sites are up to date. On a site such as LinkedIn, post reviews of financial books or websites you think would be useful to your clients or research from your firm. Clients don’t have the time or inclination to sort through this mass of info, but you have already done that.
5. Master social media. Most sites have tutorials that will teach you how to get more traffic to your page. Sites such as Twitter automatically produce a monthly report on your account, showing many useful metrics.  Join different social media groups that have members who probably have a high net worth and both post and repost content. You can repost our Cannon articles on topics of interest to your clients and prospects. If you are not going to keep your social media sites up to date, that is worse than not having them. Pay someone to keep them up to date if you’re not going to do it.

Don’t let the pandemic hurt your practice. The time to get new clients is now.

 

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Contributing Writer: Subject Matter Expert Charles McCain