It’s critical for financial advisory firms to have an A-player administrative manager to help build and serve a community of ideal clients. Your admin manager may not have the courage to speak with you directly about your unproductive behavior, but how would it help you if he or she did?

Whether it’s your goal to build a community exclusively of ideal clients or to simply elevate your client value and grow your business, you will find my response to this administrative manager’s question valuable.

Admin Manager:  I need some advice on how to get our advisor to follow his calendar of high payoff activities and NOT get distracted by low payoff activities and other issues. What do you recommend?

Answer: The primary role of an effective administrative manager is to completely own all of the administrative responsibilities, projects and tasks of the business so that the advisor is physically and mentally free to focus on his or her primary task: to grow the business by adding ideal clients as quickly as possible. (Our core business is to help successful financial professionals build an “ideal client community” with about 50 clients and deliver an extraordinary client experience that commands $20,000 - $50,000-plus of annual recurring revenue per client.)

“As quickly as possible” varies, depending on whether your advisor is a less experienced business-builder or a veteran whose goal is to finish strong by building an ideal client community later in his or her career. That said, it usually means one to three ideal clients per month because that’s about the capacity of the team to process those clients. Part of the administrative manager’s job is to create this capacity by being on top of every task in the process of on-boarding a new ideal client.

If less than one to three ideal clients are being added per month, it’s an indicator that one or more things aren’t working. What might some of those things be?

It could be that the advisor has to be involved in the administrative work because it’s not getting done well enough and he must tend to it himself. It could be that the advisor is choosing to do administrative work because he has not yet developed the habits to execute a larger volume of client acquisition activity. It could be that the advisor has some irrational fear about doing client acquisition work and is finding refuge in administrative work. We call this work avoidance. It could be that the advisor has not yet organized his scripts, talking points and processes to confidently execute an ideal client acquisition plan. It could be a variety of things, but none of them are acceptable. What you have control over is truly owning the administrative manager role to eliminate any administrative-related excuse for your advisor to avoid priorities. You have some influence over the advisor’s other behavior.

The advisor’s second priority is to do his part of ideal client service. Only when the advisor, as the owner of the business, accepts that his primary role is to grow the business by adding ideal clients will things at the business really begin to happen and perform at a high level. This does not mean that ideal clients are unimportant or relegated to a backseat. They get taken care of at a world-class level, as promised. It’s sort of like loving one of your two children more than the other. They are both loved a lot, they both get all the love they need, and they never know that one was loved more than the other. It’s about managing two high priorities. In fact, building an ideal client community leads to great service because only when that community is complete will those clients get the highest level of focus and attention. At that point, none of the firm’s energy is being diverted away from serving ideal clients. What a great day that will be!

Schedule a meeting with your advisor and directly ask, “What has to happen for you to stay focused on your calendar doing ideal client acquisition work and only your part of client service, which I will schedule for you?” Be prepared to go deeper and invite your advisor to be candid with you. Ask, “At what level do I need to be performing so you feel totally confident that I am 100% on top of everything administrative so you can focus your time and energy on adding one to three ideal clients per month?” You must also be prepared to hear the truth. Perhaps your advisor is not as satisfied with your performance as you think he should be. Perhaps you are getting the work done, but not to the standard he feels is necessary to charge a client $20,000 to $50,000 or more per client per year? Perhaps your advisor simply has some fears about letting go that you can help him overcome. Have a candid conversation and develop a plan for moving forward. Your advisor will be impressed with your initiative.

Notice the specific triggers that divert your advisor from client acquisition work and point them out to him. For example, you might say: “Your buddy John calls every day to shoot the breeze about football and you waste at least 30 minutes talking about your fantasy team. Is that really a priority?” or “With all due respect, your kids and your spouse obviously don’t understand that you can’t talk or text with them 37 times a day and build the business that will afford you all a great and secure lifestyle. Are you aware how much that’s distracting you from your goals?” or “In order to discover how much time is being lost to low payoff activities, let’s implement the use of a time log for you for the next two weeks so you can see how this is impacting our results?”

Create an e-mail protocol so your advisor never again manages his day from his e-mail inbox. Can you take over his e-mail? Unsubscribe from as much as you can. Vet those few items that must be done and get them done. If there is something that must involve your advisor, add it to a future meeting agenda and get the input necessary from the advisor to complete the action item. Most items are not urgent. Prioritize them accordingly.

Separate business and personal e-mail accounts. “This e-mail address is purely for business matters that pertain to the service and acquisition of ideal clients. Please use ________ address to communicate with _____ about personal matters.”

Stop communicating with your advisor via e-mail. Organize what you need to discuss with him in an agenda for brief face-to-face meetings.

It’s possible for your advisor to get through the entire day without checking e-mail. Imagine how much more effective he would be at making ideal client acquisition calls and face-to-face meetings with potential clients if there were no e-mail distractions!

Be a student of productivity and effective time management. The “4 Ds” are a good place to start:

1. Drop. What can be completely dropped or eliminated because it does not need to be done at all?

2. Delay. What can be put aside until later or indefinitely? Do that with as many things as possible. Most things that get delayed ultimately get dropped.

3. Delegate. What can you take over from your advisor and which of those other things that must be done can be delegated or outsourced to someone besides you?

4. Do. What has to be done in order to acquire and serve ideal clients?

Final Thoughts
That was how I helped one firm’s admin manager. I hope that you, as an advisor, will find that these insights will help you recruit, hire, train and develop a better admin manager. You might invite your admin manager to read this article and ask him, “How can you help us be more productive and build a better business?”

How can you and your admin manager work more effectively together? How can you be more of the solution and less of the problem? How can you become the kind of advisor who attracts an admin manager who cares enough to ask a question like this?

You can create your ideal life and build an ideal client community, but you’ll need an A-player admin manager to make it happen.

Bill Bachrach and his team specialize in helping successful FAs transform themselves into FA leaders who work with financially successful clients. They train the best financial advisors in the world, and those who aspire to be, as measured by value for the client, financial success and quality of life. www.billbachrach.com