Her service encompasses several different industries, and some of them don't know what to make of it. She has faced compliance issues from the firm that benefits from her product sales but not from the teaching that is now the core of her business. "We may reach an agreement," she says, "we may not. At this point my business certainly doesn't depend on it."
Packaging Your Wisdom
What Mary Anne has done is ingeniously simple. She's side-stepped a whole industry, freeing herself from its controls while making an enormous contribution. Through her work with The Strategic Coach®, Mary Anne learned to focus on her unique wisdom, an outlook on life she credits to her sister's influence. Instead of selling product, which anyone can do, she's shifted the focus of her business to a process, which she owns and which is beyond the reach of compliance departments. Anyone can make this shift by identifying an area of unique wisdom that creates value not readily available in the marketplace and developing a process for delivering it.
Mary Anne loves the work she's created. "When the client comes in and says, 'You are part of the family. We couldn't have survived without you,' well, it really doesn't get any better than that for a financial advisor."
For more information on the Ehlert Financial Group, call (847) 522.8080 or visit www.protectedtomorrows.com. You may also be interested in The Special Needs Network (www.tsnn.org), which Mary Anne helped to create, a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to helping families with special needs optimize the lifelong care of their loved ones.
Dan Sullivan is co-founder of The Strategic Coach Inc., with offices in Toronto and Chicago. For more information on The Strategic Coach, call (416) 531-7399 or (800) 387-3206 or visit www.strategiccoach.com.