It works the same way if you decide that you want to shift from prospecting for $500,000 clients to $5 million households. The strategies and marketing plan to attract $5 million households will look very different than the mass market $500,000 folks.
A key benefit of the triple double is it requires you to elevate your thinking. It requires you to breakout of living in the highly probable and predictable world to moving into the realm of aspirational possibility.
3. Make yourself irrelevant to your business. This might seem a little strange but the more valuable you are to the business, the less valuable the business is. If you can’t step away from the business for a material amount of time and have it still fire on all cylinders while you’re gone, then you don’t have a business, you have a job.
My favorite example here is Jon Jones of Brighton Jones. On my podcast, Jon told me:
“I created a framework to say, ‘I’m not going to leave our business until I know we have at least one person that I’ve hired that is just thinking about the strategy around getting people, keeping people, getting clients and keeping clients.’ As long as I had a really solid COO who was overseeing all of operations, I felt fine about taking off for a year. But from the strategic standpoint, I felt like having somebody in charge of ‘get keep’ was super important, and still is.”
During the time Jon and his family were off for a year visiting 35 countries, his business continued to hum and it grew significantly while he was gone.
Now imagine for a moment if you could take material time away from your business to just…think. Or explore. Or recharge. Or get fit. Or meditate. Or travel the world and pay attention to what’s going on. Do you think you’d come back from that time away with a renewed sense of purpose and energy?
The measure of your business is how little you’re needed in the day-to-day running of it. When you are free from the constraints of always being “on,” you become free to explore the edges of your opportunities. As Joe Duran told me, you become free to sense the next wave that your business can ride and you start to envision what your business could become in its next iteration.
Mechanical vs. Mental
When most people think about their business, they focus on the mechanical aspects. They focus on the day-to-day strategies, tactics and execution that “makes the trains run on time.” And that’s critical because without the mechanical, you have no business.
What I’m talking about with these bold moves is mental. It’s about changing how you think. It’s about helping you move from thinking linearly like 1+2+3+4=10, to thinking exponentially like 1¹+ 2²+3³ 4⁴=288.
You are only limited by your imagination so don’t limit it!
Go Deep
Those of you who read this article and “go deep” with these three bold moves, who embed them into your very fiber and act on them, will be the same advisors who five years from now will have grown their business and improved their quality of life by an order of magnitude.
It’s lonely at the top because it’s human nature for people to reach a level of comfort and then settle at that level; a level that is often well below their intrinsic potential. People get to a point of viability and then stop challenging themselves. They stop thinking bigger. They stop focusing on the fundamentals. And they stop filling their knowledge bucket.
By contrast, those at the top keep stretching and not only do they reap the financial rewards, but they also reap the emotional rewards of reaching their full potential.
Reaching your full potential is not limited to your success as an advisor. You have multiple dimensions to your life that include your relationships, your spirituality, your legacy and your health. Settling in any one of these dimensions means you’re depriving the world of the gifts you have the capability to give.
And one more thing…have fun! Making bold moves can be scary but when you do them from a place of fun, you release the negative energy and make room for the energy that fuels you and gives you a sense of confidence.
At the end of your life, if you look back and lament on a life that fell short, then we’ve all lost. French writer Andre Gide wrote, “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Folks, now is the time to leave the shore and make bold moves.
Steve Sanduski, CFP, is a financial advisor business coach, the co-founder of ROL Advisor, a discovery process technology system; a New York Times bestselling author and host of the Between Now and Success podcast.