Even before the market downturn, if you subtract portfolio appreciation and the acquisitions of other investment firms, relatively few financial advisors have meaningfully increased their revenues over the last five plus years. In fact, such calculations would show that a percentage of them were actually sliding backwards during this time. That is, they did not grow organically and their revenues would have decreased.

Maybe your clients’ portfolios managed to avoid severe losses and maybe they will continue to appreciate. Maybe you’ll find advisors with books of businesses you can buy at a discount. If so, then you may not need to pay much, if any, attention to client-focused business development. On the other hand, if you want to assuredly grow your financial advisory practice in any environment (up markets and especially down markets), client-focused business development is a necessity.

Simply: client-focused business development is where you get substantially more business from current clients as well as create a pipeline of new high-quality clients (i.e., organic growth). By mastering the methodology I’ll describe, many financial advisors can double their revenues within two years. This is possible in this time of a pandemic. Sounds great! Before you open the champagne or purchase that new home, let’s review the requirements (there are always requirements).

Requirements
To begin with, the application of this methodology is by individual financial advisors. It can also encompass that advisor’s team. It’s not about corporate strategy. It’s all about your ability to excel in the trenches. It’s about your ability to get superior business-based results when dealing with prospects, clients and other professionals.

Revenue requirement: To double your revenue, your current annual revenue is a minimum of $300,000 to a maximum of $850,000. This range covers a large percentage of experienced financial advisors. While the methodology can work for just about every financial advisor, you must have a certain level of proficiency. Usually, but not always, financial advisors with less than $300,000 in annual revenues fail to have the necessary systems in place, skills, experience or expertise.

As for the maximum, you can potentially double your annual revenue if you earn $1 million or $2 million, $5 million or more. Because of the higher base (e.g., $2 million versus $850,000), doubling becomes harder, but, even if you don’t double, you’ll probably find the dollar increases are quite considerable. It’s just more likely that financial advisors with revenue within this range are able to double their revenues within two years.

Wealth management requirement: You have to be able to provide a range of expertise. This means you have to be adept at helping clients address financial and related concerns that extend beyond investment management. It doesn’t mean you are being compensated on other financial products such as life insurance or credit. You, nevertheless, must know about other financial products and related legal services and be able to spot opportunities and constructively talk about them. There are ways to get the revenue increases I’m talking about even if ALL your revenue is derived exclusively from money management fees.

The pandemic will diminish within the next two years: Whatever the reasons, the severity of the current crisis will be meaningfully less. Either because we now have viable treatments and possibly a vaccine, “shelter in place” orders, for example, are not pervasive. I’m not saying everything went back to the way it was before the crisis, just that circumstances are not as bad as they are today.

Access to other professionals: You will need access to other professionals, such as attorneys and accountants, who can potentially refer you individuals, families or businesses. By using the Everyone Wins Process, you’ll find out if their clients would benefit from working with you and—very importantly—how to work with them so they refer you their best clients.

The Everyone Wins Process: So much for the easy requirements. Let’s now turn to the one that torpedoes most financial advisors. You have to adopt a methodology—the Everyone Wins Process—which was derived from the best practices of leading ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs. It’s a methodology that is both inherent in the accomplishments of successful financial advisors and also somewhat alien to many of them. Commonly, by embracing the Everyone Wins Process, financial advisors think and act differently than the majority of their peers.

I’ve found that some financial advisors find it’s too hard to make the transition from how they operate today to using the Everyone Wins Process. Moreover, a percentage of financial advisors when they understand what’s necessary, choose not to use this approach. It’s not a question of the methodology working because it works and works amazingly well; it’s a question of is this approach viable for you.

Not only do many financial advisors have to make meaningful changes in mindset and approaches, they have to stick with it. Two years seems to be the fastest the majority of financial advisors can go in order to double their revenues. Commonly, for the first six months to a year, there is a lot of forward momentum but not that much revenue. Then things often get better and better, and, by the end of two years, twice as much annual revenue has been generated. Also, the stage is now set for you to continue to increase your revenues year after year. So you have to stick with the process for two years—not six months, not one year, not 18 months—two years in order to double your revenue. Considering the impact of the pandemic on the markets and people’s lives, this timeframe is the fastest you should expect to go.

The Everyone Wins Process
At the core of the Everyone Wins! Process is a powerful perspective that goes…

When it’s ALL about them, that’s the time you will benefit the most!

Central to most successful financial advisory businesses are meaningful interpersonal relationships. It’s not their investment philosophies and products or their technology that produces superior business results. It’s not their team of experts. What makes the biggest difference is the level of rapport they establish with prospects, clients and other professionals. 

Leading ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs know what they want in each business situation and put in the effort to learn what other people want. By truly understanding what other people want, you can potentially provide them ways they can achieve their goals and objectives. Because you’ve been instrumental in helping them get their wishes and desires or mitigating their concerns and anxieties, they’ll often do a great deal to help you in the ways you suggest.

Digging deep: It’s almost always necessary to go beyond the surface of what people profess to want. For example, it’s the norm for clients’ lives to be complicated, and you can add value in many ways beyond doing a good job investing their money. It’s these value-added solutions, which are often essential to building strong relationships that can withstand, for example, a 30 percent or greater drop in their portfolios. Along the same lines, it’s the quality of your relationships, coupled with your ability to show your clients how to refer people who you want to meet that leads to many new high-quality clients for you.

When it comes to accountants and attorneys, for instance, your knowledge of their practices, including their business development strategies, their strengths and uncertainties that can help you find the “answers,” that are usually essential to produce a steady stream of high-quality new clients for your financial advisory practice from these other professionals. Considering that presently many professionals are intensely looking for ways to adapt, by deeply understanding their concerns you’re likely to be able to provide some powerful solutions.

The focus is all on them, so consider when you meet a new accountant in person or by phone or video call, how much time do you spend explaining what you do and how you do it? If you’re like most financial advisors, it’s a fair amount of the time you spend together. This is about you, when you would be incredibly better off if it was all about him or her.

The 4-Step Everyone Wins Process
The Everyone Wins Process is conceptually very straightforward. The process consists of four main steps (Exhibit).

Exhibit: The Everyone Wins! Process

Source: Everyone Wins! How You Can Enhance and Optimize Business Relationships Just Like Ultra-Wealthy Entrepreneurs (2020)

Step #1: Your self-interests: The starting point is your own self-interests. For example, your self-interests will likely include building strong relationships and, over time, increasing your assets under management. Your self-interests probably include obtaining more business from current clients and getting more high-quality clients. Keeping your self-interests—whatever they are—top of mind will better enable you to go into each and every business interaction with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve. You need to be as precise as possible. Yes, you want more clients, but how many more?

Step #2: Their self-interests: You must now ascertain the self-interests of other people such as your clients and other professionals. The following are the interconnected methods you employ to help you learn about them:

• Tuning in: You need to convey by your presence—whether it’s in person or over the Internet—that you’re interested and concerned. You impactfully listen and you’re authentic.
• Discovery: You artfully use open-ended questions and probes to get the required insight into what really matters to your business relationships, as well as what causes them concern.
• Empathy: You need to sincerely understand other people from their vantage point and know what it’s like to “walk in their shoes.” You also need to make sure they understand that you possess this deep insight about them.

Step 3: Appeal to their self-interests: Direct alignment and adding value are the two approaches you can take to help other people achieve their self-interests.

With direct alignment, you concentrate on the overlap between your self-interests and their self-interests. The more overlap that exists, and the more it is that your respective actions further your shared goals, the easier it is to reach agreements and move forward to pursue mutual success by supporting each other.

With delivering added value, you’re using your capabilities, insights and connections to help other people achieve goals and agendas differing from yours or are not directly connected to yours. This regularly drives those people you helped to help you in return.

Delivering added value can be a little trickier to implement then direct alignment, but it is constantly very effective.

Step 4: Track results: Knowing how things are working out is essential. As you use the Everyone Wins Process, the only way you will know if your actions have helped your relationships achieve their self-interests is if you track results. You will also want to know if you are getting the outcomes you're looking for.

By tracking results you can determine where to best focus your efforts to maximize your future success. For example, you might decide to optimize other client relationships, or you might choose to refine the value you’re providing.

Conclusions
Yes, you can. You can probably double or at least significantly increase your revenues no matter what your revenues are today over the next two years. What’s already becoming evident is that negative market conditions need not be much of an obstacle and can even prove advantageous. The Everyone Wins Process works extremely well. The complication is that for the majority of financial advisors it’s not easy. It takes commitment and hard work, and you’ll likely have to approach aspects of your financial advisory business somewhat differently than you are today.

In these difficult times, your ability to enhance and optimize your business relationships will likely serve you very well in first maintaining your clientele and then growing it. Mastering the Everyone Wins Process will probably make you much more economically successful and produce stronger relationships, which often have additional advantages. For many leading ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs, the Everyone Wins Process is not only economically enhancing, it’s life enhancing—and that means a lot all the time and especially now. The Everyone Wins Process can do the same thing for you.

Russ Alan Prince, president of R.A. Prince & Associates, is a consultant to family offices, the ultra-wealthy and select professionals.