In painstaking detail, David J. Mullen Jr.’s The Million-Dollar Financial Advisor Team provides advisors with a clear and comprehensive plan on how to create and sustain successful financial teams.
Using statistics and figures from reports, surveys and his own research, plus anecdotal information from nearly 40 years of experience in the financial services industry, Mullen is so meticulous he even explained how long meetings of various purposes should run:
A review of the previous week’s “successes, loose ends, lessons learned (and) a review of the upcoming week’s calendar:’’ 10 minutes; new business ideas: 10 minutes; client review: no more than five minutes; service: 10 minutes; and results (versus goals): 15 minutes.
If there is a strategy, plan, scheme or vision that’s going to make your financial team members prosper and feel satisfied with their career, Mullen is there with it.
“There is a chapter for each of (the) team best practices that provides complete guidance on how to implement them,’’ Mullen wrote, adding that after readers identify where they need help, they “can skip directly to that chapter’’ for guidance.
Mullen, a former advisor and managing director at Merrill Lynch, in 2007 founded Altius Learning, a Denver-based company that trains and coaches financial advisors in expanding their practices. He saw a need for this training with the explosion of teams by the early 2000s. He says that today, the majority of advisors are part of a team or would like to be on a team. In 2009, Mullen’s first book, The Million-Dollar Financial Advisor was published.
“Many experts predict that by 2020, 80 percent of all financial advisors will be on a team,’’ he wrote
But what’s so great about a team versus a sole practitioner?
“Experts have repeatedly shown that advisors working on teams outperform sole practitioners,’’ he wrote.
Researchers found that “teams have a higher propensity to do the right things that cause their business to grow,’’ and that “working on a team promoted a higher level of discipline in team members.’’