Lesson 4 | Take Action

Transcript: This is the last lesson in the Goals to outcomes course. Make sure you have your Goals to Outcomes worksheet available, which you can access in the Goals to Outcomes course page. We're going to walk through how to complete this worksheet to really build a tactical short-term action plan to help drive outcomes based on your strategy and your goals. I'm Shauna Mays, head of Practice Management at SEI. My mission is simple. It's to help you and your team grow. At SEI, we're focused on creating better and braver futures together. How can we help you do what you do best? We do that by offering curated, outsourced investment solutions, custody and technology solutions, and of course practice management advice. There are three tools that I've introduced in this course, the one page business plan, which is your strategy and an overview of your plan to grow. The second tool I shared was the business audit, which helped you identify the best places to focus your attention in support of your goals and growth, and the final tool is the goals to outcomes worksheet, which takes your one page business plan and expands the tactical and actionable parts of your plan.

This worksheet should be reviewed and updated at least quarterly, if not more often. Each individual on your team could have their own goals to outcomes worksheet. It helps you understand what do we need to do today, this week, this month, this quarter in support of our goals. The very right hand column, which captures your purpose and mission and annual goals will be the same for everyone, but the quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals can vary based on role and responsibility. All of these tools are foundational to documenting what success looks like in your business and to help you communicate your vision and priorities to your team. Not just once, but over and over. We're going to talk more about how do we gain buy-in from our team and how do we effectively communicate our goals to help everyone align their efforts to complete this worksheet, start from the very right with purpose and mission and work left.

We start with purpose and mission as a reminder of your why so we stay focused and committed. Next is your one or few goals. Again, if you have been with me since the beginning, we've defined what your one to three ideal goals are based on your ideal client and your strengths and opportunities, and we did that starting in lesson one and gained clarity in lesson two. In this example, I added the $20 million goal that we've been using throughout this course. As an example, you may have a non UM or revenue goal, which is fine if you do have a quantitative goal, such as increase in a UM or revenue that will inform your quarterly activities, pipeline and new a UM or revenue. So next I want you to look at your quarterly goals. If in this example, you want to grow by $20 million, you need to ideally bring in $5 million in new business each quarter.

I figured that out by taking $20 million and dividing it by four. This is one of your lagging indicators onto the leading indicators. Pipeline and activity are two of the most basic leading indicators that I tend to recommend firms focus on when they're looking to grow revenue or a UM. How much do you need in your pipeline to bring in $5 million in new business? Quarterly? You can figure that out by looking at your historic close rate. In general, when you meet with a prospect, what percentage of the time do you convert them to client? On average, we know that it's 78% based on investment news, 2020 pricing and profitability study. However, depending on your leads and prospects, where they're coming from, how warm they are, your own sales skill, it may be lower or higher. That conversion rate may be lower or higher. If you don't know, then I would probably err on the sigh of conservative and use 60% conversion rate, but on average as an industry advisors report closing prospects they meet with 78% of the time onto activities.

How many prospect meetings do you need to have to generate enough in your pipeline, enough prospects or opportunity? In this example, let's assume a 60% close rate to generate $5 million in new business with a 60% close rate, you need just over $8 million in your pipeline. How many activities or prospect meetings do you need to have in order to meet your $8 million? Pipeline goal is going to depend on your ideal client. Let's assume you're targeting to grow with clients that have $1 million in investible assets or more. If that's the case, then each quarter you are looking to meet with eight qualified new prospects that have $1 million in investible assets or more to get to your $8 million pipeline goal. There may be other goals that change quarter to quarter, which you can add here. In general, activities, pipeline and new assets or revenue are the three key metrics to focus on.

If you're looking to grow your business in the traditional sense of a UM or revenue. For the most part, the very right hand column doesn't change. Okay, onto the next column. We're moving left. We are further refining your focus, so we want to think about this monthly. What do you need to do this month, next month, and two months out to support your quarterly goals? We're taking that quarterly goal and we're breaking out into what do we need to focus on and do each month as you work backwards. This exercise may give you clarity as to how realistic your goals are or aren't. Again, attainable is an attribute of having a smart goal. Is this attainable or not? As you think about what you need to do each month, there may be specific milestones or dependencies in support of your larger goal. Again, if you've filled out the one page business plan, you may have noted some of these milestones or dependencies over the 12 month period.

For example, if we use the growth referral strategy, you may want to produce a piece of content each month targeting your ideal client to share with your existing clients and professional partners to remind them of who you work with, how you can help and to provide a call to action to share something that's relevant for your ideal clients. Maybe you want to be featured in a publication or in the media. Maybe you want more eyeballs, more awareness, so what do you need to do monthly to support that goal? Okay, let's keep going to support your monthly goals. What do you need to do this week? What are the few top priorities this week to keep making progress towards your monthly, quarterly, and annual goals? You're likely busy or will get busy in your business. This is a way to stay focused on the one or few things that will help you maintain commitment and momentum.

When you wake up and you know what you need to do, it's a lot easier to do it, especially when you have a game plan. Finally, on the very left hand side of the worksheet are your daily goals. What do you need to do today, tomorrow, maybe later this week in order to support your weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals? If you use time blocking to stay focused and productive, it may be every Friday is when you work on the business, not just in the business, so that's where you're going to be doing the development work on Friday, and I want you to actually write down what that specific work you're going to do is depending on how you structure your time, I want you, you and your team to think about being intentional with the activities that you do daily and weekly, especially to set your week up for success.

You can print out your goal to outcomes worksheet with your annual, quarterly, and monthly goals and update your weekly and daily goals on Friday for the upcoming week, especially when you get busy and you don't have time to put in the extra development effort, it's important that you make the most of your scheduled development activities such a prospect meeting. If you have an important growth focused meeting or conversation coming up, add it to the DLA column so you prepare for that event. By considering this question, think about what does success look like in that meeting or in that event that will help you be prepared and help you do the practice or prep that you need in order to make the most of that event. If you need help with accountability, this tool can help hold you and your team accountable. Consider bringing it or sharing it at your weekly team meeting and following up with each other to check in if your most important weekly and daily goals are getting accomplished.

Okay, great job. You've done the work to identify your strategy to build effective goals, and you have a plan to take action on your tactics. Now, this is the hardest part, gaining and maintaining the buy-in to take action. If there's one thing you can do to increase your chances of meeting your goals, it's to take the necessary actions you've identified, execute on your plan. Part of this likely requires your team to buy in, and I want to share a little bit of psychology to help you understand how to engage and motivate your people. So Daniel Pink is a very well-known psychologist and author of the book Drive In Drive. He talks about three components that drive motivation, their autonomy mastery, and the ability to work on and develop the skills that matter to you. Purpose, give your team autonomy by defining what success looks like, share your goals, communicate your goals, provide expectations when it comes to service and attitude and on how their role impacts the business and the business goals and let them do their job.

You've likely heard that everyone should have a job description, and yes, it's important because it helps define what success is in that role and helps others understand their roles and responsibilities relative to each other. As a leader and manager, I would recommend you be very specific as to the swim lanes and who owns what. Think back to the business audit in lesson two and the seven components of an advisory business. Who owns each of these components? Firm, vision and management, people and culture, technology and operations, financial planning and client service investments, business development and change management. Ideally, one person shouldn't own everything unless you're working by yourself, then you may want to leverage partnership or outsourcing to help drive scale and growth. I spent eight years in my career at an RE, a firm with eight people in the firm. We all wore a lot of different hats, but we worked really well together and got a lot accomplished when we understood what was expected of us, what success looked like in the business and in our role, and how we could help support the business goals.

Communications is a key attribute of gaining buy-in and engagement from your team. Specifically, communicating your goals is the first step in creating a growth-minded firm and culture. I know communicating your goals may sound really simple and silly, but it's something that doesn't happen in a lot of organizations by being explicit, not just one time, but on repeat on what are your specific goals. Again, you want to make sure your goals are smart, so specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. What are your goals? What are your top priorities, and how are you going to go about what are your strategy and tactics to make progress towards those goals? Now, I want to acknowledge that we, again, all get busy, and what if you get stuck or stall out? It happens, and if you do get stuck, I want to share these prompts to help you get unstuck and reengage.

Generally when we're stuck, there are three main reasons why either we lack clarity of impact, there's some misalignment to our values or mission, or we don't have a plan or process. We don't know how to either get started or how to continue on this activity or towards our goals. The most common and easy to solve reason I see inaction is lack of a process or a plan. When we don't know how to do something, when we don't have the competency or the confidence, we tend to not take action because we get uncomfortable or we simply don't know where to start. So I want you to think about a time when you were really confident you had a high degree of competency in a certain or a certain skill. It probably was easy for you to take action. For example, if I asked for you for a retirement advice, you would likely jump at the chance to share some advice based on my situation.

However, if I asked you to go get referrals or even plant referral seeds and you weren't sure how to do that, how likely would you take action? Okay, assignment number four and next steps to implement the concept shared in this course to drive goals to outcomes in your business. There are four recommended next steps. So first, complete the one page business plan if you haven't already. This is going to be really provide clarity of your overall goals, your strategy, and who you're growing with. This is your document for the year. Next, complete your goals to outcomes worksheet if you haven't already. This is where we're diving deeper on the tactical components of what are we doing today, this week, this month, this quarter, to help us continue to take action and make progress towards our goals. So number three, I want you to share with your team the goals.

I want you to share these documents. I want you to seek feedback and refine as needed. We need their buy-in. Finally, determine how you'll measure and track success. How will you understand how you're doing as far as your tactics and your goals, at least quarterly to stay on track? At SEI, we're committed to helping you be better. We would love to hear what you're working towards and help support your pursuits of growth. We are hard at work building out actionable practice management content like this to support you and your team to teach you how to think and act like consultants in your business to drive the right outcomes for you and your clients. This is an overview of the content that's either available or in the works as part of SEI Growth Lab. Thank you for joining me. Awesome job showing up to work on your business, not just in your business.