Where Does Your Time Go?
Feel the clock ticking? Work with your manager, manage clients, train team members and find new clients! Tick-tock…9:00 a.m. excitement…1:00 p.m. stress…6:00 p.m. energy-drain. How will you accomplish all your tasks and goals this year? This is a good time to ask yourself if you are bringing your same old methods of time management into the New Year.
If you didn’t leave the office in 2009 feeling in control and having a sense of accomplishment, there’s no reason to expect the same methods of time management to work in 2010. But there’s help on the way. For you to be effective, you will need to review and tweak the way you structure your day, your week and your month. Along with other New Year’s resolutions vying for a spot on your schedule, prioritize setting a new clock to halt your race against time.
Reduce Stress, Gain Clients and Confidence
Effective personal time management results in less chaos, less stress and more time in front of clients who need to have an enhanced perception of you. Having a “too busy” image plants a seed in a clients’ mind that you don’t want or need referrals—clearly an image you don’t want to project.
There are techniques to restructure your time so you’re spending more of it on revenue-producing activities, such as spending time with clients, and less on draining administrative tasks. You can spend more time and effort on writing articles and making presentations, which can garner you more prospects and more money from existing clients. These are high-value tasks because they expand your visibility and credibility, and keep you and the bank in the minds of clients and prospects.
Getting Started and Building Control
How do you create a schedule that will allow you more productive time for high-value activities? One of the best ways to create a personal time management plan is to obtain a good visual perspective on where you really spend your time. Conduct a two-week time assessment that takes into account anomalies. Record your activities on paper throughout each day. (A blank template will be provided at the conclusion of this article or blank templates available online at www.calendarsthatwork.com). Review your assessment to visualize patterns and highlight key activities you need to stop or cut back on and new tasks you need to incorporate into your practice. Via your time assessment, your need to focus on profitable, effective techniques likely will unfold.
In this era of multitasking, it may seem like you should being doing multiple things at the same time. But when an advisor jumps from task to task, an increased demand is placed on the brain to continually change neural messaging making the tasks more difficult to complete and leading to mental fatigue. David Meyer, a psychologist specializing in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Michigan found in a 2001 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, that people who toggle between tasks lose valuable time in the transitions. The brain must refocus each time it switches activities, and the more complicated the task, the more time it takes to refocus. The time loss can be as little as tenths of a second per switch, but that can add up over the course of a day in which countless e-mails, texts, instant messages, face-to-face interactions, and any number of hands-on tasks involve such switches.
How guilty are you of repeating this cycle throughout your day? How often do you interrupt your assistant with new tasks? You can do the arithmetic and see how much of your energy and productivity is being sapped. To break this ineffective cycle, increase your productivity with time blocking. Time blocking is the strategy of scheduling time—literally blocking out periods of time down to half-hour increments—to complete designated, similar activities in a concentrated way. For example, spend an hour set aside each day to call five clients who have large cash balances.
4 Areas of Focus for Enhanced Time Management
The next step is to select the high-value tasks that will fill the time blocks and allow you to build a model week to follow. The four areas to focus on include:
- Identifying your strengths and work habits
- Managing and cultivating more business from your clients
- Educating and motivating your team
- Developing a referral network to expand your prospecting efforts
Tim was successful, with 2 branch offices but feeling overwhelmed by the size of his client base. His typical day ran from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. This schedule was wearing him down with the sense that he was racing to catch up and never getting a clear sense of accomplishment. Fortunately, Tim knew organization was needed and sought coaching to direct and support him in making changes.
Personal Strengths:
Tim identified his strengths were face-to-face contact and delivering presentations and that his energy was highest before lunch. Tim’s time log revealed that he had little daily structure, few out-going calls and many client walk-ins. Incorporating time blocking, Tim scheduled several power hours per day to complete similar tasks. Upon arrival at the office, he sent e-mails to clients and communicated with the bank’s leadership team. Since Tim’s energy level dramatically dropped after lunch, he scheduled outgoing calls to clients and client meetings in the morning. At the end of his day, Tim returned client e-mails and delivered scripted voice mail messages that they would receive when they got home after their work day.
Tim also began conducting a 15-minute daily meeting with his assistant to discuss and agree on their top five priorities. Typical topics of the meeting include: client appointment update, status on transfers, distributions, contributions etc., appointments to be scheduled and upcoming client birthdays. Under much duress, he also relinquished telephone answering to his assistant, which reduced interruptions and kept him on-task.
Tim used the Microsoft Outlook calendar program to schedule client meetings for his two branches. This saved the assistant time in scheduling appointments and coordinating team members needed for the meetings. These few personal organization tips took a few months of practice to become habitual, but the results allowed Tim to leave with a sense of accomplishment instead of a heavy weight on his shoulders.
Managing Your Book of Business
As time passes, a client’s life and needs change. Lack of client contact yields lost business opportunities. Since Tim had a large base of clients, approximately 400, he knew he was leaving substantial business on the table; so, he next took steps to manage his book. Having diverse clients, Tim segmented them according to age (i.e., 50-55) and asset level. He developed a list of potential needs per segment and began to compile names of local business owners who could meet the diverse needs of his client base.
As part of the early morning power hour Tim would review 10 client’s accounts per segment per day, allowing for efficient execution and quality of contact. He would record notes for discussion and recommendations. Before out-going client calls, he would prepare a short focused script for speaking with his clients about their account, his recommendations and a Topic of the Week, such as long-term care. To complete this task, Tim directed his assistant at their next daily meeting to obtain the bank’s information on the topic and mail it to the clients with whom he had spoken. Having calls organized to reach out to existing investors reduced walk-ins and brought positive comments from clients on the increased communication.
Armed with a strategy for working his way through his book, Tim was ready to capture liquid assets from bank clients with maturing CDs. Each week, he obtained the list of CDs from the branch manager and devoted a power hour to bank customers with CDs maturing to learn about their goals for the funds and introduce the investment services of the bank. Incorporating this power hour allowed Tim to be proactive and spend additional time on potential revenue-generating tasks.
Team Development
Working in a bank, you have a built-in and diverse support system. Each team member comes in contact with the bank’s clients in multiple ways. Staying in front of the bankers and educating them about which clients you could help leads to more introductions. How you position yourself with them will help you garner more leads. For example, train staff to introduce you as the retirement recovery specialist rather than the investment specialist to encourage more positive reactions from prospects and convey a sense of how you can help with a timely issue. To work most effectively with his bank team, once a week Tim set aside a time to join the bankers for coffee in the break room. He would bring doughnuts and hold a brief discussion on who is a qualified referral and would tell them about his weekly topic. Additionally, Tim initiated a 15-minute weekly meeting with the branch manager. This saved him time that was formerly spent in numerous impromptu conversations and allowed him to set a regular agenda, which included learning about the bank’s initiatives and advising the manager of successful referrals by team members.
Building a Referral Network
Basking in the glow of his efforts, Tim realizes for long-term growth of the business, he needed to cultivate his referral network of experts such as lawyers and accountants. The referral network has the potential to introduce Tim to numerous prospects vs. trying to obtain a single referral from a client and saving Tim in prospecting efforts. His weekly calendar allowed for one afternoon for visits with these referral partners. On-site visits encouraged Tim to get out in the community and maintain Top of Mind Awareness with referral partners. Weekly discussions included, client referrals, products and services offered and cross-marketing ideas.
After a few months of incorporating the above techniques into his daily routine—with a few tweaks to make it efficient for the long run—Tim experienced rewards he couldn’t put a price on: decreased stress, shorter days and increased family time. From a business perspective, he achieved an increase in production of 22%.
Continuing these efforts, Tim will grow his circle of influence, a benefit leading to more introductions and potential clients. With a larger base of clients, Tim will need to schedule a time management review and update session in January 2011. Not a bad challenge. Take Tim’s model week and embark on taking control of your time
Written by Beth Ruggiero who works with advisors to capitalize on their time and talents.
To learn more, contact Beth at beth@climbhighconsulting.com
