Plan for Success: Do Not Put It Off Any Longer

Here are five tips to do a successful business plan.

1. Document the Plan

A strength of advisors, as a whole, is that they are very intelligent. You have to be in order to pass the difficult tests to attain designations and to keep up with an ever-changing industry. However, that strength can sometimes be a weakness. Too often advisors think they can keep a plan in their head. Being naturally smart, they can easily rationalize why they might not achieve a goal months down the road. A simple written plan helps them keep themselves accountable.

Deb Wetherby, CEO of Wetherby Asset Management in San Francisco says that a main reason for her success has been that every year she does a business plan, even if some years it was just a list with ten things to accomplish. She said, “I am a real fan of the written word. When you write it down, you stick to it.”

2. Start with the Big Picture

Before advisors launch into the details, they should write an introduction that includes their mission statement and value proposition for their practice. Such key orienting pieces will help guide all business planning decisions.

Pat O'Connell, a senior vice president at Ameriprise Advisor Group, Ameriprise Financial agrees. He said “It is critical to advisors’ success to have their mission, vision and core values in their business plans. Advisors shouldn’t cut right to the goals, because when they have this information front and center, it helps answer a lot of questions.

According to Gabe Garcia, director and relationship manager at Pershing Advisor Solutions, “Advisors should create and add a value proposition. It is important to know what’s the promise advisors are going to deliver on

3. Keep it Simple

The best plan probably is not on the back of a cocktail napkin, but at the same time it should not be too cumbersome. If a plan looks like a college research paper, it will end up gathering dust. To be effective, the plan needs to be clear and to the point.

4. Narrow the Focus

Advisors need to realize they cannot do it all. Too often they have way too much on their plate. When drawing up their business plan, they need to determine the top three to five initiatives and not lose sight of them. Think of a juggler balancing numerous balls at once. If one too many balls get thrown in, what happens? They all drop to the ground. Advisors need to recognize they cannot do everything at once and need to limit their focus to accomplish the most important things in an extraordinary fashion.

Each initiative should have defined goals and objectives to help the advisor manage the business throughout the year. Byrnes Consulting has a process of developing the BEST goals: business-driven, effective, specific and timely.

5. Manage the Process

Putting dates next to specific tasks creates measures of success that can be tracked on a dashboard using a color coding system (red = underperfroming , yellow = at risk of falling behind, and green = ahead of plan). If advisors use these techniques and then see that initiatives are red across the board, it is much easier to make improvements in the short term than it is to realize the issues when the year is almost over and the goals will be missed.

“Advisors need to spend more time thinking about ‘how’ they will execute the plan versus the ‘what’ they aspire to achieve,” says Mark A. Ricca of the Practice Management Consulting Group at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. “Advisors generally fail to hit business plan targets because when they create plans with too much attention focused on what they will do next year. Not nearly enough attention is targeted to how they will execute their plan.”