4 Self-Defeating Beliefs That Keep Advisors Stuck

When you’re first starting out as an advisor you don’t have many clients. So you have time to market and prospect. You do it and your practice grows.

Then when you finally get over $20 million assets under management with over 100 clients, you find yourself stuck. You hit a wall.

You can’t figure out how to manage servicing clients, running your business, managing your staff and still have time to promote growth.

The problem is your old ways of doing business just don’t work anymore. Your business has outgrown your wingspan. You need to learn new techniques.

The main reason advisors stay stuck and don’t change is because they have one or more of these four, common, self-defeating beliefs that keep them stuck.

Here they are:
Self-defeating belief #1. Believing no one else can do it right. You don’t trust others to help you.

The truth is you simply can’t do it all yourself. You need to let somebody else do those things that keep you away from being in front of your clients and prospects.

As a financial advisor you know the value of leveraging money. Leverage yourself the way you leverage money. When you delegate and outsource, you’re leveraging yourself.

Being a good delegator is a skill. It’s a skill you must learn if you want to continue to grow your practice.

Self-defeating belief #2. Thinking if you limit yourself to a niche, you might lose prospects. You know you can help anyone and fear you might lose a prospect if he thinks that you specialize in a different clientele. You believe that the wider your net the more prospects you’ll catch.

That wider net theory works to degree if you’re chasing butterfly sized clients. But if you want to get eagles, you need to carefully aim a gun.

And don’t worry about losing that prospect who thinks he’s an outsider. They will still see you as a specialist and ask if you can make an exception for him.

More importantly, prospects in your niche will see you as special and be attracted to you. They’ll choose you over a generalist who works with just anyone.

Self-defeating belief #3. Thinking you have a niche when all you have is a specialty. There are two parts of the niche for financial advisors. The first part is your specialty, whether you specialize in 401(k)/403(b)/IRAs, retirement, saving for college, small business retirement plans, comprehensive financial planning, investment management, estate planning, insurance, etc.

The second part of a viable niche is whom you serve, wealthy divorcees, parents of children with special needs, executives at Gotham Industries, federal employees due to retire, etc.

When you marry your specialty with your target market, marketing becomes easier and you have to spend less time at it. You’ll also get bigger more profitable clients who will pay you more for the time you spend servicing them.

Self-defeating belief #4. Believing if you handoff a small client, you are losing ground. If you just look at your assets under management and see the number going down when you handoff a small client, it feels like you’re losing. That’s because you’re looking at the wrong metric. Instead of looking at your total AUM, you need to look at profitability.

You’re making much less money when servicing a small client than when serving a large client. It’s those small clients that are keeping you working long hours and away from your family.

So when you think about handing off a small client, instead of thinking about your AUM going down, think about the time you’re saving. You can use this time to acquire bigger, more profitable clients, or can use this time to be with your family.

How about you? Are these beliefs getting in your way and putting a ceiling on your revenue? I’d like to hear if you had one of these beliefs and how you overcame it.