[The sheer fact of choosing to be a business owner is a brave and even noble act to be recognized and celebrated. Unfortunately, while business owners can be seen as being entrepreneurial in spirit, in today’s new operating environment of accelerating change, there is a major distinction that needs to be recognized between a “business owner” and an “entrepreneur.” There is a very different mindset and set of behaviors between the two that leads to completely different ways to manage and steer their firms and work with their clients. The difference goes right to the heart of the challenges facing the financial services industry.
To better understand these differences and how they apply to financial professionals, we talked with Institute member Jon Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Blueprint Investment Partners. In addition to asset management services, the Greensboro, N.C.-based firm provides its advisor clients with practice management solutions, including tools and coaching to help advisors implement an optimal business model/strategy to compete in our industry’s new operating environment. We were interested in exploring their thinking and experience behind developing The Elite Advisor Playbook and promoting their Entrepreneurial Operating System as a tool for creating focus in an advisory practice.]
Invoice Hortz: Are you able to stroll us by the important thing pillars of your The Elite Advisor Playbook? How did you identify these particular elements?
Jon Robinson: The 4 pillars of the Playbook are: shopper service, apply administration, wealth administration and enterprise improvement. We consider this framework is the optimum image of an elite advisor, an assertion based mostly on in depth analysis and 10+ years of seeing what success appears like.
We noticed that best-in-class and common advisors typically look fairly related at first look. Each clock lengthy hours, are energetic of their communities, and have robust private {and professional} networks. However, once you take a better look, elite advisors are operationally robust in every of those 4 pillars. Inside every, they focus their time on the actions that add probably the most worth to their companies. Consequently, this results in higher performing companies that generate greater margins and decrease attribution.
The purpose of The Elite Advisor Playbook was to focus on these enterprise pillars and assist advisors contemplate learn how to strengthen their very own practices in every of the 4 areas.
Hortz: Are there any particular instruments that you’ve developed on account of creating the Elite Advisor Playbook that may help advisors in strengthening their enterprise selections?
Robinson: Completely. Your query jogs my memory of the Buckminster Fuller quote, “If you wish to educate folks a brand new mind-set, do not trouble attempting to show them. As a substitute, give them a instrument, the usage of which is able to result in new methods of considering.”
We developed a number of instruments and assets as dietary supplements to the Playbook. First is the, “Are You An Elite Advisor?” quiz, which helps advisors evaluate their apply to an ordinary in operational efficiency in only a few minutes. One other concrete instrument is the Entrepreneurial Working System
for Elite Advisors, a apply administration answer. We even have a number of, “learn how to” articles on our web site that correspond to every pillar of the Playbook.
Hortz: How does the Entrepreneurial Working System present a street map or course of to comply with?
Discussion about this post