You want to offer your clients comprehensive financial services, but you may be wondering, “How am I supposed to run a business and at the same time remodel my business by implementing new processes?” 

When you’re in the process of remodeling your business, it can feel just as daunting as living in a house while you’re trying to remodel.  Your inexperience can make you feel like you’re tripping over deadlines, running into uncooperative contractors, and learning everything the hard way at great cost of money, time and energy.  Nobody wants that extra stress when they’re trying to run a business and taking care of clients!

I’ve coached many financial advisors as they implement The Trusted Advisor Toolkit™, a practice management system, and in the beginning it can feel terribly overwhelming. This is especially true if you make the mistake of looking at the whole project rather than breaking it down into bite-sized, doable pieces. 

In the beginning, I recommend spending a third of your time with the implementation of the practice management system so that you’re not neglecting the other necessary facets of keeping your business growing.  You’ll want to keep your new processes simple to implement by avoiding issues like:

• They're over complicated.
• They take too long to customize for a specific office culture. 
• They're over-automated (too many tasks are assigned and don't change when circumstances change). 

(The methodology in The Trusted Advisor Toolkit™ has been highly sensitive to these issues.  That’s why we have our financial advisors create processes with their teams that are simple, highly customized to the individual office and are flexible.)

However the processes themselves aren’t the biggest problems that a financial advisor’s office can experience during a “remodel”. Since it’s not just your office implementing the process but it also involves getting all of your external professional team members to cooperate the greatest challenges come from team members who: 

• Don’t "buy in" to the idea of the need to document major processes (even if we provide a way to do it in less than 20 minutes). 
• Don’t follow processes once they are documented. 
• Don’t amend processes once it is acknowledged that it is, for some reason, broken. 

Whenever you have a “remodel” going on in your business, take the time to have a well-defined plan and communicate that plan to others. You’ll find that the process methodology of The Trusted Advisor Toolkit™ is simple to implement and less onerous than the absence of a process. If you do not already have a membership to our system you can register now at no charge