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The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners
386: The Truth About My 3-Day Workweek (Part 2)
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So today is part two to one of the most requested episodes that I've ever recorded. If you've been around for any length of time, you've probably heard me mention that I built a seven figure financial planning practice while working just three days a week. And every time, every time I say that at a conference or in a group setting, the questions start to pour in. How is that possible? Were you actually only working on those three days? What'd you do for an emergencies? What did your clients think? Did you have to make sacrifices? What would you do again differently, you know, know, what's the catch? So I asked you what you wanted to know about a three day work week and you guys totally delivered. Between LinkedIn and our Facebook group, there were more than 80 questions. So last week I dove into a lot of like, what it looked like, what the timeline was, how long it took me to go from 80 hours down to just 24, how long I stayed there, what were the progression of things to get there, what did my staffing look like at that time. And then today I'm going to get into the play by play of how you can get there too. So I'm going to answer some of the questions I didn't get to last time because we got to a full hour long episode on this. I mean, it's a big topic. And then today I'm going to give you a play by play of how to do it and how I would do it now and again. My hope isn't that everyone wants to work three days a week. My hope is to show you what's possible for you when you intentionally design your business instead of just letting it happen to you. Right. And if you didn't listen to last week's episode, please go back and listen to it because that gives you the whole setup and answers a ton, like the vast majority of the questions that you guys answered. So today, again, I don't want to stay high level. We're going to get super nitty gritty and I'm going to break it down into what exactly you need to do to make this happen in your business. Whether that's just leaving Fridays at noon or taking Fridays off, or getting down to a four day work week or, or getting down to a three day work week or just getting your business under control and feeling a little less chaotic. All right, let's go.
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My name is Nicole Williams from the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Listening to the Efficient Advisor podcast gives me super useful tips and tools to run my business better. But the group coaching program has taken it to a whole new level. The systems, processes, templates, and even just the basic organizational tools, tips, tricks and hacks that I've gotten from Libby and the other advisors has completely transformed my world. Libby has created the infrastructure, provides all the material, and guides you through getting things done. I still can't believe how I can feel so much less stressed, so much more organized, and so much more satisfied and confident in serving my client. I'm finally working smarter and not harder.
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Before we jump in, I want to share something exciting. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be curating a group of advisors to help them grow towards their first 1 million of revenue and beyond. It's called the Systems to Scale Group Coaching program. And here's what I know. What gets you to mid six figures stops there. So if you're at 500 to $700,000 a year of annual revenue, you probably feel this. What got you here won't get you there. And you need someone inside of your business showing you the way forward. So over the next 10 months, you'll work with me personally and each other to refine your business model, prepare for hiring, simplify your operations, and build a business that grows more sustainably, more profitably, and more independently of you. Details are waiting for you@the efficient advisor.com under the group Coaching tab. But I have to warn you, spots will go fast. Okay. And one more announcement kind of thing. Make sure you set your calendar. You mark your calendar for July 28th at 4pm Eastern. Adam Holt and I are going to do a DIT webinar. We are going to do it together. We're going to help you get set up in your free trial of asset map. We're going to get a client set up, we're going to create a whole map for a client and we're going to just show you how to do the dang thing. Because there's nothing I hate more than when I would sign up for a new software program and I would like figure out how to use it, but barely just enough to be able to show a client something but not actually be able to use it really, really well. I want to get you over that hump. So I approached Adam and I was like, what if we did a dit? And he's like, weird, we've never done that before. But that sounds amazing. So we're going to get you into asset map and we're going to get you set up using your first one and you're going to get fully functional and you're able to deliver it to a client, talk through it. Adam's going to show us exactly how he does it in his current practice today. And y', all, it's so cool. So if you haven't checked it out, make sure you do. You can register for that in the link in the show notes below this episode or go over to LinkedIn and find me. And I've got some posts in there about it that have the registration code as well. Okay, so let's finish up this conversation about the truth behind a three day Work week. If you're a financial advisor who wants a practice that runs without you working 60 hours a week, who wants energy left over for the people you love, you are in the right place. I I'm Libby Griwe, host of the Efficient Advisor. I built and sold a 7 figure 100% referral only planning practice as a solo advisor, all While working just three days a week and taking off 14 full weeks a year so that I could be an awesome mom, a wife, a friend, and a travel obsessed human. On this show I share the exact systems, processes and tiny tweaks to help you scale, get organized and dramatically reduce stress and overwhelm in your business. This is your Efficient Practice playbook. If you're ready to stop being the bottleneck and start being the CEO, let's dive in. Okay friends, let's get back into it. So the last time we talked, we talked a little bit about. No, not a little bit. We talked a lot about what did my whittling down to three days a week really look like? What did it take? What was I doing on my work days? What was I doing on my non work days? I referenced episodes 12 and 224 where I get into like if you really want to listen to how I literally spent every hour of those days, you can check those out. I talked about how this process I started at 80 hours a week back in 2004 and ultimately got down to 24. It took me until around mid 2012. I talked about my team structure, what everybody was doing. And I want to share today too, another important thing. So we talked a little bit about model week. I also want to talk about annual rhythm. So I touched on this briefly. But I don't think I got super deep into it is one of the things that also helped me whittle this down and helped me kind of get control of my business was establishing what I call an annual rhythm. So for me as a mom, especially a mom of young kids, but still as a mom of Teenagers now. My year looked a little, you know, a little different, right? Obviously in August when the kids went back to school, I had more bandwidth, I had more time, things felt easier. And then, you know, then you had the holiday season where the kids were off from school. You're doing all of the, you know, Christmas, Hanukkah, all of the things you celebrate. Festivus, all of it. You're celebrating doing presents. End of year business processing was a really crazy time of year. Then everyone went back to school in January. We had the turn of a calendar. I love a good calendar. Page turn. Feels like a new year. New me had all the energy in the world. Then by May, as a parent with kids in school, you know, May is hellacious, right? You've got Mother's Day, you've got all the year end stuff. You have to go to school, watch your kid glue two popsicle sticks together for the end of year celebration. There's the graduations and the violin concerts and all of the things. So May was really crazy. And then they were home during the summer, right? So summer months were a lot more challenging. So I organized my business around those challenges. So the way that I did it is August, September, October, November. We were really heavy into what I called cluster meetings. We didn't do surge where you do like all of your client meetings really intensely over a couple, you know, like a month long window. I kind of did what we called more cluster meetings where we spread it out. So we were doing similar structured style. Again, I get super into it in the systems and scale group coaching program that we're registering for right now. But for all intents and purposes, right, we would see our A clients, then our B clients and our C clients and then we'd have a lull and it was done. So our client meetings were hopefully wrapped up by the beginning of November so that we could use November, December to business process, do important tax harvesting or conversion meetings, you know, like all of the paperwork, stuff like that, making space for those year end projects. Then we hit it hard again in January, saw lots of clients. January, February, March, April slowed way the heck down for May. And then summer was again. We were meeting with a lot of our clients who were teachers or snowbirds or you know, or we had some clients that we would meet over the summer. But again the summers were designed to be more project oriented, creating more processes, more time to work on the business. This is when we would prepare all of our themes for the next 12 months. Like there's a lot you can do in These down windows. So I wanted to make sure I mentioned that because that really also helped facilitate. So a lot of the questions that I got from you guys on LinkedIn and in the Efficient Advisor community on Facebook were, were like, well, when did you work on your business and when did you build those processes and when did you do your CEO time? So I had my model week for client meetings and like when we were in our clusters and then it looked a little different when we were in sort of these lull windows and that's when we did a lot of the big projects, the big cleanups, the big work on the business e kind of things like redoing our entire client service model, stuff like that. Okay, I want to answer a couple of these like additional questions before I go into your play by play. How would you actually create this framework for yourself? So another question I loved was, you know, did you feel crammed into three days or would you have preferred a slower paced four days versus three? So this kind of works for you. I personally would rather go if I'm going to do my hair and my makeup, I and get all dressed up and put on heels, I would rather go really hard for three days, back to back to back to back, get it all done, answer all the questions, do all of the things and then have a catch up day. Since again I worked Monday, Tuesday and then I had Wednesdays off and then I worked Thursday and then I had Friday off. So for me that's what worked best for me. But you just have to do what works best for you. I personally, I did a four day work week and it was a little less, you know, intense, but I still ultimately preferred to just go a little bit harder for three days and get another, you know, eight hour day off. That worked for me. But you, again, you have to do what works with you and your personality. The thing I love about this business is there's a zillion different ways to be successful. There is no right one way to do it. And same thing. And I mentioned this no less than a hundred thousand times last, last episode, but there is no one right way to do this either. So if you want to take a three day work week and use your Wednesdays to work on the business, like, yeah, sure, technically you're working four days. But if you only want to be in the office three days and you want to have a whole day dedicated to being a CEO and improving your leadership skills and getting your business, you know, growth strategized and like, great, do that, you know, it There is no hard fast like, oh, if I say I have a three day work week, it has to look exactly like this. It could certainly be. You are in the office Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Thursday is a work from home day where you're in your pajamas in a messy bun and you know, drinking absurd amounts of coffee and watching a Hallmark movie while you work on financial plans or whatever, you know, whatever your jam is. So it, I want to be really clear that there is no like right or wrong and you have to tweak and you do have to, in my opinion, slowly do it. Like I think you could you rip the band aid off and go from 80 hours to 24 hours. Yeah, you could, but I don't know that's going to be your best bet. I personally think slower adoption and like moving there over time and figuring out what systems and processes you need to put in place makes the most. Personally, I think that makes the most sense. Another question that I had is how many households or families did you serve? Did you have a minimum to work with you? How did you transition any households or families that were not ideal for helping you work towards three days a week? Great question. So I served way too many households in the beginning. Since I was with a broker dealer, I was the stable person in Cincinnati. So I was the dumping ground for a lot of extra clients and I had to really work to whittle that down. Now I don't remember the exact number of households and aum and all of that jazz, but when I was at my three day work week like at the end of my career, so I sold in the sale like, well, my transition finalized December 31st of 2019 when I sold, we had 285 households that we actively served. Now I say that and that sounds like a lot for someone working part for one advisor working part time. But not everybody was served the same. We were a segmented client service model based on revenue per hour. So. So we served everybody fairly but not equally. And we had a very detailed. And again, this is something I teach inside of the group coaching program. And you can probably go back and find some episodes where I've talked about client service model. I think actually I have one coming up in a few weeks where we get into, you know, not everybody has to be served at the exact same way. And it's more about impact and quality of planning versus time spent in front of or with the client. So that's a big loaded question. There's a lot involved in there this episode. I don't Want to make another hour long episode for you guys. So I want to be efficient with your time too. So we had a process that we called our Dear John process. And this was our process of either getting clients. So we really looked at our book and said, who do we not enjoy serving at all? Who, personality wise, just isn't a fit? And then we looked at our revenue per hour and said, this is how much revenue this client is producing. Here's how much time we could afford to give them and be at the same hourly rates. That way our best clients aren't subsidizing our lowest clients. And we right sized our service model accordingly. So for an example, we had a client who had a ton of life insurance with us, like total whole life policies. I don't even think I sold it to them. A ton of whole life policies from a previous advice advisor or universal life or something like that. And we saw them once every three years because there really wasn't a need to see them every single year. But it still produced really great revenue for the practice. So let's say our hourly rate was $1,000 an hour. If we made $333 a year off of this client, we could afford to give them one hour of our time every third year. So the way that we did it was we would send them an annual letter saying, hey, here's where everything is at. Everything looks great, here's illustrations. And that was it. And then every third year I would call them, we'd do a zoom call, we'd talk for a half hour, just make sure they felt comfortable with the illustrations and everything was great. And so I was still making $1,000 an hour off of them, if that makes sense. And then we had other clients that we saw three times a year. Maybe we were making $10,000 a year off of them and we were doing other things for them throughout the year that were a lot more involved. I personally don't subscribe to this. You can only serve 50 people. Well, or 100 people. Well, it depends on what you're doing. So we had some clients that I would. The insurance ex, I wouldn't say was a financial planning client. Like we weren't doing anything over the top for them right now. Of course we would offer it to them and if they did, they would have to pay for that service and blah, blah, blah. But like our true financial planning relationships, you know, we saw them a lot more frequently and it was a lot more involved and there was a lot more in between the meeting stuff and behind the scenes, stuff that was happening. So that's, that's what our practice looked like. And we didn't necessarily have minimums in the beginning. Right. Like when I was scrambling, I was thrilled if you had $25,000 that you were willing to roll over to me. And I didn't want to ever just like launch those people just because they, I don't know, they helped me get my business started. So we found ways to serve them appropriately and if it didn't work for them, that's okay, or we could offer to them. And again, we get into this in the program, I don't want to spend a ton of time here today, but you can offer to them ways for them to bring up their revenue per hour so that you could still continue to serve them well. So there's a lot of very kind ways to do that to protect your time and revenue and your efficiency. And then also, like, not be a huge jerk to your clients. But also then, you know, you do need to eventually remove clients that you can't do a great job for, because we don't want to have anyone in our book that we're just kind of serving, you know, mediocrely, if you will. Okay, so now to address the remaining questions and to kind of get a step by step game plan here of how you can reduce your time. And again, the three day work week doesn't necessarily have to be the goal per se. The goal was to build a business that didn't require me to be constantly available. So those are two very, very different things. And I said this last time, you don't have to think of it in this black and white thing. The goal for me was just to build this business that just didn't require me to be constantly available. It wasn't necessarily about the number of hours per week. It wasn't even necessarily about the like, check your email on Wednesday or not kind of a thing. What I wanted was more intentional work for me and for my team to make sure I was actually scaling myself and maximizing it. Hey, it's me popping in here to tell you something important. You know that saying, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Look, you and I, we both know you can't do this alone. As a financial advisor, you know, your time is really precious and there is just so much to do. Chasing down documents, updating CRM notes, rescheduling appointments, and slogging through your inbox shouldn't keep you from doing the work that only you can do which is helping your clients grow their wealth and achieve financial freedom. The most valuable tool you have is delegation. In the right hire can transform your practice and your life. Belay matches you with US based client service assistants and executive assistants who are background checked, identity verified and experienced in wealth management ops. And you guys, they can start you at just 10 hours a week. You don't have to be ready to go full time to get some support. To learn more, check out the resources tab on the efficient advisor.com or click the link in the show notes below. And it started for me with when I found out I was pregnant with my first son. And then after my kids were school age, it became a way for me to still have the business of my dreams, right? The one that I had goals and visions and knew I could scale and wanted to hit a million dollars and all of that jazz. I still wanted that and I still wanted to feel calm. I wanted to have time to get my nails done. I wanted to go out for coffee with my girlfriends and maintain those relationships. I wanted to do day dates with my husband on occasion. I wanted to have time to go to the gym and work out and have a full life. And this is what worked for me. So again, I want to be really clear that I trust you. You're a smart person, you're running a business, you figured this out. You have to do what works for you. I just wanted to share this to be an example of what is possible for you and just to share my experience and what's worked for me and for tons of advisors that we've worked with through our group coaching program. Okay, so now the cool thing, like so a lot of people ask like, well, okay, how did you position this with your team? And blah blah, blah. The cool thing about being an entrepreneur, right, is that it is your business. You get to decide what you do and you get to do that with, you know, you get to make up all the rules with your team's well being in mind. So in my case, the only person who saw me go from crazy person down to not so crazy person was my director of operations, Amy and Lisa came on when I was already working that schedule. So there really wasn't like this hard sell. Now I was really intentional about making sure that there wasn't resentment. But and I would do it very differently if I had a team and we were all working, you know, 40 plus hours a week. And then all of a sudden I decided to drop down. So I want to talk about how I would, how I would do that. So if you're sitting there thinking like, wait a minute, this feels so stressful. I'm already working crazy hours. How on earth am I going to get all of that work done in less time? You can't, you can't just do business as usual and drop down to a four day work week. You can't just do business as usual and drop down to a three day work week. You literally have to change the way you do business. And one of the things that I might suggest is doing some experimentation. And I think that's kind of what, what we did, right? Where we went from two nights a week down to one. What happened? How do we, how do we adapt? Okay, now go from working Fridays till 5pm till Fridays to noon. Okay, where, how are you gonna get rid of that five hours a week, right? And you can approach your team and say, hey guys, this is what I'm working towards. And I think we want to just. Anytime we have a conversation with our team, we don't want to make it not just about you, like, hey, I'm exhausted, I'm tired, I don't want to do this anymore. I would like to, you know, work from home a couple days a week now. But you all, you still have to come into the office, right? So we have to talk about it in a way that here's what's best for the team and I think you can share, right? Like at the end of the day, it's your business, you own it. And you know, I have like my best friend Jen who has been on the show and I talked about her. She is a mom of four. She works three days a week and she does a half day of working on the business. Outside of those three days, she had a team member who had been a longtime team member. And when she was working down towards her less days a week, this team member had a real problem with it and it sucked because she was an A player. But ultimately it wasn't the right fit. So you have to be surrounded with people that want you to win. And I think there's a big piece of it, of how we set that up. So if I had a team and we were all working full time and I wanted to do that, I would sit the team down and say, here's what I'm thinking. I want to make this a really great flexible place for us to work. I want you to share your comments and your concerns. Like, we could even create Google Doc and you can drop them on there. And I won't Even know who put what in there. You know, I want to be able to understand what your concerns would be since especially I don't have my hands in the day to day operations of all of the little businesses, Right. So I want to be able to zoom out and look deeper at all of the moving parts and figure out what might be some of the complications with this. So getting their buy in and helping them figure out how to facilitate this. So for me, I would come to the team and say, I would love to be able to offer more flexibility. Here's what I'm trying to do. I have obviously spent X number of years, blood, sweat, tears, all the risk. I had no problem sharing with my team on occasion, like don't forget I have all the risk here. Y' all get paid first. If the ship goes down, you're getting your compensation before I get mine. And you know, I did, I reminded them like, hey, this is what we started with, right? I started with 80 hours a week for years and burning myself out and then slowly figuring this out, right. And all of the risk and all of the time and all of the blood was on my shoulders. So I would love to get to a place where, and you can even say like, here's, here's what I'm trying to do. This is what I'm trying to accomplish. I feel like if I'm a more present parent or I get this day off to do all of my personal stuff, that I'm going to be able to be a way better leader for you guys. I'm going to be able to show up with more energy, we're going to be able to get more done. I don't think this is going to impact you. I want to do this in a way where it doesn't impact profitability, so it doesn't impact your bonuses. In fact, I think it's going to make us more money. We're going to figure out how to get more efficient. And then I think you're going to want to offer, offer them something in it too, right? So maybe the whole office, we're like, I'm trying to get to a place where the whole office is closed Fridays at noon. And that would include you guys too and not like for hourly employees. Like, hey, now all of a sudden you're unpaid for those hours or I want to be able to offer you a flexible week. So for my team, when I offered this to them, you know, they all, they all jumped on working four days instead of five. And it was a choice that they got to make. And it was a flexibility thing that we got to provide to them. But we couldn't get to having a Friday off unless we had all the right systems and processes in place. So I would love to see you set it up with your team or even just for yourself as an experiment and then test it. Right. So you could even say like the goal is August through, let's say August, September, October. Those three months we're going to try to do a four day work week and we're going to experiment and see how this goes and what you'll find when you start kind of working towards what would that model week, what look like. You're going to figure out that a four day work week is going to look and feel different. You're going to have to cut like what are you going to cut and how are you going to cut it? This is where you don't want to just willy nilly. And there's definitely something to be said of like, hey, if I just don't work on Fridays from this point forward I'll have to figure out you might just naturally be more efficient with your four days because you're super excited about having your Friday off. The sitting around and chatting, the making extra cup of coffee, the kind of putzing around, maybe playing on Facebook or whatever over your lunch break, that could all disappear and you could very easily tighten up your existing days and have a workday off. So one of the things that I love to do and then we're going to talk about what you need to update. I love to start with a time study and I've done episodes on Time studies and we talked about establishing your annual rhythm. So I would love to see you start with those two things. Do a time study. Have your team do a time study where you are literally documenting every single thing that you and your team are doing in 15 minute increments and being like really honest like I did, I farted around on Instagram for 30 minutes over my lunch break or I played on LinkedIn, not producing content or putting anything out there, but I literally just was looking at stuff on LinkedIn for half hour. I took two hours to do the Joneses plans. I spent 35 minutes in my email like tracking literally everything that you're doing. And I've got a couple episodes that walk you through how to do a time study and then how to analyze it. So let me grab those numbers for you. Okay. It's episode number 224 called Complete A time study to boost Productivity now and then. The very next episode 226 so not the very next but the next Tuesday episode is how to design your time study. So I've already referenced that one. So those ones are going to be great guides to how to actually do the time study for you and your team and then how to analyze those results. And again, just again looking for what can I automate, what can I delegate, what can I delete? Like what are we doing that's not so farting around on Facebook is something you could delete. Maybe you're spending hours and hours and hours doing investment management and you could offload that. That was actually one of the questions that somebody asked me was how did you do your investment management? So in the beginning I did it all by myself and that was on one of my days, right? Like I had a big time block where I was messing around with portfolios and doing the research and then ultimately was able to farm that out. I just did an episode with main management last month that they do an awesome job. It costs nothing. You can have somebody professionally design all of your portfolios. There's a million different resources like Maine, there's TAMPs, there's whatever. We had an in house one at Thrivent that became available and they were able to start doing some of that portfolio management for us. So again, that saved me a ton of time. And they, they did a. They did a great job, right? Like they're like the amount of time and energy that I spent in those portfolios probably wasn't worth the extra teeny tiny percent of return that I got because it was cheaper for me to do it. Like I would rather pay somebody and have that eat into my profitability to do that because I probably spent, I don't know, 150 hours a year messing with these portfolios. And when I got that kind of time back, like so there's all these little things that we can do. So do a time study and not just do a time study, but you have to actually do the analysis of the time study and then start looking at crafting model calendars or model weeks. I want to flip through these questions here and make sure I'm answering everything too. So you want to flip through and build out your kind of annual rhythm like we talked about. What does that look like for you in your office? When do you have the most energy? When are your natural down periods? Are you a snowbird? Do you serve a clientele like teachers where maybe the summer is actually going to be your busiest months, right? So there's all These different things to consider. Then you have to think about current structures. And that includes like, so your four day work week guidelines need to include certain things. Like maybe you need to change the way you do team meetings. So for example, if your default meeting is an hour, you might need to whittle that down to 30 minutes. That's something that we had to do, right? We were doing these team meetings where it was fun and fluffy and we had all this conversation and it was taking an hour and we're like, we have got to get this down to a half hour. We still want to have fun and fluff, but we need to have better pipeline tracking. We need to have and not stuff that we need to all go over in the meetings. But is there a way for us to create something that's visible to everybody, that we can all see and we don't have to go through it case by case and talk about each and everything? Can we come up with better ways for me to get information out of my head and into my team's heads and vice versa, right? So getting really tight on the agenda for our meetings. And the next thing we had to do was update some of our systems and processes, right? So that's a whole thing. But we actually had some pretty good systems and processes coming into place. But every time we whittled it down, we had to tweak them to allow us to get to. Me being there three days and my team being there four days. And so that's the rub with systems and processes is that what got you here isn't necessarily going to be what gets you there. And that's the same thing with team members, right? The team members that got you here might not be the right players to get you to that next level. And those are really, really, really hard truths to hear as, you know, an owner, especially when you love the people around you, that they might not be the right fit. And I heard this once described, and I thought this was really kind of a beautiful thing, that some people and some employees, some friendships, people in your life might be like rocket boosters. They are attached to you and they help you get to a certain stratosphere. And then at some point they fall off. They're no longer elevating you to the next level. And not that they become useless or something like that, but they fall off. They are no longer necessary and it requires something else to propel you to that next level of atmosphere. Some people on our team might not be the right fit. In Jen's case, she had an Amazing employee. This woman was so good. But culturally it didn't work for her. She was not okay with Jen not being there two days a week. And she tried it for a year and a half. She's like, I just want to make sure you're available. I want to be able to talk to you, I want to see your face. I don't want to be here by myself. I don't. And it was all about her. And unfortunately she was great, but she wasn't the right fit for the team. And ultimately, you know, after that moved on. Right. We realized there was some other toxicity and some other things that were going on with her. So ultimately she was a great person to get her to the level that she was at, but not the right fit to get her to the level beyond. So we want to establish some of these guidelines like around meetings and systems and processes. And if you're going to attempt like a 90 day test period or example, we're going to have to think about ahead of time what is it going to take to get you there. So you can't just say, oh, I'm going to start this August 1st. You need to start preparing. So we need to look at meeting structure, we need to look at how do we, how do we spend our time and how do we automate, delegate, how do we streamline that, how do we carve out time to work on the business, how do we create that calendar management. You want to lay out your calendar on a weekly basis or a quarterly basis and look ahead, allotting the necessary time in your schedule for any meetings to make sure that you can still get your work done. So you really need to do, you really need to do change around your work days and how you work in order for this to work. And if you're doing a 90 day experiment, you will want to set a date and time with yourself or your small team, if you have one, to look at what happened over those 90 days and troubleshoot so that you can make it permanent or make adjustments. And I'm trying really hard not to beat a dead horse. But it just, I want to be so clear that you have to think of this as a progression. And it's not a black and white, it's not a pass fail. But there are really kind of three questions that you need to ask yourself. Number one, if you're thinking about reducing your schedule, how will you professionally benefit from a four day work week or from a three day work week, how will you professionally benefit? Number two, how will you personally benefit from moving to a three or, you know, four day work week, how will you personally benefit? And number three, what would it mean for you if you didn't make a four day work week happen or a three day work week happen? In other words, how would you continue to work five, six, seven days a week, late into the night, most weekends? How could that negatively impact you or your business? And I honestly think that's the most important question. And I want to talk to you about why you want to do it and all of the beautiful things that it could do for your business and your personal life. And if you don't ever do this, right, Depending on where you're at in your journey and how you feel right now about your workload and the time you're spending in your business, what could be the negative impact of yourself if you don't do this? So kind of this future pacing idea. So for me, if I didn't change my business, I was looking forward, thinking, I am going to hardly ever see my kids. I'm not going to be wildly involved in their upbringing. And then down the road, as they got a little bit older, it's like, hey, I'm going to burn out. I'm going to turn into a person where my whole identity is this job. I'm going to not nurture my friendships, I'm not going to nurture my marriage. I'm not going to be able to show up at school, at the parties and be the Valentine's Day party mom. Side note, I know how to make balloon animals and I used to be like the world's greatest party mom for school when the kids were little because I would come in and make all kinds of balloon animals. Just imagine like 30 first graders with swords. It's so good. But we want a future pace too. And think like, what would, what will happen if I don't do this? And if it's not a negative enough consequence, Right. It might be hard to adjust. But we also think, like, what would be the benefits? So one of the questions that I got asked was, do you think you could have made more money if you worked like that and worked five days a week? Oh, I absolutely could have. Sure. Of course, if I had two more days to operate at that level, I absolutely could have made more money. Now the question I would ask myself is, could I operate at that level five days a week? And that's a maybe. Yeah, I'm sure I could. But money wasn't really the big motivator for me. So that wasn't really Part of it. Another question that somebody asked is, how big do you think it's possible to scale a business working three days a week? And the answer to that is really, there is no limit. It's what do you want as a business owner? So I personally didn't want to hire other advisors. I didn't want to train other advisors. I didn't want to lose an advisor and have all of their people now fall on my plate and be my responsibility. I didn't want the logistics, especially when my boys were small. And when I sold the practice in 2019, let's see, that was seven years ago, they were 10 and eight, so they were still small. I just didn't want that responsibility. Now if you're like, hey, I want to grow a team, I want to run a billion dollar AUM firm. You do, you boo boo. You can do that on three days a week. There are so many examples of advisors that have done this. Eric Negron, who will be on the show here in a few weeks talking about his personal board of directors concept, he did that right. Like there's plenty of people out. You can still achieve those results with hiring the right people. You have to hire and you have to physically change. So one of the questions that I loved, and I love the way they phrase this, let me find it, okay, what did that evolution require you to rethink and what was your biggest obstacle to reaching the goal? So in order to move to a three day work week or in order to scale a business and hire other advisors, you have to change the version of yourself. Like the version that you currently are will not work at that next level. You have to make it. You have to like really decide that you are going to do this and it's going to require a new version of you. And so for me, that was stepping out of that advisor role. And not that I ever gave up client work, but like having to start thinking strategically like a CEO. I was going to have, I was not a systems and processes person. I had to start building them. It required a different version of Libby. It was easy for me to be like, I love staying up till midnight and sleep until noon. That version had to die in order to make space for the version that could run a million dollar plus practice on three days a week. So the requirement, the biggest obstacle was the version I currently was. So some of the things that I did is I hired a coach. So that was a huge deal for me. I hired a coach, I joined programs, I stepped into that role. I realized that these were skills that I needed to develop, and I wasn't going to fart around trying to figure them out on my own. One of the biggest mistakes I made early on in my career that looking at like, I just wrote the biggest check I've ever written for personal development. I just wrote a check for $20,000 for a program. And I would not have done that 10 or 15 years ago, but I realized what I'm trying to do requires a completely different version of myself. And I am a smart cookie, right? I can figure it out. And you are too. You can do all of stuff on your own. And I promise you that the most expensive thing you can do is do it on your own sometimes. I just did an episode on time versus money and how we all know that we should hire things out, but we have such a hard time spending money on things that get us results faster. And that's one of the most expensive mistakes I see advisors making with their business is they're not willing to spend money on something that expedites the results. And when I finally got over that hump and realized spending $4,000, $5,000 or like in this case, $20,000 on something that's going to get me the results so much faster, I'm actually saving myself a ton of money in the long run. So I had to really genuinely change the way that I thought about money, the way that I thought about time, the way that I showed up in my business, the skills that I needed to develop. So to answer that, that amazing question, the evolution that required was for me to be a completely different version of myself. And I don't mean, like, I had to change my personality and I had to stop being like, fun silly Libby. Like, no, you can still be fun silly Libby and a total badass CEO. Okay, so you need to do a time study, figure out your annual rhythms, establish your model calendars, develop your systems and processes, and get the right people on the team. And that one's the hardest. So there were a lot of questions about what did you delegate and how did you delegate? Did you delegate client notes and follow up and research? The answer is yes, all of it. I literally had to find ways. And I've done plenty of episodes on delegation and even delegation of things that feel really nuanced. You have to get really good at letting other people do. You have to get great at delegation and automation, and you have to get great at deleting stuff that you've been doing for years. You have to learn to kill your darlings and Realize that maybe certain things that you've been doing aren't having the impact that they used to on your clients? Like, we want to solve for impact. So inside of our group coaching program, we do the four KPIs and one of the things that we solve for, we do revenue per hour, percentage of time spent in front of clients, and we do impact score. The other one is number of referrals, but also then percentage of right fit referrals. And they all have different indicators. They're all indicators of something different, but they're all related to productivity and your marketing message. But impact is an important one, is what is everything that we're doing? Like we need to maximize impact. So if you are doing a bunch of things in your business that are cool but not necessarily all that impactful, can you redeploy the time, energy or money that you're spending on those things into doing things that are more impactful? And we need to have the right people on the team. So people that respect the fact that you built this business from the ground up, they respect the fact that you are the owner. And the respect flows both ways. Right? You respect them by giving them some of the benefit of all of your hard work. So for my team, that flexibility was literally everything. And of course we had rules and we had boundaries around it. You know, you couldn't just like not show up for work for three weeks like we had. You know, you still had to put in for vacation and we had to make sure that vacations didn't overlap. But your clients aren't going to care as much as you think they are. Like they won't as long as you communicate properly to them. They don't even notice the difference as long as they don't notice the difference. So you have to have the things in place that make them feel supported, that make them feel like they can get the answers, that make them feel like you and your team are the there to solve their problems and answer their questions and be available to them and they're okay if you leave the office Fridays at noon or if your whole office is closed on Fridays. I am not the only example of that. There are a million advisors who are fully solo, that have no support staff that work three days a week and they just tell their clients, here are the days that I'm in. And again, that might be where you're still checking your email on those off days. So don't, don't get too caught up in, oh, the three day work week has to look like this Like I said, mine was an evolution over time. So hopefully, I hope you guys found these episodes helpful and that we kind of busted some of the myths about what a three day work week looks like. And was it easy to get there? No. It required, like I said, a totally different version of myself. But I'm so glad I did. One of the questions Nick Nielsen asked, he's like, do you regret it? And I was like, what do you mean, do I regret it? And I thought a lot about this. Like, did I ever regret working three days a week? No. Because of the way I built it, I was able to achieve, like, I don't know, for me, money wasn't the goal. If that's the goal for you, then, okay, maybe you might have a different answer. And, you know, people would say, oh, but your kids don't even. They were so little, they might not even remember all that time you spent with them. I'm like, I don't care if they remember it. I do. I remember it. I will never regret spending my Wednesdays playing doggy on the floor with my boys and hearing them belly laugh. I will never regret being there for their first steps. I will never regret being there for their first words. I will never regret any of the things that I did because it all worked out the way it was supposed to. And I could probably have more money now, but. But for me, that's not a driving motivator. What it did for me is it gave me a lot of skills and a lot of CEO mindset that I didn't have before. And I don't know if I wouldn't have had my boys. I don't know what would have been the catalyst to get me there. Maybe just burnout. But the way that I built my business, to me was very sustainable, was a very doable model, and I didn't hold myself to this perfectionist approach with it. Right. If there was something that needed more of my time, I had the flexibility to give it more of my time. If there were seasons where I didn't need as much of my time, great. I had the flexibility to do that. If someone in my family needed me, I had the flexibility to do that. If nobody needed me and I could go all in on the business and I had ideas coming out of my eyeballs and I wanted to create on Wednesdays and Fridays, I could do that too. I could do whatever I wanted. And I think that's the. That to me, that structure of having the three days a week is what gave me ultimately that freedom and that's what I would hope for you too. So I think the biggest misconception about reducing your schedule is that you just rip the band aid off and do it, or that it's something that happens overnight. It really is not an overnight thing. If you're going to do it well, if you're going to do it in a way that's sustainable. And like I said at the top of the episode, the goal was never to not think about work or to never ever touch anything on a Wednesday or Friday or a weekend ever again. It was to build a business that didn't require me to be constantly available. Anyways, I hope you guys found this episode helpful and I would love to know more about your journey to reducing your schedule to building systems and processes. And again, if you need help and you need support and you're ready to make that investment in yourself, I would love to invite you to join us for the Systems to Scale group coaching program. You can come as you are and you can leave a well oiled machine. I'll give you all the tools, the templates, the systems, the frameworks, everything that you need to get there over a 10 month window. And then of course you have access to our amazing alumni community where we just focus for years and years and years on implementation. Thanks so much and I hope you guys have an amazing rest of your week.
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My name is Jen Becker and I'm a financial advisor in Faribault, Minnesota. I went through Libby's program and her coaching is hands down the best training I've had in my 16 years as a financial advisor. Each session I come back with dozens of new ways to streamline my processes and I can get it all done in less time. Libby gives you all the tools and templates to truly build out your systems. I've tripled my revenue while working less since signing up with the Efficient Advisor. Your business is worth the investment of your time, your energy and your money. You will not regret going through this. This program.