← The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners
The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners
393: The Business Advice I Think We've Been Getting Wrong
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In today's Efficient Friday, I want to share an unexpected mindset shift that completely changed the way I started thinking about systems delegation and what it really means to build a successful business. This realization hit me while I was halfway around the world on an African safari and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. If you've ever felt guilty that your business still depends on you, or that you're wondering how to create more freedom without giving up the parts of your business you love, I I think you're going to like this conversation. I'm also going to walk you through like the world's simplest exercise that will help you identify where your energy is going, what only you should be doing, and where systems can give you the freedom that you were hoping entrepreneurship would provide. Let's dive in. Welcome back to another Efficient Friday where every week in about 10 minutes or less, I want to share a super simple, very tactical tip idea binding says shift, hack, whatever with you that you can implement in your business right away. So if you're a financial advisor who wants a practice that runs without you working 60 hours a week, who wants to have energy left over for the people that you love, you are in the right place. I'm Libby Grywe, host of the Efficient Advisor. I built and sold a 7 figure, 100% referral only planning practice that I grew to 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. A 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, I've got you covered. And I have three quick things that I want to mention before we dive into this week's content. Number one Registration for the Systems to Scale Group coaching program ends August 13th. So we are down to the last week of registration and we only a couple of spots open. So if you are ready to make 2027 your most organized year ever, I would love to invite you to join us. To learn more, you can check out the efficient advisor.com or in the show notes below click on the link or when you head out to the website click on the Group Coaching tab. There is a wild amount of information out there for you. Also the webinar that we did with Asset Map a couple of weeks ago is up on the YouTube channel, so. So if you want to see Asset Map live in action, a very quick and easy way to get started. Basically, Adam pretended I was a client and he created one and showed you his tips and tricks and best practices on how he actually creates an asset map live. You can check that out. And if you don't know Quinn, Quinn is an agenic AI agent that I use in my own business and I'm obsessed with it. You've heard me talk about it. We are going to be doing a live webinar with Quinn showing off some of the new best practices from an advisor. So it's going to be an advisor doing a show and tell of how they use our first 100 days process inside of Quinn. So we are currently working with Quinn to build some Efficient Advisor workflows specifically around the first 100 days. So I'm super excited about it. Quinn is just an amazing software tool. It will literally save you hours, anywhere from 10 to 15 hours a week. And it's so much more than just like a note taking tool. You can talk to it while you're driving, you can text it, you can email it. It is truly an AI agent that can actually execute and do things inside of your business. It is an absolute game changer and I'm super excited to show you and introduce you to some of our Efficient Advisor workflows. You can learn more over at heyquin. H E Y Q U I N Efficient Advisor and speaking of podcast sponsors, I've heard from a bunch of you about your AI governance assessment with T2M works and I'm so, so, so excited. So maybe if you're an RIA owner, maybe this is you, right? You're using all of this AI. Maybe it's a note taker, maybe it's chatgpt, maybe you've built some Claude code. Maybe you're using Quinn and you're getting tons of value from it. But you're wondering to yourself, you know, is our environment actually set up to support this not just from a productivity standpoint, but like from a governance and compl and protecting our clients information. That is where T2M works comes in. They help RIA firms build and sustain a governed foundation so that AI can be used confidently and defensibly with the right information flowing to the right place at the right time. And once I started working with T2M is the first time I heard the word shadow AI, like Google it. It's kind of nuts, y'. All. And you want to make sure that you're not having information unintentionally flowing out of your business. For Efficient Advisor listeners, they offer a free complimentary AI Governance Ass Assessment. You can learn more about them at t2mworks.tthenumber2mworks.com, the efficient advisor. And of course the link is in the show notes and over on the efficient advisor.com under resources. So now, after all of that, let's dive into this week's content, the business advice we need to stop following and what to do instead. Freedom doesn't mean your business never needs you again. It means that your business no longer needs you for everything. And I want to share something that has completely shifted. I had this aha moment and it's been shifting the way that I've been thinking about systems and processes in building a business. And honestly, I might have contributed to some of the confusion that exists out there in the entrepreneurial financial advisor space. So if you've been around entrepreneurship long enough, you've heard the phrase build a business that runs without you. We want to build a business that runs without you. We need to build a business where you don't have to show up. Right. And it's one of those phrases that's just repeated so often that I think we start to absorb this and almost take it as gospel or fact. Right. And I certainly have said things in that direction. I've certainly thought that way. When I was running my own advisory practice, I remember thinking that that was the goal and often that I was failing because my business still needed me. And the other day, so I was on, I took my two boys on an African safari this summer. It was our big last hurrah trip before my oldest is a senior in high school and we were on the safari and we were on this game drive. When you go out on an early morning game drive, it's just you in a blanket. Everybody's in the jeep. It's early, it's like 5am You've got your hot cup of coffee and it's quiet and you're searching and you're just out in nature and there's obviously no phones and no distractions and it was just this beautiful time for yourself. And so we were on this game drive, which by the way, this was one of the biggest, most amazing experiences that I've ever had. I would highly recommend a safari if you aren't even interested in animals. It was still like, it sounds so cheesy, but it was like a life altering experience. It was amazing. But when we were out on this one game Drive. I remember having that moment where I was thinking, wow, I absolutely love being away from my business. And in that very same moment, I couldn't wait to get back to it. I had so many ideas, and I'm so grateful that I have a business that has these systems that allowed me to step out of my business for a couple of weeks and not have to check email and not have to worry about what was going on. I realized that I wasn't striving to build a business that couldn't run without me forever. It was more along the lines of that I wanted a business that could mostly run without me, that didn't require me to be involved in every single thing, in every single decision. I realized that all along, most of us did not get into this business to be absent from the business. We got into this business for freedom. And whether that was freedom of schedule, freedom of vision, freedom of way of doing, freedom of financial gain, we didn't necessarily get into it to be completely absent. Most of us didn't wake up one day and think, gosh, I'd really love to build a company where I'm completely unnecessary. You started your business because there was part of you that wanted that freedom and to do something that you genuinely loved. You wanted to own this business for a reason. There are parts of the business that still light you up and that you most likely want to be involved with. Now, of course, you might want to sell your business someday, or you might want to pass it on to a gen too. Or maybe even your freedom is that you want your role to change over time. Maybe you don't want to be an advisor, seeing 100 clients anymore. Maybe you just want to see your top 20. I think for me, and like I said, my messaging has probably contributed to this in some way, shape or form. But. But we've confused freedom and absence. They're not the same thing. Freedom doesn't mean that your business never needs you again. It means that your business no longer needs you for everything. And that's a very, very, very different goal. And I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to build this business that runs without us. And it almost is defeating in a lot of ways because that's really hard to do, especially if you are the fountainhead. You're the one that started the business. The whole thing flows from you. Now, it's totally reasonable to think your role might change over time or that the ultimate goal of the business might be to sell. But for most of us, when I think about my own business, That I have now this business, the Efficient Advisor. I'm still obviously very involved. I coach, I teach, I record podcasts like this one. I speak at conferences, I create new programs, I lead my team. I make strategic decisions about where the business is headed and I don't want to give those things away. I actually love doing those things. What I wanted to give away were the things that I didn't love. Right? Things like back and forth, emails, scheduling, administrative follow ups, the production of the podcast once I'm done recording the repetitive tasks that somebody else could do. That's what systems has given me. Operational bottlenecks existed simply because I didn't have a do documented process or I hadn't empowered somebody else to make that decision. Once I was able to start giving those things away. It's not an escape from my business. That wasn't what I was doing. It's given me the freedom to spend my time doing the work. That gives me energy, that brings me joy, that totally lights me up. And I think there's a much healthier way to think about what it is that we're building. I can remember feeling like that failure because my business still depended on me. I've had even flickers of that in this business that wow, I still have to be the one to go speak at a conference. Well, yeah, of course, it's my content. I don't want to not do that. I actually love those parts of the business. Instead of asking yourself the question, how do I build a business that runs me? I want you to ask yourself a different question. How do I build a business where I get to spend most of my time operating in the role that energizes me the most? How do I build a business that optimizes me and what I got into this for, because I think that's what we're actually really after. Not absence, really. More just alignment. Right? Because there's so many facets. Y' all know, we wear so many hats as financial advisors. There's so many roles in the business that you are fulfilling. So I think it's more about align as opposed to absence and not necessarily stepping away from the business in its entirety. Stepping away from the parts that no longer require your unique talents or even if they do, hiring somebody to do those things, the things that just don't make you happy, that aren't in alignment. I have a simple exercise that I would love for you to do this week, for the next week, maybe you're doing a time tracking or maybe you use a planner like I Do I want you? As you're going through your schedule, as you're going through your model week, as you're going through your day, just take note. Two columns. Things that give me a ton of energy, things that drain my energy, answering emails. If that gives you energy. I mean, you do you reviewing plans, crafting financial strategies. Do you love being in the weeds on investments? Do you love scheduling clients? Do you love putting out fires? Do you like placing trades? Once you make those lists, then at the end of the week, go back and ask yourself three questions. Number one, did this action get me excited? Did it also bring me joy? Did I feel like I was in my flow state? Second, am I the only person that can do this thing? Or could someone else with the right systems, the right training, and the right expectations take this off of my plate? And then lastly, if I stop doing this six months from now, would my clients even actually miss me doing this? Or would they simply just benefit from having a more focused, more energized, more motivated and excited version of me? Because your clients don't need you scheduling appointments. They don't need you tracking their paperwork. They don't need you answering routine questions. They need you being you. They need the best version of you sitting across the desk from them. And if that means being able to take two weeks off, if that means being able to take a month off like I did in my financial advisory business, one of my favorite times of year for my business was stepping out of it for a whole month. Number one, it operationally allowed me to just crush it from the operations standpoint because my team had to be equipped to do all of the things for an entire month. But it gave me that margin. It gave me that white space. And I always came back from that month wildly refreshed with lots of new ideas and new energy towards the business. And I felt like I was running my business instead of it running me. Because I think at the end of the day, the goal isn't necessarily have a business that runs without you. I think the dream is to have a business that gives you the freedom to show up every day to do more of the work that you love doing and a lot less of the work that you don't love doing. And for you to run the business instead of it running you. Right. We want to build with the goal of protecting your energy. Because when we start to lose energy is when we start to burn out. And I talk to advisors all day, every day inside of our group coaching program that are on that bubble. Right? They're right there on the edge, on the verge of burnout, and it's not an enjoyable place to be. Right. And I'd rather you get ahead of that. And I think it starts with the mindset and it starts with the way that we're thinking about our business as opposed to trying to build a business that runs without us building a business that we are running instead of it running us. And if you need help figuring out where do we start with systems and processes, I would love to invite you to join us for the Systems to Scale Group coaching program. Our August 2026 systems to scale group starts August 20th and the last day of registration is coming up. It's Thursday, August 13th. So we've got just a short little window left here for registration for this round and basically what we've done is we've created a container of time for you to work on your business. It's a couple of hours every week of very focused, very dedicated time and we follow a very specific framework to make breaking down your processes super easy. And what I love about this round is we've been redoing a lot of the content as we've continued to grow and expand and have more I've had more margin and more bandwidth in my business to be able to add on to the program and make it looking at it through that lens of unreasonable hospitality. So how do we marry client experience and how do we marry efficiency in our office? Because we don't want to be so efficient that we're missing some of the integral pieces that make our clients feel connected to us at that human to human level. So I'd love to invite you to join us inside of our Systems to Scale Group Coaching program. You can find out more about that in the show notes below or over atthe efficient advisor.com under group coaching.
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Hi, my name is Todd Pisarczyk and I'm the CEO at Momentous Wealth Management in Vancouver, Washington and I just finished the Efficient Advisor Systems to Scale Group Coaching program. I was struggling with getting all the things that I've learned over the years onto paper and into documented processes whenever a client came in. I feel like we did a really great job, but everything we did, we just did intuitively based on things that we'd learned over time. We realized that in order to take our firm to the next level and be around long term, we needed to get those processes out of our head and documented. After 10 months working with Libby, I feel like we've accomplished this. We now have systems documented for everything from when a client first calls us all the way to what we're doing for reviews for the next three years. We're even in the process now of building these into our CRM and getting many of our tasks automated, thanks to people that we've met through Livy's program. What I like most about the program, that it's actionable. Every week you're going to get an assignment and you're actually going to be working on things, and the pace I felt like is perfect. If you're even thinking about this, I would highly encourage you to join. I didn't even realize how bad I needed this program until after I got started.