You’ve gone through your full sales cycle and finally signed a new client who is a perfect fit for your practice - congratulations! Now, the client service process begins.

Every financial planning firm should perform process audits at least every other year, if not annually. If you keep your scheduled audits consistent, the process will eventually become second nature, making it even easier to maintain.

These five pieces of your marketing are elements that I have found to be the easiest to get off your plate, have a positive impact on your calendar and/or peace of mind, and have the highest ROI.

As 2020 comes to a close, many business owners are looking toward 2021 for a new start. This year has been a rollercoaster in many respects, but it can be useful to look back on what went right (and wrong) during this turbulent time, and set business goals accordingly. Let’s talk about how to set operation goals, evaluate what needs to change, and execute!

Your client service calendar is the backbone of your financial planning practice. Unfortunately, many advisors often start to feel overwhelmed by client service tasks. Before they know it, their business is running them - not the other way around. Luckily, there’s an easy way to navigate this dilemma. Structuring a client service calendar that prioritizes your peace and works around your lifestyle goals can put you back in the driver’s seat of your business.

Today we’re reviewing the key pieces of technology you should include in a standard “minimalist” tech stack. Ready to trim your tech budget? Let’s dive in.

Every business has an onboarding process. However, whether or not careful thought was put into crafting that process is often a different story.

Changing the lives of your clients is the whole reason you started a business in the first place! So, let’s talk about how to craft your client experience vision, and how you can put it into action.

As a business owner, there will inevitably be times when you need to take time off. This may be for a short vacation, or it could be for a longer period of time. Just because you own your own business doesn’t mean you don’t deserve maternity leave or an extended leave of absence due to family or medical problems!

Let’s dig into how you can standardize review meetings for both yourself and your team to make the experience a positive one for everyone involved.

The truth is that hiring can be a pain. Although it’s sometimes necessary, business owners need a better solution to scale easily before they look to hire. The good news is that a solution *does* exist: leveraging your existing processes and technology to free up your time and create a scalable practice.

Most advisors I work with need to reorganize their sales and prospecting process. The truth is that many financial planners begin their practice by signing on people with a relatively ad-hoc workflow. They tailor their sales and prospect follow-up process to each new client, and it works- for a period of time. When you don’t have many clients, tailoring your sales experience to each individual family you sign on is time-consuming, but not the end of the world.

Many advisors assume that once they’ve signed a client the “hard work” is over. Unfortunately, that idea couldn’t be further than the truth! Within the first 90 days, your clients are going through a colossal shift. Starting with the sales process, and ending with their initial plan being presented, they’re fully trusting you with their money, their goals, and their fears.

Onboarding clients can be one of the most challenging processes for advisors to create in a scalable way. When you first launch your firm, onboarding feels easy. Every client is an incredibly exciting opportunity, and you’re more willing to tailor the onboarding experience to their unique needs. However, as soon as you start to serve more families, that practice becomes increasingly difficult.

As a business owner, you know the frustrations of trying to grow your business. Scaling when time and energy are limited resources can be a challenge. Luckily, honing your operations can help.

At Level Best, we encourage our clients to track several key metrics to ensure that their processes are still working - both for their financial planning clients and for their team. Let’s go over why you should be tracking metrics, what to keep track of, and how to store the data.

Let’s dig into why financial planners, specifically, should have a service calendar for their business, and how to build the ideal service calendar for your practice.

As a business owner, there’s a temptation to accommodate every new client who walks through your door. While this is admirable, recreating a custom process for every challenging or complex client can become a financial and emotional drain on your practice.

One of the #1 questions my team gets is: Where do I store my processes once they’ve been developed? It can be frustrating to spend years honing your processes and standard operating procedures, only to realize you don’t have a way to store them for maximum efficiency and accessibility.

This summer I’m celebrating four years in business - which is an exciting milestone for any small business owner! In the past four years, I’ve gone from being a solopreneur to managing a team that now helps me implement client processes and workflows, as well as focus on client service.