Key Takeaways:

• Leverage a Dream Team: Building and implementing a highly effective team allows you to offload time-consuming, low-value tasks, enabling you to focus on high-impact activities.
• Empower Your Team: Thoroughly train and empower your team members to become independent and proactive employees. 
• Delegate Client-Facing Responsibilities: Offloading client-facing tasks to your trusted team members ensures smooth operations in your absence and allows you to concentrate on strategic initiatives.

What is one of the biggest advantages of adopting a business-owner mindset? Getting to focus on the areas of the business you actually love. And I’d venture a guess to say it’s not the time-consuming data entry tasks, right? When you’re a business owner, you don’t have to be involved in tedious work, because others can manage those tasks on your behalf. In fact, when you have the right dream team in place, bringing in high-quality prospects is really the only thing you should be doing.

As Michael Gerber puts it, “If you want to make $300 per hour you have to quit doing $30/hr work.”

If you have the goal of continuing to move your firm upmarket, you’ll need a solid support system in place. Let’s take a look at what it takes to build and implement a highly effective team of professionals at your firm.

Build the Right Team

In order to leverage your team to move upmarket, you must first build your firm’s dream team. It all starts from the moment you decide it’s time to hire someone new.

First, you must determine what position or positions you actually want to hire for. Ask yourself what sort of professional would be most beneficial in helping you move upmarket. Is it someone in an assistant role, or do you need another financial professional on staff? An investment manager? An office manager? Identify the tasks that are taking up the most of your time, yet don’t necessarily require your expertise (meaning they can be offloaded to one or more individuals). Build your hiring roles out from there.

Once you begin the hiring process, be especially thorough when vetting candidates. Make sure the person you’re considering is a great culture fit, understands the industry, and is experienced in what you’re asking them to do (or at least willing to learn). Hiring a new staff member is a long, exhausting, and time-consuming process—you don’t want to be forced to repeat it all over again if someone doesn’t work out.

When you find the right person, make sure to prioritize training. Again, be thorough enough in your training to empower them to become an independent, productive, and proactive employee. Set your expectations from the beginning, and let them know how they’ll be involved in helping the firm grow. Despite some common misconceptions, employees like to be included in firm goals and initiatives—doing so can serve as an effective motivator and give others a sense of purpose at work.

I’ve often found that when you empower people, they rise to the occasion, and they typically exceed expectations. Keeping this in mind will serve you well on your journey to moving upmarket.

Refocus Your Time

Once you’re confident in your team members’ abilities to keep the firm operating efficiently on the backend, you can gradually (or not so gradually, if you prefer) transfer some of your responsibilities to them.

You may find that this process is more difficult than you initially realized, especially if you’re used to operating as a one-person operation.  Giving up control can be scary, but that’s why you put so much effort and time into the hiring process—because you need a staff you can trust implicitly to help you operate efficiently and continue moving upmarket. 

Those worries can heighten when it comes to handing off certain client-facing tasks. You may question, “How will clients feel about meeting with people other than me?”

Let’s consider this concern from your clients’ perspective…

Your client hired you because they trust you. They also trust you to hire and train competent professionals who can serve them as well. Keep in mind, your clients are concerned about being served—but nine out of ten times, they don’t really care whether they’re served directly by you or someone else on your team. At the end of the day, they’d rather get an immediate answer to 95% of their questions than wait for you specifically to call them back.

Why It’s Important to Offload Client-Face Responsibilities

However difficult or uncomfortable this step in the process may be, it’s necessary and important for several reasons.

First, it gives you a layer of protection, in the event you become unable to communicate with clients. Say you’re in a car accident, experience a family emergency—or you just want to take a vacation! Having your team handle simple client requests ensures smooth operations in your absence.

And second, the fewer low-value tasks you’re carrying on your shoulders, the more time you have to:

• Focus on warming leads
• Reach out to prospects
• Expand your network
• Deliver a more elevated client experience to a more affluent market

Developing and Leveraging Your Own Dream Team

Moving upmarket is an attainable goal, but only if you take the necessary steps to set yourself up for success. Building a high-functioning, independent, and capable team of supportive professionals is the key to getting low-value tasks off your too-full plate and refocusing your time and energy on the things that will keep you moving in the right direction.

If you’re ready to supercharge your growth goals and build your dream team, the Elite Advisor Success System™ can help. Through comprehensive training, you’ll get everything you need to break production plateaus, serve more clients, make more money, and have more time freedom. Reach out to our team to learn more about the Elite Advisor Program today.