Design Your Ideal Advisory Firm Using These 4 Roles.

If you're an advisor and you're running your own practice, then you know full well that there's a lot of different hats that you have to wear. Even if you have a team assisting you, you're most likely spending a lot of your time in some parts of the business that you wish you weren't in, or that you shouldn't be in. I read something recently from Jack Delosa who categorized the four different hats that advisors wear while they're running their business. In today’s post I’m going to go through an exercise to help you figure out where you are spending your time and where you should be spending your time. This is a new way to think about it, at least it was for me, so I want to share it with you. 

The first step to getting to that next level of growth or satisfaction at work is knowing these four hats, or roles, so that you can easily know where you're spending your time now, this week, and then decide where you want to spend your time. 

The Technician

The Technician is the person who's doing the day-to-day work of the business. This could be the advisor duties, which is why we got into the business in the first place, to work with clients. But you may be doing the admin business. You might also be the forms person or the tech person or the office manager or schedule scheduler. All of those things are The Technician. And really the goal is to find the piece of work that you want to do, and that you're good at, and do more of that. 

The Manager

When you hire someone to assist you, then you have to start being a manager. Really the Manager is just the person who oversees the technicians and the work being done. 

The Leader 

The Leader is very different from the manager. This person is motivating people to perform and turning the vision for the firm into reality. 

The Entrepreneur

The Entrepreneur is often the owner – the overseer who is concerned with KPIs and metrics and measurements and key decisions.

So now, the point of this exercise is to take these four categories and see: where are you spending your time this week, or over the last few weeks, or month? Then the second step is to determine where you want to spend your time? Ask yourself what is the ideal amount of time you’d like to spend wearing each of these hats?

If this was helpful for you or if you’d never thought about the four hats this way, leave a comment and let me know!