How To Multiply Your Income as a Financial Advisor

What do top advisors do that help them increase their business and income each year? They're doing something that any of us can do. And in this post, I’ll share three steps to take so that you can start multiplying your income. Now, the reason to do this is, yes, to increase your income, but also it creates more opportunities for yourself and for your team, if you have one. The growth of your income has less to do about how hard you're working or how many hours you're working, it has everything to do with what you're doing during those hours.

Some advisors make $1,000 per hour, some make $10,000 per hour, and then there's some making $10 to $50 per hour. And you can decide what your time is worth. Doing so takes three steps and I'm going to share that later in the post.

Now, you won't be spending a hundred percent of your time on $1,000 per hour tasks right away. But you can still multiply your income by setting aside just a few minutes or maybe an hour each day, to focus on those $1,000 per hour tasks and ignoring the $10 per hour tasks during that designated time. Doing this will allow you to make a much bigger impact on your business and also on other people.

And here's what I mean: if you spend time on $1,000 or $10,000 per hour tasks, you can then choose to intentionally spend more time on low-income-making activities that bring you the greatest spiritual impact or the greatest fulfillment. For example, you can choose to have a longer-than-normal meeting or go out to lunch with a client who might not be your top client or an A+ client, but because you care about her and you want her to know that she's valuable. This might give you fulfillment, but let me tell you, it's a lot easier to do when you're not worrying about the operational duties or the emails that are piling up while you're out to lunch.

The ultimate goal here is to do the things that you love, that you're good at, and that have the biggest impact.

I’m going to share the steps to spending more time on the $1,000 and $10,000 per hour tasks so that you can multiply your income. But one more thing before I continue: those $10, $50, $100 per hour tasks, they're essential. And there are people who are uniquely suited to do those things amazingly, and they're actually better than you at them. So, they're not bad things. They're important––they're really important for the success of your business. It's just about using your strengths, and also the strengths of your future team, effectively.

Here's how to do it:

1. Figure out your $1,000 per hour tasks and $10,000 per hour tasks and list them out
2. Keep a list of the $10, $50, and $100 tasks to create a future job description or delegation list for somebody on your team
3. Once you’ve delegated, fill your time with the $1,000 and $10,000 per hour tasks. And also make time for the $0 per hour tasks that bring you the most fulfilment or make the biggest impact 

If you're not sure what are your $10,000 per hour tasks, and what are your $10 or $50 per hour tasks, here's a quick video outlining how you can determine what these are for you or for your firm. 

Here are some examples of tasks you could delegate are:

• scheduling your own meetings
• filling out servicing paperwork or new business apps
• fixing the not in good order forms
• answering phones or listening to voicemails
• fixing stuff on your website
• office maintenance things
• even answering the majority of your emails

The $10,000 per hour tasks that you want to spend your time on are:

• repositioning – how you offer your advice to focus on value and communicating value
• speaking to larger audiences, from one to many
• hosting a social client event for your current clients and strengthening relationships
• meeting with your client advisory board and receiving feedback
• salary and incentive decisions for your team
• setting up a long-term strategy
• improving your service offering for all of your clients
• hiring or firing team members
• establishing values and culture or firming up values and culture regularly with the team
• cutting costs

As an example for that last one, we had software that we’d been using for years. We were legacy clients, so we had a much lower cost. Everybody else had a much higher cost and the software company was going to increase the fee by 10,000 bucks. So, I spent an hour on that problem, talked to a few people and we saved $10,000 per year. That's a very clear $10,000 per hour task.

And the $1,000 per hour tasks are:

• meeting with clients or meeting with prospects
• cultivating high quality CPA relationships
• delegating complex tasks
• creating systems so you can multiply your time

That last one's valuable. We talked about multiplying your income. You can also multiply your time learning how to delegate and create systems once so that you never have to do the low-income tasks again.