Written by: Micah Shilanski
It’s easy to make excuses, to tell yourself head trash stories about why your calendar is set up the way it is. You want to deliver exceptional service, and in a ploy to demonstrate your value, you’ve marketed yourself as available at any time.
So, you meet with clients at their convenience, knowing that an unexpected urgent meeting will kill your productivity for the rest of the day.
Sporadic client meetings aren’t the only issue: just when you feel like you’re about to finally get in a groove for meaningful work, your phone is ringing off the hook with clients who must speak to you right now.
Advisors tired of reacting to their schedule come to us looking for ways to break out of the debilitating spirals they’re caught in.
Surge meeting cycles allow advisors to take control of their calendars and schedules to deliver value to their clients in a more predictable, productive way.
However, there are a few myths surrounding Surge that we want to dispel for any advisor still holding out on this best practice that’s revolutionizing our industry.
Myth: Two meetings a week count as Surge
We talk to advisors who come in and say that they’re solving for A, B, and C, so they can only have a few meetings a week.
A single meeting a week, or even two a day, isn’t solving for anything besides being lazy. You can never get into a rhythm for meetings; even a handful of meetings aren’t enough to help your team find their groove.
When we break this down for advisors, they quickly see that a light meeting schedule isn’t delivering value to anyone; it’s just laziness.
Scheduling less than four meetings daily is just playing office—you don’t have enough time to do anything else. By having light meeting days (less than four meetings), you will get worse at delivering value because you deny yourself and your team the opportunity to build and follow a high-performance process.
You see, you want enough daily meetings to keep you in a highly productive zone. You’re not in a meat factory, grinding things out, but working with intelligent clients, and you need to stay on your toes.
In my experience, all advisors can handle four daily meetings during Surge to stay on top of their A-game without burning out.
So long as you keep those meetings an hour long, you’ll be able to deliver massive value without making your clients glassy-eyed.
Myth: Not all Surges are equal
Sure, not all Surges are created the same, but that does not mean they are unequal.
Just look at the differences between my Surge and Matthew’s. During Surge, Matthew Jarvis, CFP®, only sees clients on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. He has five or six clients daily, but his Surge stretches out a week longer than mine.
During my Surge, I see seven or eight clients daily, Monday through Thursday. We’re both solving for what’s best in our respective practices and are intentional about how we’ve set up our Surge cycles.
When you create your Surge, focus on what you’re solving for in your practice. If you’re being highly intentional, hitting your goals, and growing with only 12 weekly meetings, rock on—you’re doing fantastic!
Myth: You can’t prep between meetings
Advisors tell me they can’t do Surge because they have to spend an hour or more prepping for a single meeting and can’t understand how I could do it in fifteen minutes.
Surge prep doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming—here’s a hack:
Directly after each Surge meeting this fall, you will prepare for your spring meetings. And then you just have to trust that your former self knew what you were doing six months ago because you followed your system.
When I finish a client meeting during Surge, I create a dictation where I clearly outline what needs to take place for the next meeting in six months:
- Here are the tasks to be completed within the next week
- Discuss any items we need to review and list any items we need to request
- Outline topics that will need to be shared for the next meeting and what I think about these topics
When I read these memos six months from now, I’ll know precisely what tasks needed to be completed between meetings, which items required review, and the topics we needed to discuss—plus my views on those topics.
By taking a few minutes after each meeting to create these dictations, I’ve saved my future self hours reviewing and second-guessing because I can trust that I followed the system at the moment.
Here’s a litmus test so you can be sure you’re creating beneficial post-meeting memos:
If you dictated a task and a team member has to come back to you for clarification, you didn’t do a great job on that memo.
If you don’t know what you meant by a memo and are not ready to sit down with a client based on the information given, your memo system needs improvement.
Create a note card to help remind you what items should be covered in your dictations so that you can better create prep memos.
Remember, you’re using Surge to solve scheduling issues in your practice so that you can devote more time to other projects and deliver massive value. This isn’t a cattle-car treatment for your clients but rather a streamlined process so that you and your team can perform at the highest level possible.
Action Items
- It’s nearly time for our next TPR Nation Power Session!
- Block out time for the morning of Wednesday, October 18, 2023, so you can join us for an information-filled webinar all about business planning.