19th April 2016
Time 4 Advice: How I stopped wasting time doing the wrong things…
Time is your most precious of assets yet so many of us spend too much of it doing the wrong things. How many of you reading this post have actually worked out how your time is utilised every day and asked the question “Are you doing what you really want to and should be doing”?
Many years ago, when I used to run my own financial advice business, I was always stressed by how quickly the day would pass and how little I had achieved at the end of it. This led me to thinking that I could be working smarter and it was then that I began to record how I was spending my time so that I could find out the ugly truth. Two months later, I knew!
The truth was that as a financial adviser, I was spending only 19% of my time doing any financial advising. The rest of the time was spent doing the stuff that I didn’t enjoy (like writing reports, doing research, making sure my files were in good order and so on), stuff that other people could do better than me and much more inexpensively. At the end of the day, my role was to see clients and generate the fees that would keep them happy and the business growing.
In my case, my challenge was easily resolved through the recruitment of a fantastic para planner, who took all of my day to day tasks away to allow me to dedicate my time to seeing clients and professional introducers. The result was that the business became significantly more profitable but most importantly, I was doing the stuff that I enjoyed most. We had achieved a win-win in every respect.
Now many years later, I am still amazed at how many of the people we see are spending way too much time building client reports from scratch when in the majority of cases a more systemised approach could be adopted without the loss of the personal touch. Unfortunately, generating client friendly, personal reports from legacy back office systems is simply not an option. The majority of these systems don’t give you meaningful access to your data and so in order to get information out, you have to rely on the reports that the system provides. In other words, your software vendor is dictating the way you need to present information to your clients, which surely cannot be an acceptable way to work. Clearly it is not, which is why so many advisers write bespoke reports from scratch every time they see a client.
With modern global CRM solutions, like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, on which CURO is built, access to data is unlimited and by plugging in tools like XperiDo, it is possible to create highly personalised template reports in seconds. XperiDo is a truly amazing solution and when used in conjunction with CURO has the potential to liberate you from the daily grind and help you find more time for advice.
How do I know this? Well at Time4Advice, we use XperiDo in conjunction with our own version of Dynamics CRM and I have been able to slash the time it takes for me to create highly personalised proposals for our clients. Before we started using XperiDo, my reports would take me at least three hours to create. Now, exactly the same document takes me only three minutes to complete. What’s more, the numbers are correct 100% of the time.
Technology, when implemented well, has the potential to transform your life, freeing you to spend your time on the things that really matter.
To learn more about CURO and XperiDo, just get in touch HERE.
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