For years I’ve been working with private business owners helping them work through their financial life on a total strategic basis. This process is long and arduous. Most business owners we talk with are not interested in having meetings that last multiple hours and processes that take more than one year to show results.
Because I’ve decided to meet our business owners where they are we’ve introduced a different type of planning process to use with them. We call this process Blueprints for Tomorrow. The purpose is to help business owners work through strategic areas of their business in a tactical way.
We know that business owners like to think strategically and act tactically. This means that owners are good at thinking about the big picture of their business, but when it comes to implementing they often try to do too much at one time. In addition, their advisors are often working on the advisors agenda and not the business owners agenda.
Taking long processes and chunking them down to bite sized bites helps the business owner work on small pieces at a time. There is more satisfaction in getting these tactical activities accomplished. In addition, when the business owner gets to choose what part of the process they want to work on, the owner is able to stay in control of their process.
When we convert strategic processes to tactical activities we have a better chance of both adoption of the process and implementation when planning work is completed. Having our business owner Clients choose what activities are most important keeps the business owners interest high in the projects they commit to.
We as advisors often want our Clients to take on large projects that are complicated. Often our business owner Clients would like to take on the large project but they just don’t have the time. Keeping strategic activities tactical allows us to keep meetings short and the amount of time needed for each part of a larger project small.
When I ran my vending company I always had time for a project that might take 30 minutes a week for a few weeks. If someone wanted me to spend several hours a week for many months, I would have to think long and hard before taking on a project like that. I knew that some of these long-term and time consuming projects were important, but I just didn’t have time and in many instances the interest in pursuing things that required a time investment that was too large.
We’ve been finding as we move towards the role of the architect of the plan and not the implementer we’re having a much higher percentage of business owner participation and ultimately better results for both the business owner and our firm. I strongly encourage you to think about chunking down projects. You might just see a higher percentage of adoption and more importantly completion of projects we bring to our business owner Clients.
Josh Patrick
Filed under: Ethics, Financial Planning, For Business Advisors, For Business Owners, Objective Review, Time Management, Value Creation, Wealth Management, collaboration
