The Journey To Scale

Most weekends, I teach my daughter a little gymnastics in our lounge room.

Before you laugh – yep, I know I don’t look much like a gymnast – I actually did teach gymnastics to kids back when I lived in Japan in the late 90s.

My daughter is, like many four-year olds, as keen a learner as you’d want. Everything is “Awesome” and “That’s great, Dad”, mixed in with high fives and smiles.

The one thing she isn’t good at though is learning step-by-step.

She wants to do a no-hands front flip before she learns a forward roll.

She wants to do a handstand before a monkey jump.

But progression is the key.

I used to be a “skim learner”. When I had a problem, I’d go searching for someone who looked like they had what I wanted, try and understand the one thing I thought was the “secret key” to their success and… wonder why it didn’t work for me.

What I better understand now is that to get to where they were involved a progression.

They learnt certain skills that gave them the opportunity to master others.

They built marketing foundations that resulted in the ability to master other lead generation tactics.

They built systems and processes into their business, that later enabled them to work with clients in a way that anyone who tried to copy (without the same systems) couldn’t.

The focused on assembling a great team only once they’d mastered having a business that could support the investment.

You can have the best strategies and tactics in the world, but if you’re implementing them at the wrong time, it’s unlikely you’ll get the same result.

You may have seen this with clients who come into you, keen to talk about putting together an investment portfolio, when they’re deep in debt, utterly exposed to even a small financial shock and don’t have a single dollar that isn’t being spent

Still, they want to talk about buying property in the new SMSF you’ll set up for them (balance: $80k). Great strategy, but maybe there are a couple of others to look at first?

Related: How to Have the Perfect Restart in 2018

Same deal with building a scalable advice model.

There are seven stages along an advice firms’ Journey to Scale.

This video will share what to focus on at each stage, what to implement, KPIs to track and some rough metrics around clients numbers and month-to-month revenue targets.

Implement the wrong strategies at the wrong time and you may find yourself stalling en route.

Move too far through the stages whilst ignoring a strategy from an earlier stage, you’ll most likely hit a wall later on.

Nail it at each stage though and you’ll find yourself methodically taking the fastest route to having your own scalable advice firm.

As Tony Robbins says, “Most people overestimate what they can do in a year, and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade”.

If that idea makes sense to you, this will bring it all together .