Get out of your DEN

From working with financial advisors for many years, I have observed many justifications for spending the majority of their workday in the office. Here are six of them:

When you’re not in your office, things aren’t getting done.

• You’re too busy to be out of the office on a regular basis (or even to have clients come into the office to visit you for lunch).


• Your assistant can’t manage the office without you there.


• There’s too much going on in the markets, and you can’t miss it.


• Others in the office need access to you at all times – that’s how important you are.


• You talk to clients on the phone all the time, and that’s plenty.

Do you have other excuses—oops, I meant to say reasons—why you don’t see clients every day? (Write them down here.)

• Reason #1


• Reason #2

Now look at that list, and ask yourself this: “Why am I tolerating a work paradigm that doesn’t allow me to tap into the most important asset I have—my personal relationships with the people who I depend on for my business?

Give yourself a minute to contemplate that question fully.

Did you come up with a really good reason for maintaining the status quo?

As importantly, can you picture activities that you’d like to do out of the office with your clients and prospective clients, if you allocated more time in your week to do so?

For example:

• Visiting the business of one of your business-owner clients and ask for a tour to his office. Understand the way he functions, make it a reason to understand his style of functioning.


• Attend the performance of your best client’s son/daughter.


• Have coffee, as a small token of thanks, with the attorney who continues to provide you with high-quality referrals.


• Or something else that you’ve long intended to do but never got around to it.


• Having a discussion with clients on how you want to add value and if they can be part of it. An ifa actually has an advisory board of clients.


• Put in efforts to improve yourself and communicate it to the client.

Here’s the thing. The phone is great for transactional business, not for relationship building. One can touch base with mass market by phone, a call, whatsapp message etc. but your important clients need you showing up there.

What to do?

Make a commitment, right now, to increase the number of in-person client meetings by four times you have in an ordinary month, preferably over lunch or dinner. A restaurant, their office, your office—the location doesn’t matter.