Discover the 4 Key Steps to Make Next Year Your Best Ever

Rob Brown: Oftentimes, what we see with our clients is one of their big dreams is to build their business so that it could run without them. But you don’t build a business that runs without you if you don’t have a vision for the next few years of adding the right people and the right roles to your team. So, as you kind of move from that dream big step one into visioning, thinking about three years, step two, that’s what you’re doing. And then step three is, okay, now, what are we going to do this year that’s going to put us on track to get that aim even more focused?

Phil Calandra: What we believe and what we teach and what we coach is that there are multiple steps, multiple stages to the whole process. And I think where a lot of people fail is they’ll just have the goal. The elephant wasn’t eaten in a day. It was eaten in bite sized pieces. And I think people miss that.

Intro: Welcome to the Truest Fan Blueprint, a podcast for financial advisors and other professionals looking to get the most out of yourself and your business. I’m Rob Brown and my partner, Phil Calandra, and I promise to walk you through a journey that will allow you to take action in your business and your life so that you can be the best that you can possibly be. Thanks for listening.

Rob Brown: Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Truest Fan Blueprint. I’m Rob Brown, along with my partner, Phil Calandra. Hey, Phil.

Phil Calandra: Hey, Rob. Good to be with you.

Rob Brown: Yeah, it’s great to be with you. This is one of my favorite times of year. During the last month of the year and even into the first month of the new year, I get to do a lot of planning with my clients, helping them relook at their visions and their goals and how they did, and it could be a lot of fun. In fact, I’ve been traveling a lot the last month, visiting with some clients, and that’s been great, letting them talk about what they’ve done, but also how that shapes what they do going forward. And in today’s podcast, what we want to do is we want to share with you what we think are four essential steps for making sure you put yourself on a path to be able to, uh, have your best year ever, because we think every year ought to be better than the last, which makes it your best year. So, Phil, how would you start that process? What would be the first step?

Phil Calandra: Yeah. Well, first, I love that idea, because when you close out one chapter, you get to start a new chapter, and that’s what we’re doing at, uh, year end, and then it’s kind of a rebirth. So, uh, we always look at, obviously, everyone has to have their dream. We call it the dream sequence. Everyone has their kind of long term goals, but don’t just set goals. I’ve come to learn over my years in building my firm and working with people. Goal setting doesn’t really work if you don’t have an additional exercise or additional activities. The key to it is activeness. You have to be active in creating the plans and processes. So if you haven’t done the dream, what we call dream big, if you haven’t done that, it’s going to be really hard for you to put actions and processes in place. But if you don’t do that, you’re going to have a run of the mill, same old kind of year in 2024 that you’ve probably had in the past.

Rob Brown: Yeah, that’s, um, absolutely right. The framework through which you go, the framework that we use in our private coaching, is really intentional and really purposeful. And as you said, it starts, number one with dreaming big. And if you’re doing this for the first time, that’s exactly where you start. But if our clients have been through that process before, what we’re doing is we’re saying, how did the last year stack up against those dreams for the future? Did it move that needle? Or did you find that there were some things that you were dreaming about that you really don’t want to pursue any further, or there are some new things to add. So you have to start by really kind of doing that dreaming process relative to where you are having done the dream big exercise or the dream big process before or not. And then, Phil, even again before, we really kind of jump into saying, okay, these are our one year goals, which everybody wants to get through quickly, because I think a lot of folks that we work with, or a lot of financial advisors and business owners and entrepreneurs think, well, they’re going to tell me, I have to build a 27 page business plan. Nothing could be further from the truth. It only a couple of pages. But once you go from dreaming, thinking out ten years, what the future looks like, and how that relates to what you’ve done this past year, then you have to think, okay, how does that relate to my three year vision? Yeah, Phil, why is thinking about your vision and looking out a few years before you get to one year so important?

Phil Calandra: Well, it’s like Stephen Covey used to say, uh, or does say, he says, keep the end in mind. So if you’re going from point a to point b, obviously, you have to know where point b, where do you want to end up? If I want to end up in the mountains of Colorado, I’m not going to go south from Atlanta, Georgia. So you have to have that firmly in place. And the best part about it for me has always been the destination can change for you. It will change, it will have a shifting over time. And that’s okay if your desired outcome, if your big dream needs to be tweaked a little. But it’s like anything else in life, I correlate it to fitness. If you have a goal in 2024 to run your first marathon and you’re a couch potato, well, then I think you better start with a walk around the block. And it’s a progression. And our businesses, I have found in my nearly 20 years as a firm owner, is that it’s the progression. What we call, uh, the truest fan action plan. It’s the steps. It’s not enough to say, I want to finish a marathon 26.2 miles. You need to then back away from that goal. When I would say back away from the finish line and say, okay, I’m going to, in my first month, increase my daily activity from the couch to two blocks around the neighborhood, then to a mile, then 2 miles, then 5 miles and so on. Um, same thing. Could be weight loss. How many people are going to go through their New Year’s resolution? I mean, that’s a bunch of bs. Don’t make resolutions. But you’re going to say, well, I need to lose 20 pounds, and then you’re going to go right to the refrigerator and you’re going to pull out the chocolate cake. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s what we do. So same thing in our business, same thing in the personal aspects of our life. Set the goal, dream about what it is you want to achieve, and then back away from it. We call that the action plan. We call it sprints. That’s kind of using our vernacular there.

Rob Brown: Yeah. And that’s even jumping a little bit ahead, because when you back away from the dream and think about that three year vision, it’s like creating aim. It’s like saying, I want to lose 20 pounds this year, but the first thing I’ve got to lose is five pounds. Because you can’t lose 20 pounds until you lose five pounds. Right. Or oftentimes, what we see, I see with our clients is one of their big dreams is to build their business so that it could run without them, whether they’re thinking about succession planning or just building a larger organization where they take on more of a, um, CEO role and aren’t as engaged day to day, week to week basis with their clients. But you don’t build a business that runs without you. If that’s your big dream ten years out, if you don’t have a vision for the next few years of adding the right people and the right roles to your team. So as you kind of move from that dream big step one into visioning, thinking about three years, step two, that’s what you’re doing. And then you’re not trying to create extraordinary specificity, but it gets more specific. And then step three is, okay, now, what are we going to do this year that’s going to put us on track to get that aim even more focused into our vision for the next few years and moving towards those big dreams that we have. And those one year goals are extremely important. Whether you’re thinking about growing your revenues, or if you’re a financial advisor, growing your assets under management, or if you’re building your team, um, adding, deciding how many people you want to add to your team, there’s so many things that you can do in that first year. So those goals become a step more specific. And then, as you said, phil, the fourth step. Is that what we call the truest fan action plan or sprinting, where we say, okay, now we know what we want to do for the next twelve months. The first things we’re going to do in the first sprint in the first 30 days to make sure that we’re on track and that helps us hyper focus on losing that first five pounds or running that first mile so that you could run 26 miles down the road, or if you’re building that team, deciding on what the role is and what a, uh, job description looks like for that person and how you’re going to hire them. So breaking it down into those action steps, and not like dozens and dozens of action steps, which you’ll never get done, it’s like, what are the three or four things that you can do in that first period of time becomes so, so important.

Phil Calandra: Right. I think what I couldn’t agree more is it’s simplifying it down, because what we believe and what we teach, what we coach, is that there are multiple steps, multiple stages to the whole process. And I think where a lot of people fail is they’ll just have the goal, even if it’s just the one year goal, and say, I want to bring in 25 million of new assets under management. But then there isn’t any shift in their mindset. There isn’t really any why to it. As Simon Senec says, why do you need to bring in 25 million? That’s a great goal. But then break it down into bite size pieces, right? The elephant wasn’t eaten in a day. It was eaten in bite size pieces. And I think people miss that. And then we’re all going to slip back into our old habits. We’re not going to change our diet, we’re not going to exercise frequently enough or be disciplined enough. I’m not going to prospect, I’m not going to ask for the referrals. I’m not going to commit to the webinar. And then what happens? We’ll do a check in at the end of the first quarter or mid year and say, how’s it going? Are you getting closer to the goal or are you still on the couch? And that’s why people don’t, uh, have the fulfillment, have the success that they really want.

Rob Brown: Right. Because you want to be able to look at the end of that first quarter, and when you ask yourself the question, how have I done towards my goals this year? Be able to say that I’ve accomplished something very specific that puts you on track. But too often people get to the end of the first quarter because they haven’t had action steps. They haven’t been going through this action plan process that we teach, and they go, well, I’m not really making a whole lot of progress, but the good thing is I’ve got nine months left. I’ll catch up.

Phil Calandra: Yeah.

Rob Brown: And then the same thing happens at the end of six months.

Phil Calandra: Six months and nine months. And it’s all about momentum. Right? Watching a lot of football these days because baseball is over.

Rob Brown: Right, rob?

Phil Calandra: So we watch football, but look at a football game, the team that generally has the momentum throughout the first half, second half, that’s generally the team that comes out on top, because that momentum fuels and fuels and fuels. It’ll be the same thing with you’re trying to win the game, you’re trying to have the best year yet. What’s the momentum that’s going to carry you all the way through that? Don’t miss that.

Rob Brown: Yeah. And I think that’s right on. I’m thinking about the clients that I was actually just with the last couple of days. And one of their goals for the year is to revamp their clients service model. What they found is that at least what they think they found is that their clients are actually feeling like these advisors are giving them too much time, that their reviews and some of the things that they’re doing are too frequent. So they want to revamp the model, and we kind of know what we want the model to look like. Um, but instead of just going out and flat out changing it, we said our goal for the year is to make sure that the client service model is as good as it could possibly be. But when we look at the first quarter, look at our first sprint, we’re going to do two things. The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to survey our clients both electronically and through in person questions that we ask during reviews. Based on those answers, we’re going to create a new service model and calendar in that first sprint that then we can begin executing in the second sprint. So that’s not trying to eat the whole elephant, as you say, in that first quarter. It’s like, how do we break that down? And I think, uh, that’s also how you avoid roadblocks, because you’re pacing yourself.

Phil Calandra: Yeah, right on.

Rob Brown: So I think it’s time to land the plane. Phil, I think we’ve covered the steps that we know are so important for putting our audience on track, for making 2024 their best years ever. But we can take that one step further. If you’d like to try out our system, you can actually get a two week free trial. We’re starting a brand new program called the Truest Fan Roundtable. And if you go to truestfancoaching.com freeaccess truestfancoaching.com freeaccess, you can sign up for a two week free trial of the Truest fan roundtable. You can get a bird’s eye view on the exact process that we use to go through those steps that we described that will put you on track for your best year ever.

Rob Brown: Because, as we always like to say.

Rob Brown: Phil, we’re rooting for your success. Take care, everybody.

Outro: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Truest Fan Blueprint. If you want to learn more, head over to our website, truestfan.com. On the site, you’ll learn more about becoming a truest fan. You’ll also find today’s show notes and links to the other gifts and resources we talked about during this episode. Again, thanks for listening. And remember, we’re rooting for your success.