Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors: Covert Techniques for a Remarkable Practice

by David C. Baker

First, make sure your positioning is not interchangeable with more than 200 other advisors, but make sure you can find at least 10 other advisors who do the same thing as you. Not who do it the same way as you, but who do the same thing as you. As a secondary check on your positioning, make sure that there are at least 2,000 addressable prospective clients, but no more than 10,000.

Second, have a simple lead generation plan. This must include the regular development of insight that’s disseminated somehow, but you’ll need at least one higher-impact tactic that fits your personality and takes advantage of the context in which you work: speaking engagements, events, research reports, a book, etc. The goal is to secure more opportunity than you have capacity to serve, because the delta between the two represents your ability to say “no” and maintain more control over your client base.

Third, understand your financial performance. Know exactly what to track, and keep an eye on your cash cushion especially. Reduced to its very simplest, try this. Create a spreadsheet called “Time to Starve.” Add up these things: Cash (what’s in the bank) Savings (set aside for a rainy day in a business account) AR (accounts receivable: billed to clients but still outstanding) WIP (work in progress: work completed but not yet billed) Sales (work that you’re >80% certain of landing) Update it every week and divide that total number by your typical monthly overhead expenses. That represents the number of months of runway.

Fourth, develop a cadence to foster accomplishment. I see advisors waste so much time trying to be more efficient at things they shouldn’t be doing in the first place, and working on things that can easil...

The idea is to divide your week into three kinds of days. The first kind (Preparation), which will comprise three or four days of each week, are the days when you get things off your plate or clear the deck. I call these Preparation days because they are designed to enable you to do something else. These are full of all the little things that won’t change your life but must get done anyway. You’ll do 20 of these in a day and it’ll feel good to check them off, but all together they don’t amount to much real impact. Think of these as the things you do so that you can concentrate without distractions during the second type of day. The second kind of day (Contribution), which will only be one or two days per week, is when you get real work done. These are the days when you are changing your world. You write your marketing plan or you invent a new service offering or you shape some original research for a talk you’re going to give. It’s uninterrupted time because you’ve cleared your plate in order to do some deep work that isn’t otherwise possible. Maybe it’s in the office or offsite. The third type of day (Perspective) is the weekend, for most people. It’s when you become a normal human again, reconnect with people, pursue hobbies, do physical labor, read, and largely forget about work. They are Perspective days because they keep you grounded. You soak things up like a sponge, often learning things that have nothing to do with your professional expertise.

The great advisors provide four things, all wrapped up in a fifth, governed by a sixth. The four things are insight, objectivity, courage, and empathy, all wrapped up in a methodology unique to you, governed by a dismissive perspective about your own future—a disregard for how you will survive.