Prospectmatch Advisers That Get Ahead

You have a slow month and you feel bad.  Your manager indicates that if you did this or that, you would have done better. These reactions are misplaced because they assume that you can control your results.  You cannot.  You can only control your activities.  I know this is upsetting because Americans are taught to believe we can control everything sans the weather.  So we believe that if we have a bad month (i.e. slow sales), we must have screwed up.  Not so realize financial advisers that succeed.

You cannot make a client buy, you cannot make interest rates go down, you cannot make your clients’ mutual funds go up 20%. You cannot control your results.

You cannot control client procrastination, you cannot control terrorism, you cannot control the market diving by 800 points or the fact that a rich prospect’s brother-in-law is in the business and has his account. You cannot control your results know the financial advisers that succeed.

You can however control your activities and when you let that sink in, you will have fewer disappointments and you will have more energy. When things don’t go well, there’s nothing you can do about that.  The only thing you can do is control your activities.  Successful financial advisors know the secret formula: activity generates results.  So the secret is, be and stay BUSY.

You can make 25 contacts a day, you can study for the CFP® credential, you can join a study group, you can read a book on portfolio construction, you can have lunch with a million dollar producer, you can set your minimum account at $250,000 but you cannot control your results this week or this month.

However, in the long run, there are activities that generate extraordinary results and make successful financial advisers.  Unfortunately, most producers will never wait for the payoff and will have changed their activities seeking an instant payoff, believing that they can control their results.  When the results they want are not immediately forthcoming, they change their activities again, never realizing the payoff from the previous activities.  The top producers have much more patience.  They select a set of activities and keep doing them, not giving up, until they strike the gold. Have you been like the gold prospector who gave up 10 feet before he hit the vein of gold?

I’m reminded of Peter Lynch the great fund manager who had a simple outlook.  He knew that in the long run, stock prices follow earnings.  He invested in companies with growing earnings. Did he make money every year?  Of course not.  Yet he did not have any notion that he could control his fund’s results.  All he could do was to research companies, do a through job, find companies with growing earnings and stick to all he could control—his activities.  All he could do is sit with the knowledge that the right activities eventually bring extraordinary results.  He of course, had extraordinary long run results managing Magellan Fund; he had the best track record of any fund manager, ever.

Next time you have some ridiculous notion that you could have done something to avoid a bad week or bad month, let it go, unless that something was doing the activities you had planned to do and didn’t.  Just get in gear because in the long run, your activities are what you can control and the universe rewards appropriate activities and delivers success to financial advisers that are most active.

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