Episode 60: How Quality over Quantity Impacted my Professional Life
I’ve said before, nothing had a greater impact on my ability to achieve my goals than simplification. My recent episodes have focused on personal life and the benefits of fewer material things to reduce the cost and complexity of my life and how this freed up space for my growth and development.
This week I want to look at how this impacted my first business and former profession as a financial planner.
Like most businesses, the beginning was very much a somewhat desperate time. I had no clients, no income and needed to find lots of the former for the latter. The failure rate in that business was extremely high. The company I started with told me that after the first year only 1 of 3 new planners would still be around and by year three, on a third of those who survived the first year would still be in business. I was 24, married and a father so failure wasn’t an option. I was determined to be in the small group who made it, and I’m grateful that I was.
The problem was that each year I had this huge internal and external drive to “grow”. To get more clients. To make more money. It always felt like there was no end in sight. It all about growth, more, bigger, better. Plus the complexity, materialism, and expense of my personal life was driving my professional life and thus stress.
So for years and years more was all I thought I needed, but the growth I was seeking was elusive. Then, the winter of life I described in AfterLIFE, Waking Up from My American Dream, hit me. As I simplified my personal life and did the hard work to know, love, trust, and understand me I could see what was important for my life. After a while I saw how my old way of being professionally, wasn’t in alignment with the new mindset. So I streamlined and simplified my professional life (see chapter 9 of AfterLIFE “Retooling My Business”) and brought my services into alignment with my core values.
I focused in on the client relationships that I had, built deeper connections with a small group of people and provided the best service I could. I looked at every aspect of my operations and eliminated anything I didn’t need to do, automated as much as possible, and focused on building the right team and to assist me. The net result was building a business where I worked less and less each year for the last decade and grew my gross and net revenue each year. By the time I left the industry I had a highly profitable streamlined business that provided an outstanding service to clients I had wonderful relationships with. It would have been an easy thing to keep doing that for another 20 years, but I felt pulled to a life that was inconguent with the attention that business required. BUT this new chapter of my life and all the adventures I’m stepping into wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t focused on quality in every aspect of my life, over quantity.
Like I acknowledged in the beginning, when we first get started in our careers or businesses, there is the hard fact that we do need more just to survive. But if we stay in that desperate more, more, more mindset continually it can have the opposite effect.
Net impact of the changes I made:
I worked more efficiently
This let me make more and work less
I gave me more time to spend with my client when we interacted without stressing about the next thing
I created deeper relationships with my client which helped them and made my work life more meaningful to me. (win/win)
Focussing on efficiency gave my team permission to use technology to get things off their plates that humans didn’t need to do making the work day less mundane (doing this pre-covid set us up for success to adapt to working from home pretty seamlessly)
This empowered them to have more time to spend with clients too, deepening their relationships
Everyone’s life, business, and goals are unique. I’m just offering my example for anyone it may apply to.
Best of luck as you pursue your dreams and enjoy your journey!