Pick good people and get great results
Aug
21, 2019 @ 4:07 pm By Scott
Hanson
As a planner and adviser for almost three
decades, I've become good at delegating. But I sure didn't begin that way.
Like many of you, I started with a desk, a
phone, and a manager who gave me a lot of encouragement, but no leads or
clients. I worked my tail off for a few uncertain years before I saw tangible
results.
Eventually, I had a nice book of clients to
serve and generated enough income to take care of my needs. Referrals began
coming in and life was good.
But it wasn't perfect.
As we grew, my business partner and I had a
small staff, but we were still the ones doing most of the financial work: the
tedious, time-consuming, behind-the-scenes tasks that are necessary to run an
advisory firm.
It would have been easy just to stay on that
path, but we wanted to build something larger. It may sound disingenuous, but
we wanted to help as many people as we could. Of course, we knew we'd benefit
in the process, but we viewed it as the proverbial win-win.
In part, achieving that growth required a
technology play, but a lot of what our business still requires is human capital
— good people. So we began to plow profits back into the business in the form
of payroll.
One of the biggest obstacles that I faced was
letting go of meaningful, important work and trusting someone else to do it —
delegating.
The tough thing about
delegating is that you have to give up responsibility and
fully trust another person to service a client, prepare a financial plan, do
trades and perform other tasks.
It's hard. There's the fear that the other
person might damage a hard-won client relationship or make a trading error … or
worse. But while it may be hard, over my career, I've moved from feeling fear
and dread when I delegated to a place where it brings me joy.
Here are just a few of the benefits you can
reap by delegating.
First, other members of your team can have
meaningful careers. (Watching employees grow is one of my favorite parts of
what I do.)
Second, it frees you up to do the things you
really like doing. (By delegating to a great team, I'm able to do work that
inspires me.)
And third, it's great for your clients, who
benefit from a wider array of services (and better service) and get to form
"sticky" relationships with other people inside your firm in addition
to you. (When I look at the services we offer today, there's no way we'd be
where we are if I hadn't gotten proficient at delegating.)
If you're like most people, the concept of
delegating may sound appealing, but fear of doing it (or a lack of familiarity)
keeps you from moving forward. That not only keeps you from growing, it keeps
you from fully enjoying what you do.
Lean into it. Learn to love delegating. In the
end, everyone will be better for it: you, your employees and your clients.
Scott Hanson is co-founder of Allworth
Financial, formerly Hanson McClain Advisors, a fee-based
RIA with over $4 billion in AUM.
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