#338 Steve Salvia – Transcript

Ben Nash
Hey guys, Ben Nash from the XY advisor team and today I’m really pumped to be here with a good mate of mine and business coach Steve salvia Steve is a coach with and founder of Blackwing profit consulting. He was a financial planner for two and a bit decades before that owned accounting businesses mortgage broking is he’s been in the game for for a long time, but he’s turned to the dark side slash the bright side or something, depending on how you look at it, I suppose a bunch of years ago, and now helps financial planners do better business. So Steve, mate, thanks for joining us.

Steve Salvia
Great to be on with you, Ben. Been a long time so pumped to be having a chat with you. And you know, there is a dark side and a light to every single coin. You know, that

Ben Nash
depends on you, I think you asked any financial planner, it depends on which day of the week you ask them as to what they might May, obviously you see inside a lot of advice businesses through the work that you do. So I thought maybe a good place to start is what are some of the trends that you’re seeing in the market at the moment?

Steve Salvia
I look at this, there’s so many things going on. Yeah, everyone, everyone knows what’s been going on being the last, as you know, as well, last night, and much two years, even, you know, go back to three years, probably now if you think about it, you know, there’s so much going on with all the regulators and the decision makers and all the powers that be have put all this all these rules and regulations, and just made it really really difficult as we, as we all know, made it pretty difficult to be a financial planner. So there’s a there’s quite a few trends that are happening on the on the good side of things, but there’s also what I’m finding a lot of Ben is that people are spending a lot of time innovating, innovating, you know, everyone’s trying to find better and smarter and faster ways to do things, you know, we’re sort of getting caught up a lot of the time, what from from my discussions with planners anyway, getting caught up in the kind of the back end and the tech and putting it all the all the tech together and things like that. So I’m finding that a lot of a lot of time and effort is being spent on that kind of the back end that that tech stacks and the putting all that side of things together, which is really important. Of course, yeah, you have to do that. And you’ve got to have your text read that, right. But what I’m finding is it’s taking a lot of time and effort away from the kind of the front end of the business, you know, it’s like, it’s like being an opera singer. And there’s a front stage and there’s a front stage and backstage of the bit of the business and that’s financial planners should be really spending most of their time on the front stage, you know, in front of the crowd during the gig, you know, getting the applause and you know, getting Rosa thrown on the stage and all that sort of thing. You know, that’s, that’s what the value is, you know, as as far as that goes, but we’re caught doing that the back end the props and the makeup and the the cleaning up afterwards and things like that, we get caught doing that, you know, if you think about the at the Pareto principle, I reckon it’s an 8020 flipped in inversely, I reckon if you spoke to most financial planners, generally, it’s going to be fairly close to doing that, you know, 20 to 30%, client facing income producing Business Growth activity, the front stage stuff, and they’ve doing 6070 80% of the back stage stuff as well. Even if they’ve got a team they see they seem to end up getting there. You know, everything seems to land on their on their lap, they the financial planner seems to be the bottleneck. They’re not and tell me tell me if I’m right or wrong, you know, you’re doing it dates, it’s a big thing I’m finding is that we’re, we’re spending so much time on the back end. And I’m not as focused on the front end, where the where the where the humans are, where the people are. So yeah, going on, that’s for sure.

Ben Nash
I know for us that one of the things that’s really helped over the last little bit is building a leadership team inside the business and starting to offload some of those things. And I think as financial planners, particularly for the business owner, financial planners, it’s like you’re looking to grow a team. And it’s like you need, you need a role field. So you start hiring for a role. But what happens and this come a saying from a mate of mine, that you end up being like the guru with 1000 followers that you’ve got, might have a great paraplanner, you might have a great CSO, or you might have a great marketing support person, but at the end of the day, you’re still the guru. So everything that happens as you say that it all comes onto your desk. So now what we’re doing is we’re trying to go well, actually, let’s you own that. And then you can be the guru. And then people can come to you and you sort of slowly sort of trying to remove yourself from those things. Because all the things are good things. They’re important things, but it’s like yeah, do they done by you?

Steve Salvia
Do they have another important, even though they’re all good and important? Do they actually have to be done by you? And I think I think it’s also important to actually for for you or me or the adviser to actually position these other people is just important, just as important as what the actual advisor is. So it’s a lot about how the advisor and the advisors normally got the relationship with the client. It’s really a lot about how they actually position that person to the client as well. So we want to try and it’s all a lot of it comes down to actually training up the client. So if the client is trained up right up front to come to you as the go to person, well, then naturally the the client or the prospect is going to come straight to you as the go to person. But if they’re educated right up front, if you come to me for these specific things, technical strategy, got a question to ask around advice, or, or got a problem or an issue you’re trying to fix from, from an investment point of view, or whatever it happens to be, come to me, come to an on front desk for this and that. And the other thing, I want to change tax file numbers or small admin things, if it’s something to do with the plan that we’re working on, go to Emory, you know, this, this sort of thing. So actually positioning, what people’s roles are, and actually introducing them really early in the piece and getting the client to actually buy into that as well.

Ben Nash
You forgot to mention the go to for recommendations around beard balm, which is a role that I’m happy to and like to continue to fulfill in the business? Well, I

Steve Salvia
think, again, if you’re if you’re doing more than 20% marketing around the beard balm that that could be a definite side hustle for you.

Ben Nash
Right, what do you what are you seeing is the biggest roadblocks for good financial planning businesses at the moment? You mentioned a few things there already. But what are the what are the top ones that you say?

Steve Salvia
Look, it’s funny, we started off with that, because I really I recommend and the biggest roadblocks that we’ve gotten the clients clients are in control, where financial planners aren’t managing their diaries, they aren’t managing their time, they’re not setting boundaries with with clients. And therefore, what’s happening is from what I’ve, what I’m seeing, or what I’m hearing in my discussions with, with financial planners, you know, financial planners are getting pulled from pillar to pillar in a post. So one thing that’s really important, one of the things I teach my my coaching club, guys, my black green guys is that, you know, you need to be the one in control. And we kind of have a little phrase and Ben, you know, from our work together years ago, you know, you I always just I always say, this is how it’s done around here. So the way we do it here at XYZ in financial planning is here, we do it this way, and this way, and this way. And Mr. Client, if you’d like that, that’s great, that’s good, that’s gonna work really, really well. And if you don’t like it, the way we do it here, well, then that’s fine as well. But we’re probably not going to have a long term relationship. So if the way that you do it is positioned right up front, you that gives you control, right, and that needs to be done right up front. It’s kind of like he or she who makes the rules wins the game. So it’s either it’s either the plan is in control, or the business is in control, or the client and the client is in control. Now, a lot of the a lot of the politically correct, correct, a posse out there, right now might say, Oh, well, it’s all about the client, it has to be about the client, we have to, we have to sort of think about everything, it’s got to be to deal with the client. And that’s fine. And it kind of makes sense. But at the end of the day, if you run with that, you’re then the client becomes a leader and you become follower. And we don’t have to wait here we go off on tangents and get in rabbit holes and get pulled from pillar to post as I mentioned, so, so being in control really, really early in the piece. And it’s not, you don’t it’s not done in a router, or a nasty way or anything like that. It’s just kind of sitting down the ground rules straightaway so that you are the leader and the clients are the ones that are following you. Because we’ve got a business to run bit. You’ve got a commercial business around. So here’s how we do it. If you like it, that’s great. If you don’t like it, that’s cool, too. But this is how we this is how it’s done right here, that sort of thing. So so that’s a big one. Yeah.

Ben Nash
Yeah, I think absolutely. People, people come to us, because we’re the experts. So it’s like, I was having this conversation with one of the guys in our team yesterday. And it’s like, all they come to us because they’ve got these frustrations, and they want this help. And then you start talking to them about how we do it. And then all of a sudden, they become the experts. And they’re going on we do this and it’s working. It’s like well hold on a second. But why did why didn’t you mention that all these things aren’t working. So do that. So I think you’re absolutely right that you got to lead because if you don’t like if you end up working with every client in exactly the way that they think that they want to be worked with, then you’re gonna have to charge $30,000 for a financial plan, because you’re going to run the most inefficient business on the planet.

Steve Salvia
Well, there’s two things with that being the first one with with Mr. Client, what you’d be saying is, I always think about to know and not to do is not to know. So just because they know it. And if they haven’t done it, well, they don’t really know it at all. Because if they didn’t know what they should have done, why now why they’ve been talking to you in the first place, right? So to know when not to do is not to know. And the second part of it is we what we talk about in coaching club. There’s this thing that they talk about, you need to have a bespoke business, right? You want to be bespoke, you’ve got to be specific to the client and everything’s about that specific client and every single client is different and, and everything’s got to be bespoke. And that’s true, and it’s all well and good. But the reality is you’ve also got to run a commercial business as well. So the phrase that we use at coaching club is we talk about bespoke cookie cutter, right bespoke cookie cutter, we want a bespoke cookie cutter business. So the advice and the strategy and the tactics and the names and addresses and all the all the details, critically and absolutely bespoke to the client. But we’ve also following a process that we use within our business, which makes it much easier to run the business, it streamlines everything you that way, and what you can do that you can then lead the client on a conversation, which covers off all the things that you need to do, and uncover all the all the bespoke and very specific things that the client needs to share with you and get the questions that you need answered. But it also allows you to run your back office much more efficiently. Do the do the do you file notes in a much more efficient way? Do you hand over to your power planner in a much more efficient way, because the the process and the strategy and the systems are, I’m using the word cookie cutter, but you know what I mean, they’re very similar. But they’ve got Yeah, but they’ve got bespoke details for each and every client. It makes the handover of the power plan, power planning. And the strategy node sees it and makes the productions of the power of planning and the strategy notes, it makes the production of the admin and the paperwork that you’ve got to do easier because you’re working on bespoke cookie cutter. So if you go again, if you’re going off on 10 2015 different tangents or it’s a different method or a different way each and every time that you’re talking to a client it’s going to be it’s too, it’s too hard to streamline. It’s too hard to it’s also too hard to system hard to systemize and automate as well. So thanks.

Ben Nash
Sorry, I was just gonna say it’s impossible to train a team around that, that if you if your process is consistent for every client, it means that whether it’s the associate the CFO, the power planner, the admin support, like they know what’s coming, and then they can plan their work appropriately. If everyone’s like, how do you run a team around that?

Steve Salvia
This is how it’s done around here. So this is the x y Zed financial planning way. And if the prospect or the client likes that, that’s great, but if they don’t like it, that’s great, too. But this is how it’s really important. So that’s number one. The other probably thing Roblox is I reckon, and we kind of touched on a little bit, I reckon poor delegation, I reckon that’s it. I just, I’m just finding more and more that financial planners are a little bit maybe I don’t know, if it’s the word timid, or it’s a little bit different environment from five or 10, or 15, or 20 years ago, you know, we’re, we’re really conscious about the feelings of the people that were, that are working with us that are in our team. So that so our delegation skills have dropped off dramatically. So it’s like, I know, I’ve got to delegate that. But I’ll get it done. I don’t I know they’re overloaded, or they’ve got too much to do, or they’re working on this absolute, I’ll just do it myself, right. And the reality is, we get back to that bottleneck where it everything ends up on your desk, or it doesn’t actually end up on your desk, it ends up in piles on the floor in that as you walk in your office, right and, and that piles up and then the next client comes in, and the next client comes in, and you’ve end up with all these piles of work to do because we haven’t got the delegation skills down pat. So one of the things I’d suggest to everyone guys, you really need to have a think about your delegation and become a you’ve got to become a master delegation these days, you know, you want to be you want to be focused on the hype, we talked about, you know, what should What should a high end professional financial planner be doing day to day, think about what are the core activity, it should be income, so it should be income producing client facing business growth, relationship, building, strategic and technical, you got to do some compliance as well, because that’s part of it as well, you know, high end financial planner activities, right? And then there’s the rest. Right now. There’s all the rest all the stuff. And all of that stuff is really, really important. But should it be done by the financial advisor? It should, it’s either it’s been, it’s like, you know, and I know we don’t charge like this. But if I asked if I asked the financial planner, I’ll ask you been like, Man, if I had to ask you, I know you don’t charge like this. But but if I asked you what you would, if you were charging out by the hour, what would you charge? What would you say? Roughly?

Ben Nash
1000 bucks. Good.

Steve Salvia
2010. That’s better, because it takes it around. But yeah, but you know, if you’re charging by the hour, you know, most financial planners that say around 303 50 Mark, right, roughly. So it’s either a 303 $100 an hour job, or it’s a 40 or 30 $30 an hour job. So yeah, financial, spending 20% of their time roughly doing the $300 an hour jobs and only an 80% of the time doing the 30 $30 $40 $50 an hour jobs. It doesn’t make sense. So we’ve got to flip that we’ve got to flip the switch somehow you can’t avoid, you can’t do 100% of those jobs, because some of the things just have to be done. But if we can get to a 6040 or 7030 what you do on the $350 jobs, our jobs rather than the $35. Now jobs will be a game changer for everyone. So this is the delegation part of it. is really, really important.

Ben Nash
Yeah, I think the other part of that is as well, particularly for business owners, but for financial advisors, and really for anybody, I think in any role in the business that another coach once taught me that it’s like read, you have read tasks and green tasks, it’s like green tasks are the things that are that you enjoy that you feel like you’re really good at where you feel like you’re really happy when you’re doing them. And then you’ve got red tasks that sap your energy. And if you do a diagnostic and look back at your week, and go, what the tasks read, and what tasks are green, more red, you got there, the things that you should be delegating so that you feel happy in the work that you’re doing as much as the value. And I think that’s critical as well. But you don’t want to be doing things that you’re not happy doing. Because otherwise you’re just going to be for NP at the end of the week.

Steve Salvia
We what we do one of the first exercise when I work with a new client, and I’m not sure I think we might have even done this before we do this exercise called the love hate relationship. So you’ve got to build a love hate relationship with your business, right? Because so what you want to do you want to identify what are the things that you love in your business? And then what are the things that you hate in your business? So when you think about delegation, well, the first thing to do is you’re going to delegate the things that you hate doing, we’re going to find the people to do it, to delegate it or to outsource it or whatever. So so the first thing to do is figure out what is it that you like, but not not only what is it that you like? It’s what makes money? What grows the business? What builds relationships, what’s client facing all of those things? Yeah, they should be in the love side. And then all the rest is the, the hate side of it. And fan, they’re the thing things that first go at first. Now the reality is you can’t just get rid of every single thing that you hate, and get rid of that tomorrow, or next Thursday. But you might have a list of 12 things there in the in the hate list. And you say, right, okay, this month, I’m going to find, I’m going to get rid of three of those things and get those off my list and delegate those to someone. But what happens is when you get the right people and you build your team, if you build the right team around you, what you hate is probably what someone loves. So that becomes it becomes a higher level thing in their lovliest that you don’t want to do. But then they written know that they should be doing it they really enjoy doing. So you actually position it like hey, I don’t like this thing. But you’re the expert of this manual, go ahead, this G You’re fantastic at this, this work, this is what you should be focused on this so that I can get out and go out and grow the business and do all the things that I need to at the top end. So if it’s if you build the right team, you can you can position it pretty pretty well. One of the big things Ben and I, this is years ago, years ago, we worked out that I was getting like 60 7080 emails daily, you know, and you know, I opted in for things and you know, I was getting all these emails and all the emails and client emails and everything. And my email address was on every business card and letterhead and all the all of the stuff. So So and everything was coming to me and of course I couldn’t get through it all and then it go to the next and then all of a sudden at the end of the week, I’d have to sit there and wade through all these emails. So what we decided to do we we decided we gave me what we call it what we call a secret squirrel email that only I have and I give to my friends and my my family, my wife and my kids. And then we had another business email address, which was Steve at Southern financial records. So Steve at Southern Financial and that Steve at Southern Financial came into Daniella at the front end. And then we we came up with this thing that we called the four days So Danny up so I was so I ended up getting three or four or five emails from my family, my mom, right and Daniella got the other 75 emails. And she says she did four things. We call it the four DS so what happened with number one? It was Daniella did it herself. Number one, so she did it herself. So let’s do it delegate it, decide when or digit so she either did the thing herself, she delegated it to me or to someone else if it needed to be delegated to someone in the office. Number three, it was decided when so something that I needed to see she would put it in the calendar that you need to email Fred back at 1110 today, so she put it she actually diarize it for me, or the fourth one was digit. So she’d rather do it herself. And we got to a point where Daniella even had an email address. So some I get an email to say, Hey, Steve, here’s that. Here’s that tax file number you asking for? Danielle would go back on the email and say, Hey, Bob. Hey, hey, Bob, thanks so much for that. I’ll pass it on to Anne Marie, appreciate you getting it back to me so quick, Steve. And she’d signed my name at the bottom of it and send that thing out. Because Steve said he didn’t need to know that it did a telephone number or a payslip would come in. She got it. It went straight to Angela out in the power planning department and Steve was none the wiser. In the meantime, I was out there, building the business, making income seeing clients doing all the growth oriented things, and that email I didn’t even need to see. So that was a really cool one. The four DS is a really good one as well, why I didn’t need to see all those emails and I just got them out of my life basically.

Ben Nash
Yep. Yep. Yeah. That’s why it took me so long to actually pin down you for a calendar invite for today because you still don’t have an email that the hard

Steve Salvia
access might If you don’t have your look, it’s hard. No one knows my secret squirrel address. And it’s pretty hard to keep me out. So that’s, that’s that’s part of that that’s part of the scale its scarcity thing as well. If you if you want to have an appointment with me, find me you’ll know how if you want me, you’ll find me that sort of thing.

Ben Nash
Save what some, what do you see? Obviously growth is a focus for people at the moment. But what do you think of the fastest ways for people to grow?

Steve Salvia
It’s Look, that’s it’s an interesting question. The reason I say it’s an interesting question is because it the fastest way to grow is it depends on what level you’re at. Right? So we talk about, we talk about six levels of a financial advice, business or a career even like, you’re either at the sort of the foundations part, you’re at startup, or you’re at struggle or strife. I say struggle, but you know, maybe politically correct, you should say strive. So a startup struggles drive, stability, success, scale, or significance, right. So every financial planner, whether you’re self employed or not self employed, you’re at one of those levels, you’re at the startup stage, you’re at the struggle stage, you’re at the stability stage, you’re at the success stage, scale stage, or the significant stage. So depending on where you’re at, at what level you’re at, currently, you need to focus on the thing that’s right for you to be doing at your level of growth, because one of the problems I find is that I’ve got people down at yeah, there’s people I see people who, who are at startup or struggle stage, but they’re looking up at the advisors who are up at scale, yeah, success or scale or significance, and saying, oh, I need to do that, or I should be doing that thing. And that person out there did or that person at that level is doing this thing up here. But really what they needed to focus on what’s the things that they need to get that are going to get them from startup up to up to strive or struggle, and then if you’re gonna strive or struggle, then then you’ve got to, you’ve got to do those things that are gonna get you to grow to stability, and then to success and scale and significance. So the fastest ways to grow aren’t figuring out firstly, where you sit, we call it the profit pyramid. So where are you at on that profit period? Well, the first thing is to identify where you’re at. And then secondly, once you know where you’re at, what are the things that I need to have ticked off to say, right, I’ve done that, that and that these things are all implemented into my business, which will then take you to the next level. Now at the next level, what are the things that you need to do to implement at that point, at that are going to get me to the next level, and to the next level, the next level, now someone like yourself, you know, when we first met, you were probably at startup or you know, at that sort of strife stage, that’s when we first met and the work that we did together. We’re all struggling, but you get what I mean by you move, you move up the ladder, the things that you and I did together, we were they were the things that you needed to do that were the right things for you to be doing down there. And that got you to stability that got you to success. And you’re at a point now where you’re at scale and significance. Now now, I think most financial planners don’t know your anyone in our sort of sphere or our network, know that you’re doing things way up here that most financial planners aren’t doing, because but you but you ticked off the startup and the struggle and the stability, you got to success. And remember, I think really early in the piece been my job with a financial planner, if you’re not at success, yet my job is to get you to success as quick as I can. But one and once you get to success, it’s to get your ass out of there as quick as we possibly can as well, because success is a trap. What happens you think about someone gets some from startup to struggle to abilities to success. What happens when they get to success,

Ben Nash
you get complacent is the good enough age,

Steve Salvia
I’m here, I don’t need to really push your hustle on or do anything like that. So it’s actually a trap. So people get, it takes a long time to get as good as success. But once people get there, they actually get stuck there for the longest time as well. Because they don’t have the drive that they need to get them there. So we’ve got to get to success as quick as we possibly can. But then we got to get your backside out and get you move up to scale and significance kind of in the in the area that you’re in. So So that’s I think that’s that’s really important as well.

Ben Nash
Yeah, I think I’ve know that I’ve definitely been there earlier on in the piece that you get distracted with things and think that you need to do, you need to be everywhere on on social media, I know that we are in a lot of places now. But like trying to do it back in the day and you just end up spread too thin or that I’ve got to have some advertising funnel and you know, all of these things that you’ve looked at great businesses and negotiate Yeah, I should have that. But really the right move at the wrong time. It’s still the wrong move. So you got to have the chops in place.

Steve Salvia
You’ve got to you’ve got to get yourself out there. And you’ve also got to have you’ve got to have a reason for people to listen to you. So you do want to build some authority. And you’ve also oftentimes you do want to have somebody can offer people so that they act so that they can reach out and talk to you’ve got to have a compelling offer for people. But you know, it doesn’t it depends depending on where you’re at. We’ll be we’ll be commensurate to the type of thing that you’ve got to get out there. So there’s different types Some marketing, there’s different types of positioning that different sort of messaging, depending on where you’re at, in your in your in your profit pyramid. So yeah, so it’s really important to foot. So again, the first thing is to identify that and then figure out what needs to be done at that point. If you think about if you’re at startup, there’s no point thinking about, like, like the, one of the problems I find Ben is people at startup and struggling, even stability. They spend most of their time in the back end in the back office, focusing on their delivery and their tech stack and their templates and automation and all of those things, right. And they spend their time doing all that stuff. But they’ve got no one coming in the front end. Yeah, so right. So what’s the point, you’ve got this, you’ve got this all singing, all dancing back end and delivery process, but you’ve got no clients, or prospects in the front front end, in my opinion, that should be ran the other way, bring the clients in, put a little bit of pressure on the model and create a little bit of a bottleneck. And it’s amazing what you can do from the back end or from from an implementation point of view, once you’ve got a little bit of mature under a little bit of pressure, right? Yeah. So if you’re a startup and struggle, forget the back end, yes, you can’t literally forget it. But you shouldn’t be spending 50 60% of the time on the back end, get some prospects in the door, get some money, some bumps on appointments in the calendar, some bums on seats and the money in the bank. And that’ll give you then give you a little bit of breathing space. And then you can try to take a step back and say, right, we’ve got this, we’ve got this little bit of a bottleneck. Now we’ve got this little bit of a refresher, we have to spend a little bit of time and a little bit of effort over here on the back end. But we’ve got but you know, I can push out clients for two or three weeks, I can build a little bit of a system behind the scenes don’t spend all your time with this, or singing or dancing back in program with a process with no no, no fun with no clients coming in, coming in the door, if that makes sense.

Ben Nash
That’s right. And money can solve a lot of problems as well. It’s like he could have a slicked back end. But if you don’t have any dollars, and you can’t grow, and you’re not making any money, which sucks. But while that’s

Steve Salvia
short, that’s a short term strategy. Well, my business is called Black, we profit consulting. Right? Black, we profit consulting. So for me the biggest problem in my prospect or my base, right, the people that I work with, it’s so important, I put it in our business, no, its profit. So we’ve got all the turnover, and we’ve got all the staff and we’re growing our businesses, and we’re winning all these awards. And we’re doing all this and that the other thing, but at the end of the day, show me the money. And so So Blackwing profit consulting, I think to myself, right, what is the overall there’s lots of things, lots of stuff that financial planners need to do, but what’s the biggest problem is profit. So that’s why we call Blackwing profit consulting, because I find it the biggest problem with so we’re doing all this work, and we’ve got these great businesses, but there’s no catch. So we need money, we’re running a commercial business, it’s not a charity of Benevolent Society. So you’ve got to charge professionally, you’ve got to, you’ve got to get paid what you’re worth, you’ve got to have a really good strong pricing program, you’ve got to charge for the work you do. And if the clients like it, that’s great. But if they don’t like it, that’s great, too. Because this is how it’s done. We charge for our work.

Ben Nash
Yep. And I think if you’re a business owner, you’ve probably you know, working hard, you’re motivated to work hard. But if you’re working hard, and you’re not getting paid that or not getting paid well, then that’s if you’re working hard, if you’re working hard, and you’ve got you’re making heaps of money, at least that gives you you know, you you feel better about that. And then plus, because you’ve got heaps of money, then you can hire more people so that you work less so that you can feel better, and still make money as well.

Steve Salvia
So, and again, of course, it’s not all about money, there’s so much more to it. But at the end of the day, if you can’t, if you don’t make a profit, you’re gone, it’s all over, you’ve just wasted your time. So it’s lots and lots of things. Money is one of the critical elements, our mantra spend money, meaning and impact, right? You’ve got to be profitable. Because if you can’t not probably then then you want, then you want to have meaning in what you do. And then if you’ve got money in many you can have an impact. So it may not necessarily mean that you’re right. Don’t know just the other thing you’re talking about the fastest way to grow. Ben, I you know, I always come back to that that five ones formula. So if for the guys who are listening, probably mostly financial planners and people in the financial advice space, you know, the five ones formula to me, is the biggest or the fastest way for you to grow your business. And you know, for anyone who’s listening, it’s the five ones formula. It’s one person with one problem from one traffic source with one offer for one year, the rule of five ones. So we want to find that one person who is your ideal market. So everyone talks about niching and I’m going to niche but you’ve really got I believe, if you look at you know, I’ve studied for many years now the sort of the top echelon of financial planners, I’ve looked at them closely. I know a lot of them. I’ve worked with heaps of them, you know, that sort of top 10 15% of financial planners. And what I’ve found been over the years, there’s sort of 12 sort of traits that all those sort of top end people have that the best of the best financial planners you know, anyone who’s listening to this, you know, those who you look up to up there and you say wow, that’s he’s he’s doing No, she’s doing it. She’s a great planner, you know, they’re really good. At the top end of it, there’s a certain number of traits that they’ve kind of all have in common common. One of them is that most of them not every single one, but most of them have a niche. So it’s really important, in my opinion, for you to bed down and get really, really specific and work with me. So it’s, that’s the one person one problem. Once you know the niche, you can then say, right now I know the niche, what are the things that are going on in their world? What are their frustrations and fears we talked about before? What do they want an aspiration. So once you know your niche, you can really get, you really get granular on what their problems are. And we can put messages out to the market that are specific to that person and their problem. So one person with one profit problem from one traffic source. So once you know the person and once you know the problems, the next step is we’re going to find that so where are those people congregate on mass. But once you know that niche, you can figure out where they congregate on mass, then with one offer, so I don’t mean one super fund or one insurance policy, I say, it’s What can I go out to market with an offer them sort of hand them on a silver platter that they may think is valuable, and they’re gonna either engage with me or interact with me or click the button if I need them to, or whatever it is, what’s the thing that I can offer them to get them to come towards me. And then the last one is one year now, you want to stick with your niche for for a period of time. But you know, you don’t really need to spend a year to figure out whether your niche is working, or whether the niche is right or not, you know, you can probably you can figure out within about 90 days, if you do it properly, you can spend about 90 days, but it’d be weird to say the four ones plus 90 minutes. So that’s why we say the five ones. So that doesn’t sound right. So so it’s what I say one year, but within 90 days, if you do it right, you can figure out whether the niche that you’ve chosen is the right one, and should you persist with it? Or do you change your niche, but really

Ben Nash
figure out you, you generally get a sense of like, if it’s not working, but I do agree with you. And you You taught me this way back when when I first started my business and I found it Yeah, like really important that one year piece is actually quite important to build good momentum in the channels that you’re in. And I, I’ve been big on LinkedIn for a long time. And I get, you know, talk to other financial planners, and they’re like, oh, wow, Ben, like, that’s cool. You do this and that. And they’re like, we want to do it. And they do it for a bit and then they get distracted. And we’re not consistent. And I know that I’ve had times where I’m inconsistent. And I see the impact of doing that. But the key is really just pick it and just hammer it out. And one of the things that we’ve done, I’ve done LinkedIn, that and then you can expand to another channel, after you’ve done that if you try to start doing LinkedIn or Instagram and Facebook and plus webinars plus podcasts, like you just can’t do it, you want to just add things on gradually, and then just keep sticking to that and be consistent. And then you build the momentum.

Steve Salvia
The words are constant and consistent with your marketing with your authority positioning. So you’ve positioned yourself as an authority in your space. That’s what you’ve done. If you think about it, that’s the reality of what you’ve done. And, you know, we talked about 554 years ago, five years ago, you’ve now positioned yourself over a period of time. But the reason you’ve done that is because you’ve been constant and you’ve been consistent in your space. And now you’re at the position where you’re at that sort of scale and significance level simply because you did the things that you need to do along the way. Right, so so guys don’t give up, you know, double down on the niche. What’s the niche? Do you like that person? How to how to how to pick a good niche decently cheap, effectively, if you can take those three boxes, you’re going to be pretty close? Do you like them? Look, do you want to see them succeed? Can Can they afford you? Do they have the money to pay for a financial advisor? And can you get them the result you want? Sorry? Can you give them the result that they want? Right? So do you like that person? Can they can they afford to pay you? And can you give them a results at one if you can? If you can answer those three, you need to answer all three pretty much. If you can answer affirmative in those three, then you’ve pretty much you’ve got a pretty good nation out there.

Ben Nash
Absolutely, yeah, we went through that exercise. And it is important. There’s a lot of things that you can do, but I think pick one do it be consistent. You can add more in you know, and it also builds from there. Yeah, see, mate, thank you so much for sharing your insights for anyone that’s keen to learn more about what you do what’s what’s the best way for them to do that.

Steve Salvia
Ben best way probably the place that I’m most prolific would be LinkedIn. So if you want to have a chat, if you’ve got anything that you’ve heard, if you’ve got anything that you like that you’ve heard from this podcast, reach out to me on LinkedIn chat private chat me and LinkedIn on and just start a conversation with me that’s the best way to find we’ve got a website WWW dot black wing.com.au But you know, I’m mainly inside LinkedIn or you can find me on Facebook dude, find me I’m around the place. No, no dramas at all. If you if you want me or find me.

Ben Nash
No doubt, no doubt. Well, Steve, thank you so much. Really appreciate it, buddy. Yeah, got lots of great stuff there. So yeah, look Want to hear about those results and we’ll catch on the next one

Steve Salvia
No worries man cheers good to catch up.