The power of “just one thing”

Since January, I’ve been conducting full day workshops to help advisors adjust their businesses to today’s new reality. I’ve had a terrific response to these - typically, advisors emerge excited with a long list of possible initiatives and new ideas. That’s good news at one level – but also risks having advisors feel overwhelmed and fail to act as a result. The difficulty after a workshop is almost never not enough new ideas – it’s almost always too many.

Here’s the one strategy that I’ve seen work best to help advisors translate the ideas they take from any workhop into action. This strategy comes down to four simple words: One idea per quarter. I encourage advisors to identify the one idea that will have the most impact on your business – and resolve to focus on that and only that for the next 90 days. Make a sign up and put it above your phone. Put this idea as the number one item for your weekly team meetings. Start your planning for every week by identifying what you’ve going to do in the next seven days to make that idea happen. Do this for 90 days and chances are that at the end of that, you’ve got momentum behind it and this idea is locked into your routine. At which point you go to the next high impact idea on your list and repeat the process.

With this simple strategy, you can act on four high impact ideas a year - and have a high likelihood of seeing a lift in your business as a result. Remember, we change the way we learned to walk – one step at a time. By focusing on one high impact idea a quarter, you increase the odds greatly of making that idea happen.

If you agree with this, two final questions:

First, what’s your high impact initiative, the one thing that if you did that and that alone would have the biggest impact on your business? And second, what are you going to do between now and the end of the year to make that happen?

Answer those two questions and chances are that you too will see your business move forward, one idea at a time.