$275 for 2 Coffees… Are You Kidding Me???

Well, hey there guys. Steve Salvia here from blackwing.com.au.

I just want to reach out and say g’day to you this morning.

I was with a financial planner just towards the end of last year and it was a really good quality financial planner – great guy. I won’t mention his name but I went out to visit him, have a coffee and have a meeting with him. We had what we call out ‘Situation Snapshot’ Strategy Session in his office.

It was going really well. We had a great conversation. He was doing some really good things. He had 4 or 5 staff and another 2 advisors in the firm working with him – doing really great work, really awesome strategies. Some of the plans he was doing – a lot of SMSF and high net worth client work he was doing… It was really excellent. Doing a few pre-pension changes, just before the new rules came out.

But one thing that happened that really disturbed me. I just needed to talk to you guys about it and see if it’s happening with you.

What happened was we had a cup of coffee and (I actually brought the coffees with me) we got through about an hour of our session, we said hey you know we’ve decided we’re going to have another cup of coffee. So what this guy did is he actually got up out of his chair and he went to the kitchen and made himself and me a cup of coffee. I said that was fine, I have no problem at all…, and I said “Who normally makes the coffee in the office here?”.

Remember they had 5 admin staff and a team to back him up. He said “Well Steve, I normally make my own coffee”! And I said “That’s interesting, Okay great.” I said “What’s your hourly rate? If you were working or doing financial planning work, or strategy work with a client…. what’s your hourly rate? Hypothetically, if you had a hourly rate, what would you say to a client if they ask you that? What he mentioned…. What he said was his hourly rate was $275 per hour.

I said “Okay.. okay mate. So tell me, what’s the hourly rate, what’s this coffee costing us or costing you when you make your client’s coffee or make yourself a cup of coffee?”.

The answer is guys, it’s effectively costing him $275 per hour for that cup of coffee.

Now guys, I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t be making coffee or you need to be lazy in your office so you need to call the people around to get coffee made for you…. But there’s things in your business that you are Genius at. That you’re Excellent at, that are High Value tasks that you should be focused on day-to-day…. Especially if you are the owner of the business or the main income producer within your firm. And it’s things like coffee.

A couple of other things that I ask them after that, “Who opens the mail?” and he said “Well I go to the post office on the way to work and I sit there in my car and open the mail”.

“Okay great! So what’s it costing you to open the mail?”

He also said…. I asked him about photocopying. I said “Do you stand near the photocopier much?”

And he said “Yeah, I actually do. I do quite a bit of a photocopying in the business
as well ”

So guys the lesson that I got for you here is, there’s $20 an hour work in your business and there’s $275 an hour work in your business. I want you, as the income producer, as the advisor, as the technician and a strategist and the people person, the relationship builder, the person that’s growing and developing your business.

I want you to be the person who’s doing the $275 an hour work, and I want you…. As the income producer… as the adviser…. The technician & strategist…. to leave the $20 an hour work to people who are Excellent, who you want to position as those sort of job or being their GENIUS!

In other words guys, I want you to finally – learn – to DELEGATE.

It’s a really important part of your business model, and it’s something that we financial planners just don’t do well enough. We say we do! And we all want to do it. I think most people know that they need to delegate (intellectually…) but in reality – they just don’t delegate well enough.

Guys, I want you to get good at delegating. I want you to figure out what are the important tasks, what are the income production activities in your business. What are the things that bring out your best, make your juices flow. What are the things that make you get out in the bed in the morning and want to get to work, and want to get there really really quick and do a great job with your clients.

Those are the things that I want you to focus on.

Anything else if it’s not those things, I want you to delegate it. I want you to give it to someone else, and I want you to make that their genius.

Guys I’ve got a really great little worksheet to help you figure out what you should be doing in your financial planning business as the income producer and the advisor, and what you shouldn’t be doing we should be delegating it.

So if you like a copy of that worksheet, do me a favor and if you like a copy I’ll just send it to you no problem at all. Just type in the ‘GENIUS’ in the comment box below, and I’ll send you out a copy about the genius worksheet. Works really well for helping you decide what you should be doing, what you should start doing, what you should stop doing, and what you should continue to do as well.

Okay, so guys type in the word ‘genius’ and I’ll be happy to send that out right away.

Steve Salvia signing off from Leighton Beach here in beautiful Perth, and we’ll talk to you real soon.

Take care, bye now.