4 important questions to ask yourself

A little more than 10 years ago, Devang Patel, CFP, CLU, was at a crossroads. The now-14-year MDRT member from Edison, New Jersey, was working very hard but neither seeing the professional success he wanted nor spending much time with his family.

In his 2015 Annual Meeting presentation “Blue ocean secrets for practice management,” Patel discussed several questions he asked himself to gain perspective on adjustments to make in his life. These included the following:

1. Do you work in your practice or on your practice? Are you spending more time working on stuff or on planning for the next three to five years? Most advisors are busy doing day-to-day stuff and don’t spend enough time planning for where they want their practice to be in the future. If you don’t know where you are going, you will not get there.
2. If you were to die today, is your firm the place where you would want your family to go for wealth management services? Most advisors don’t have enough life insurance, or their investment portfolios are not allocated properly, nor are they saving enough.
3. Knowing what you know about your current staff, would you hire all of them again for the same positions? We often retain staff members that we should have let go long ago. We feel bad for them and somehow make an emotional decision instead of a business decision.
4. Would you like to be married to someone like you? We get so busy with work that we stop noticing the simple things in life. We don’t appreciate people around us for the things they are doing at work and at home to make our lives easier.

Read 4 more questions to ask yourself in “Blue ocean secrets for practice management”

Written by Matt Pais, MDRT Content Specialist