If you don’t know the dollar value of your time as a financial advisor, you’re selling yourself short and creating a barrier for reaching the next level in your career. As many top financial advisors will say, “If you spend your time doing work worth $10 an hour, how much can you expect your income to grow?”
“All over the world, we all have one common denominator, and that is 365 days to a year,” said 27-year MDRT member Marcus T. Henderson Sr., LUTCF, of Brentwood, Tennessee. “That’s our common ground. How does this common denominator unite us? It permits us, as mostly commission-based advisors, to calculate what an actual hour of our time is worth.”
When you know the value of your time, Henderson said, you gain information about how and where you should spend your time because you:
- Know when to hire staff
- Understand what cases to walk away from
- Align your professional mindset with other top-paid professionals, such as attorneys, accountants and consultants
“By assessing my time very discerningly, this one act has taken me from a Qualifying [MDRT] member to a Top of the Table member, almost overnight,” Henderson said. Finding out his hourly value, “was the missing digit we all seek to unlock the door.”
To find his formula, watch his 2016 Annual Meeting presentation, “What’s your professional time worth?”
For more time-maximizing ideas
- Watch “How hiring staff can make you money”
- Watch “How to have enough time for work and family”
- Read “Goal setting and time management in 2 easy steps”
Hi, wow this is real meaning of time is money & money is time.
Regards
One of the hardest skills to learn early in your career is delegation. We have to do so many jobs to be successful. We have to prospect, administer, design the cases, do underwriting and just have time for creative thought. All of these take time. All of these tasks add value to your practice. All of these tasks are essential. But all of these tasks do NOT have to be done by you. You can outsource them or you can hire staff.
This means you have to pay someone to do specific jobs for you. Now you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. You need to determine how much it is costing you to handle the underwriting compared to jobbing it out. Let’s say your average size case is $1000 of income. If you have to spend $100 to get it administered and underwritten – and this takes you 4-5 hours – what could you do with that time? How many more appointments could you make? How many more appoints could you conduct? It might surprise you to know that a 10% incremental improvement in productivity could add as much as a 25-50% increase in revenue.
I had five fulltime employees by my fourth year in the business. It cost me money – but I also was able to do what I do best – find people and talk to them. My production skyrocketed and I qualified for TOT two years later. It is a difficult decision to invest money you don’t feel you have to get income you have not yet earned. But I can tell you, you are holding yourself back by doing all of the jobs yourself.