Double your income and work less

What can you do when your career hits a wall, despite late nights and weekends at the office? Your efforts become scattered as you work more in areas you neither enjoy nor excel in, trying to do it all for your clients. Some top financial advisors found a solution by working less and specializing more.  

Specialize

“You can’t be good at everything — at least I can’t,” said Top of the Table qualifier and 18-year MDRT member Clay Gillespie, CFP, CIM, of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. “I find if I’m good at one thing and I keep pursuing it, it works quite well.” Among top financial advisors, most of them specialize, he said.

The concept holds true in other fields as well. For example, in the medical field a general practitioner doesn’t deliver babies or perform open-heart surgery. Instead, specialists are called on to provide the best care for patients.

Teamwork and referrals

Financial professionals can successfully take a similar approach. “The concept of a team works, and it’s as beneficial to the client as it is to the advisor,” said 19-year MDRT member Micheline Varas, RHU, of Vancouver. “Furthermore,” she said, “it allows an advisor to work less while earning significantly more by leveraging the specialty areas of others.”  

“Because commissions are split in accordance to the talents of a specialist in collaborative work, a percentage earned on a case could potentially outweigh the 100 percent you may have earned on your own. This is simply because you are benefiting from the ability of others who are far more experienced within a specific arena,” Varas said, a Top of the Table qualifier. “The key to referring clients to other advisors is to ensure a written agreement is in place before any work is done that addresses how the case is to be split, the ownership of the client and any subsequent sales that may occur thereafter.”

• Find out more about this collaborative approach among specialists in the video, “Double your income … and work less: Inside high-performing offices.”
• Hear more ideas for taking your career to the next level in MDRT’s exclusive video series, “Inside high-performing offices.”