10 things to do if you don’t want to increase your income

I’ve given some thought about how not to grow a successful financial services practice or increase your income. I came up with these guidelines of what you do not want to do:

1. Message someone because you need a client instead of asking questions, adding value and helping solve their problems.
2. Market in a way that’s inauthentic to you, such as by following the 26-year-old financial advisor crushing it on TikTok and building automated funnels, even though you’re 50 years old, happily married with kids, don’t use TikTok and thought a funnel was something you use in the kitchen.
3. Use “spray and pray” as your marketing technique to build your business.
4. Call yourself a financial advisor, but don’t master the basic concepts you need to know to help your clients get where they want to go.
5. Do your best to grow your business instead of doing what it takes. Sometimes your best is too low of a standard.
6. Complain and get disillusioned because the world isn’t fair and the game keeps changing. The world isn’t fair, and the game does keep changing. Accept it!
7. Say you will do something and then not get to it. Good intentions are not good enough.
8. Find something that works and then stop doing it. So many seasoned advisors tell me something like, “It worked really well. I don’t know why I stopped doing it.”
9. Jump into ads and expensive funnels before you know whether your messages work. If they don’t work organically, they’re not likely to work with paid traffic. It’s money not well-spent.
10. Piece together a whole bunch of different strategies to grow your business. “Frankenstein” was a hit movie, but it definitely won’t grow your business.

If you’d rather build your business, take what’s been working for you and embellish, improve and supplement it. It’s the fastest way to a $1 million practice.

 Sandy Schussel is a performance acceleration coach who has been working with financial advisors for more than 20 years, helping them break through to higher production levels.

For marketing ideas:

• Read “Marketing your expertise”
• Read “Magnetic marketing and operational mastery” [MDRT members only]
• Watch “Out-of-the-box marketing ideas” [MDRT members only]