Scott Fitzpatrick:
Hi, everyone. I want to talk about this concept of a Wheel of Competency and what it is, is the eclectic skillsets required at a personal level and a business level to be able to work in this high net wealth advisory space. So whilst I’m going through this, I want you to give yourself a score or give your team a score, or look at your whole business and go, “am I ready, willing?” “Am I equipped to deal in this marketplace today?”
So let’s have a crack at this. First of all, context. You will have heard through our podcasts a lot of this need for the ability to stay in context, not dive into content, not dive into solution phase. As content experts, we quite often want to. Be able to get the context out for a client about what makes a great life for them. Let’s get the NOW information. Let’s get the 10 year plan, the big context, the four L’s, live love learn legacy, the Steven Kovey context that I love so much.
So give yourself a score between zero and 10. Where do you rank on this? Be honest with yourself. Maybe somewhere in here. Technically, so technically, it’s such a wide area because we need to be across tax, asset protection, estate planning, business issues, family issues; which are quite technical, a whole range of investment issues, possibly. Now, don’t be frightened of this. We want you to be across it, but not in it. When we need to, we’re going to build our Best of Breed team around us. So give you a score and think how you are technically. There might be some areas there that you need to brush up on.
Collaborative advice and that’s talking about having that built that Best of Breed team around you. How is your Best of Breed team? Have you got one? Do we need to build one, or do we need to re-look at it? And what are you like at project managing around the other professionals? Can you hold the room? Can you lead the conversation with the other professionals and the client in the room? How do you keep them in the loop? So that’s collaborative advice.
Quite often as professionals, it’s hard for us to get our head around this collaboration. We like the client to come in. We see the problem. We get it solved. This is taking a collaborative approach. So give yourself a score on collaboration, might be high.
Functionality. You would have heard Paul Crane in the podcast talk about functionality. This concept of red, blue, and black. Have I got my business set up appropriately to run those three functions? Red being the lifeblood of the business, blue, getting the work in and the workout and black, spending time on the future relationships, the future revenue, the future clients that we’re going to look at. So give yourself a score there and that might need some work.
Distribution skills. That was one of those black activities that I’ve put in there because it’s vital to your business, because really, as I’ve said before, it’s about the difference in your business between last year and this year is the people you meet. So we want to meet more of the right people. How do we get into future relationships, peer groups? How do we find those types of clients that we can add a lot of value to with this family board, family advisory concept? Might need some work around there. Let’s give yourself a low score there.
Systems. We’ve all got systems and procedures. What are our systems? It’s okay to look after one client, but if we’re looking after 50, do we have the right systems, policies, procedures to build a business around this? May need some work.
Project management skills. What do we like at running 50 clients? One client, we might have 20 tasks to do. 50 clients, we’ve got a thousand. How do we manage that? How do we outsource the work? What work do we do that’s important and urgent versus work that can be done later, work that can we outsource? How do we think about our project management skills. We don’t want to hold onto it all. What we want to be able to do is engage the other professionals to help surround the client with the right advice. Very important piece of the puzzle.
And the last one is the EI, the emotional intelligence skills. How do we rate ourselves with the EI part of it? We call it the soft skills, but quite often, it’s the hardest skills. So how are our people skills, our relationship skills? Can we read the room? Can we sort through the emotions? Can we see where the truth is for people? Are we clear helping them get to the truth of a situation?
Remember, we used the PIES model, the political, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. How do we find ourselves? “I’ll be happy to play in the P and the I, or are we having to do a little bit of the E?” How do we find ourselves on the spectrum? Quite often, if we’ve come from a technical space, we’ve got the P and the I, maybe need a little work under here, but it’s just a really good check-in to go, yeah, maybe I need some work around this to become a well-rounded advisor that you can walk into a room with confidence, and know you can deal with any situation. So you want to give yourself a score here.
Now when we pull this together, it should be a beautiful round circle. Of course not, but it’s a really good check-in to go quickly. How am I traveling? What areas of my tyre, if this was a beautiful tyre, what areas of my tyre do I need to pump up? It’s also a really good one to use for your staff around their competencies as well.
