I want to get a good idea of the audience before I get started, and then I’ll give you an overview of who I am and why I’m here. And then what you’re going to learn.

How many of you are founding owners? Vast majority of the room. How many of you like running your business? Good. How many of you would rather work with clients? How many of you are employees? Great. OK. How many of you are second-generation owners? A couple. Welcome, congratulations to you guys.

All right, what we’re going to talk about today is about duplicating yourself. How many of you want to duplicate yourself? I don’t know what’s wrong with you people; I do not want two of me. I’m exhausting.

I’m Angie Herbers. I’m a consultant in the advisory space. I’ve been doing this for 17 years. I’ve been running businesses of my own for 23 years. I’m also a columnist and blogger in Think Advisor magazine, and I’m delighted to be here. I’ve gotten to a point in my career where I can do more of what I love, which is to teach. So I’d like you to view me today as your teacher, and I’m going to teach you how to duplicate yourself and then you might regret it. All right?

As we’re going through the workshop today, I want you to get out a piece of paper because I’m actually going to put work back in the workshop. And we’re going to do some work on your business and within your business so that you can walk out of here today with some things that you can actually implement into your practices and in your firms to help yourself just be better.

Also, as we’re going through the workshop, because it is a small group and we do have some time, I’d encourage you to ask all the questions you want. I’ll be glad to answer them from a teaching perspective, but also from a consulting perspective to help you get on the way and get your most pressing questions answered. If I think that that question is going to be answered later on in the presentation, I’ll just walk over here, I’ll write the question on this whiteboard and we’ll come back to it later.

If you don’t want to raise your hand and you don’t want to interrupt, then you can always walk up to the whiteboard and write your question if you so choose. If you get bored and you need to walk around, then just walk up here and write a question. All right?

OK, today we’re going to talk about death of the rainmaker. How many of you are also rainmakers in your business? Most all of you. How many of you like that function? Most all of you. How many of you have a hard time finding someone else to do that function as well as you? Let me just break your fantasy. You’re more than likely not going find it. So let’s do it differently.

Throughout the evolution and the growth of an advisory practice or any professional services business, the biggest issue is the rainmaker and the rainmaking function. It’s very difficult to go out there and hire another rainmaker or find another rainmaker, and you want to know why? Does anyone want to guess why?

Audience: They’ll do it themselves.

Herbers: They’ll do it themselves. That is the answer. If they can rainmake, why do they need you? They don’t. So in order to build an actual business or a really good practice in professional services, you really have to learn how to, in the strongest way possible, kill the rainmaking function. And there’s a way to do it.

The problem is most people don’t know how to do it because they are, as founding owners, the natural rainmaker. And they come from their perspective of This is how I got to this point, and this is how we’re going to get to the next point. As a business grows and builds and develops, what you realize is that your perspective isn’t always the right perspective.

No, really. It isn’t always the right perspective, but it isn’t always the wrong perspective. So the good news is that all you have to do is get a different perspective. I’m going to help you today with a different perspective, and hopefully it will change your practices so that you can grow and help more people or help as many people as you want to.

So, this is the art of business development and how you create what’s called the “sales and the marketing function” in your practice. And it very much is like walking a tightrope. The reason it’s walking a tightrope is because it’s learning to do something that you’re not natural at. You’re natural at going out and getting business. You’re also probably pretty natural at keeping a business alive through hard times, which is why you’re all here and why you are the founding owners.

I have to share with you, yesterday on Twitter — I do a lot of research in the medical practice field. It’s just a love of mine. I like where medicine is going, particularly concierge medicine. And there was a guy, a consultant who posted on there, “Seeking all founding owners. We will go out, and we will get the clients. We will do the heart surgery. We will also transport the heart if you need a heart and then we will put it into you.”

It made me laugh out loud because what you’re doing as founding owners or what you had to do to start the business was literally walk a tightrope. You were learning as you were going; you were bringing in clients. You were doing what you had to do. I mean, in a sense, you were the heart transport. And I think it’s important that we just recognize that as a business grows, what we can’t do is we can’t do it all. And the hardest thing in working with founding owners is to actually get them off this tightrope. Get them off of it and to say, “Listen, I don’t have to walk out there on this tightrope. I can have other people do it for me. Or I can ask for help and not try to do everything myself.”

The rainmaking function, because you are the best at it, or supposedly in your head, is the hardest one to let go of. Now, with all this being said, there’re two things that happen as your business grows. The first thing is that the rainmaking function and the running-the-business function compete with each other. So on one hand, you’ve got out the rainmaking. And on the other hand, you’ve got the business management function. What most people will do or what most advisors will do is they’ll take those two functions, and they’ll wrap them together like this, right? [visual]

And they’ll say, “I’m not going to give up the business management function, and I’m not going to give up the rainmaking function because I’m the best at it.” Here’s a problem, though: That means you’re in constant conflict all the time. The business is wanting your attention, and the growth is wanting your attention, and can you give attention to two things at once? Anyone who has multiple children will understand that concept really well.

So, what you have to do as the business grows is you kind of rip yourself apart. And you have to say, “I’m either going to be the rainmaker or — in the executive suite, it’s called the CMO — the CMO function, or I’m going to be the business owner, the leader of this organization, and be the CEO.” How many of you can make that decision? Very few. Congratulations, you guys are much further along.

When you can’t make the decision of whether you’re going to be the CEO running the company or the CMO bringing in all the business, you end up doing those two functions, and you do those two functions poorly. You are the problem. So that’s the first thing I want you to write down. I want you to write down, “I am the problem, but I don’t have to be the problem anymore.”

Audience: You talked about CEO and CMO. How about COO?

Herbers: The COO function is also in the executive suite.

Audience: CEO? Part of CEO?

Herbers: No, not usually. So, this is a really great question because you have lots of executive functions. You’ve got the CEO function. You’ve got the CMO function. You’ve got the COO function. You’ve got the CFO function. You’ve got the CIO function. OK?

In really large firms, then you get the CCO function. So, what you end up having is the CEO function and five other primary functions underneath it. When you’re doing all of those things, you just add the CMO plus the CEO function, and what do you have? You have one fist layered on the next fist, layered on the next fist, layered on the next fist, layered on the next fist. And essentially, what you, as the owner, are doing is getting buried. Right?

When you ask about the COO function, the COO function, if you are a natural rainmaker and you’ve actually built your business, is what we call internally versus externally. Externally is the rainmaker; internally is the COO function. Then you have the same problem. You have the CEO function and you have the COO function that’s coming over the top of you that are competing with each other, and you have to rip those apart too.

So if you’re doing everything, the bottom line is that you’re doing the impossible every day. You should pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself. That’s how you got to where you are. But it’s not how you get to the next point. We have to start peeling back all those layers.

I want to add something on your COO thing. The COO function is actually the easiest one to peel off. If you are an internal, if you are a founding owner and you do most of your business development internally, which is writing blogs, just maneuvering with friends, those firms don’t actually grow as fast if you have the natural COO function. But if you do have the natural COO function, then it’s easiest to solve that problem. We don’t have to solve a rainmaking problem, which is the CMO function, and is a harder one to solve. It’s easy to go out and hire a COO, a real high-end operations manager; it’s nearly impossible to go out and hire a CMO or a natural rainmaker.

Audience: But, taking the COO off my plate is one of the hardest things because you can’t teach the non-founding owners, and we do so much managing, and nobody can do it as well as us. That doing it as well as us is that operation part.

Herbers: I appreciate you saying that. Taking anything that you’ve done and that you’ve wrapped your soul around — I mean, let’s just admit that it’s really hard to build a business. It’s one of the hardest things to do other than being a stay-at-home mother, in my opinion. Amen.

So building that business from the ground up to where it is; many people don’t realize what they actually built. And in building it, we had to hold on to those functions. It was important for us to hold on to those functions as we got there. But the problem then is, we get there, our glass is full and running over. We get there and we think in our head, Well, this is how I got here. Now to get to the next step, I’m just going to hold on to these things tighter.

The tighter that you hold on to all of those functions, the slower you will grow once you get beyond certain points. And I’ll show you what those points are in a minute.

I’ve already asked this question. I asked it in the beginning because it’s a trick question. So, now that you know what you know, how many of you really want to duplicate yourself? One. A couple people. So here’s the thing. The goal is to stop thinking that duplication is actually the answer because we don’t want to actually duplicate you. We don’t want everyone doing everything that you’re doing. It’s not sustainable. So, if we continue to think that it’s OK or that we can duplicate ourselves, then we’ll always be looking for people out there who are just like us.

And here’s the thing. We don’t need another you, just like I don’t need another me. What we need are people with different functions and skills so we can split all the functions that we have. But in splitting all the functions, what do you also need? You need trust. And the first thing that you have to do is trust yourself in how you’re building the organization. Stop thinking that you can duplicate yourself, and then trust that you can let go of this one little component. And then the next little component. And then the next little component.

Many people make the mistake of letting go of all of those components at once. They basically say, “Here’s all the stuff that I don’t want to do, that I can’t anymore. I’m going to go out, and I’m going to hire someone. I’m going to bring that person in. I’m going to have really high expectations of them. I’m going to pretend that I can actually duplicate myself, and then I’m going to take all that stuff that I just dumped in my hand, and I’m going to hand it to them.” What did you just do? You just set them up to fail. And as a result, they’ll fail you.

Our goal is not to duplicate; our goal is to do it differently. All right, here’s the thing. There’s a lot of fear that we have as founding leaders when we’re growing our businesses. There are a lot of people who talk about being fearless out there. That fearlessness actually got you to start the business, to go out and get clients and to grow that business, right? There was something in you that was just really passionate, and it got you to the point where you are. How many of you, when you were starting your business, remember when you didn’t know where your next paycheck was going to come from?

You didn’t know how you were going to put food on the table for your family. You may have had to go out and get a business loan. I remember when I started my consulting business, I was 23 years old, I would go to Walgreens every day after work and I would get a little Ramen noodle packet because, literally, that’s all the money I had to eat. You do this for some reason. Maybe it’s passion. Maybe it’s you wanting to accomplish something in your life. Maybe it’s that you want to be challenged.

All that fear got you to this point. But, if you continue to carry that fear beyond this point, it’s actually going to sabotage you. Here is the primary fear: Client-referral rates will start falling. So in other words, your client service will fall. “If I let go of some of these clients’ service functions or these business management functions, then I’m not overseeing all of this client service, right? And I’m not making sure that everything is done right. Then the clients aren’t going to refer anymore, and they might talk about me in the city and I might lose my prominence at the country club.”

Client referral rate falling is the first fear. The second fear is the close ratio falling. So, you’ve got clients who come in the door; let’s just say you’ve got a million-dollar client sitting right in front of you. Oh my goodness, if I put somebody else in my organization in front of that million-dollar client, they won’t close them, and I’m really good at closing, so I’m going to jump in there, I’m going to throw them out of the room and I’m going to make sure that I get that client closed because I don’t want to lose the client. How many of you have thought that or done that? The rest of you aren’t telling the truth.

New client growth rate falling. [visual] So, we go out there and we want to make rain, right? And we want to have lots of leads coming in the door because the more leads we have coming in the door, the better it makes us feel about our growth. So if we start seeing people not connect through our website, or not call us, or not email us, what do we think in our head? Oh my goodness, we’re not going to grow anymore. So they start to fear the lead flow.

The next is the new leads falling. Sorry, I got my two switched around. The new client growth, meaning people sign. The lead flow is what I just talked about. And then the last one is the profit falling. So, how many of you throughout your practice have taken home some money? You got really used to that money, and you got comfortable with it, and you started growing and you made more money. And then you got really used to that money that you were making, and then you made some more money and you got used to that money that you were making. And then you made a little bit less money.

Everybody better raise their hands. We’re going to have an honest group here. It creates a lot of fear, especially if your lifestyle outside of the business has grown as fast as your income in the business has grown. “How am I going to go home and tell my spouse that I’m not making that much money anymore and I’ve got to take away the American Express card?”

Audience: Oh, no.

Herbers: Right. That would not make them happy. And then they fear, last but not least, that take-home pay. So with all of these fears, what happens is, as we’re building the business and these fears are coming at us, these are just old fears that we had when we started the business. These fears drove us to where we are. These fears are sabotaging us in the future. So, the first thing we have to learn to do is not fall into fear.

When I have a client on the phone, and we recognize these fears are happening like, “Oh, Angie, I cannot stop this marketing program because we won’t have leads coming in,” one of the things that I will say to that client is, “Listen, have you ever had any problem finding clients?” How many of you have ever had a huge problem finding clients? Amen. Unless you’re all being dishonest.

We already know you can find clients. We already know that you can pull your magic wand out of a hat, and you can go out and get a client if these things get to a point where it’s dangerous in your business, right? So there’s no need to fear any of this.

So what we have to do is to move past the fear, and we have to start letting go of things because here’s the thing. You have a magic wand. And you can pull that magic wand out, and you can start bringing in clients, voila, to solve any of these problems. That is what makes you unique. That is what makes you a great business owner. That magic is what will make you not fail. How many of you fear failure? How many of you fear success?

Audience: What does that mean?

Herbers: Good question. A fear of failure is: If something fails, it is my fault. A fear of success is: If something succeeds, I will lose something that’s important to me.

The fear of success is what will I lose if I succeed? What will I lose at the top? So most of the time, employees fear failure. They fear failing because it’ll get blamed on them, and they might lose their job. The vast majority of time, founding business owners actually fear success. “Who am I going to lose, my friends, my family, whatever? If I have a lot of money, if I have a big house down the street, if all of a sudden I’m different and I accomplish my dreams…”

It’s a lot easier to live in a world where your glass is half full than when your glass is half full and running over. That’s why many people won’t go after their dreams; they won’t go after their passions. It’s oftentimes not the fear of failure, but rather the fear of success that’s holding them back.

All right, all of these fears create stress. Now, I’m going to tell you, if you are bored right now, most of my clients don’t like when I get into the fear and the stress and the psychology behind growing a business because this is not what they want to hear. What they want to hear is the solution and how to solve it. But, if you don’t recognize what’s actually going on within your business, you won’t be able to solve it. So I’m going to talk about stress.

All of these fears create a to-do list. How many of you have a very long to-do list of “I’ve got to get a new marketing program in my business. I’ve got to start a blog. I’ve got to start social media. Now I’ve got to go see a strategic partner twice a week every week, plus I have to serve clients, plus I have to go to MDRT, plus I have to do all of this other stuff”? How many of you have a to-do list that long?

Here’s my first suggestion to you. I want you to go home, I want you to take that to-do list and I want you to put it in the shredder. And then when it’s done shredding, I want you to open up that shredder and I want you to look at that to-do list. I want you to look at all the pieces. And then I want you to take all the pieces within that to-do list, and I want you to give them to someone else. You don’t need to add stress.

So here’s what happens. Because of all of these fears, what founding owners will do is they’ll be bored. Their business is running really well. And then they’ll start getting into the data of the business. They’ll go start scattering around their business trying to find some problems because “I can’t be bored. I’ve been working my butt off for the last 20 years. I need to be doing something.”

They’ll get bored, so they’ll go around and start looking for things to do. They start looking for things to do, and then they start a to-do list together. That to-do list then throws them, very much like a pendulum on a clock that goes back and forth. That to-do list throws them all the way over to feeling overwhelmed. That to-do list is what’s creating your problem.

So once they swing all the way back over here to overwhelmed, they walk around and run around and call consultants and say, “I don’t have time to do everything that I want to do. I need to do all these things. I need you to free my time. My employees aren’t very good because you’re not spending any time with them. They aren’t very good; they’re not helping me; they’re not getting this stuff done. We’re not getting it done within the timeline. I made a six-month goal, and that six-month goal wasn’t achieved.” Right?

All that stress has made not only you, but your entire culture and your whole system overwhelmed. So, what you do, again, is you swing back like a clock and you’re like, “It was really great over there when I was bored, so I’m going to go way back over here to being bored. So I’m going to get rid of that to-do list. I’m going to forget about it. I’m going to fire some people. I’m going to go out and try to find some new people who are better than that.” You get bored again and then you don’t know what to do and you swing back to overwhelmed.

Now, does anyone ever have anyone in their life who sort of walks around with their head cut off, going back and forth from “I don’t have anything to do; I need something to do” to “I’ve got too much to do”? My favorite thing is a lot of women walk around, and I’m not attacking women, but a lot of women walk around and I’ll say, “Hey, how are you?” “Oh, I’m busy today.” “Really, what are you busy doing?”

Let’s be full, people. Let’s be full. In the right ways. Full or fulfilled. So here’s the thing. I’m going to teach you about how stress works. So, you can’t have the maximum performance in your business — your business itself, you and your employees — if there’s a lot of stress. But you can’t have the maximum performance in your business when you are bored. How many of you are football fans? A few.

You know how they come out of the tunnel and they’re jumping around and they’re getting all hyped up? You know what they’re doing? They’re getting their stress level up because they can’t walk out onto a football field not having done their pre-warm-up and all of that, to get their stress level up, to get them to peak performance. They can’t just walk out there and do their job and perform well if they start off on an even keel.

So what happens is, as the stress goes up, the stress curve goes up, and let’s just say this is zero and this is five and this is 10. [visual] As the stress goes up, you get to a really healthy level of stress, which is a five, somewhere balanced between bored and overwhelmed. And in that level of stress, the five, you find peak performance. So what that means is, if you get overwhelmed you have to get yourself back, right? If you get bored, you just need to do a few things at a time.

The problem, though, is when you’re overwhelmed, the only way for you to get back to center is to get bored. Think of a clock pendulum going back and forth. The only way that it will stop right in the middle is if you do the swings, slowly getting back to the center. So, when you’re looking at your fears, you have to conquer the fears that you have. When you’re looking at your fears, you have to take one thing and hand it away. See how that feels, one thing and hand it away.

But when you take all of the things and hand them away, you’re just pushing yourself back to bored, and at some point it’s going to swing back. So what your goal is within your organization and within your culture is to maintain a stress level of five without the swings. We can actually see this in numbers through analytics. If we track the stress of founding advisors or founding business owners, and we track the stress level within the culture, plus we track the performance side by side of the business, profit and growth, there is a significant difference in growth going like this and then falling, and then growth going like this and falling. [visual]

The goal is something like this. If we can’t get the revenue or the profit in your company, I’m going to draw this instead. [visual] If we can’t get it to go like this, then what we need to do is to step it up. So we go a little bit here. It flattens out without it going down. We go a little bit here, it flattens out. Little bit here, it flattens out or goes up.

The promise of most people and most consultants—which to be really honest with you, I don’t like to identify myself as a consultant because I don’t agree with a lot of them. But many people will come into your organizations, and they will promise what’s called a “hockey stick.”

They come up here, and they say, “Oh, you’re right here. Here’s the thing. We need to invest some money. We need to go out and hire some people. We need to invest in marketing, which is capital. We’re going to put that into your business, and you’re going to fall a little bit like this. And then, after you fall a little bit, we’re going to dip like this. And then you’re going to shoot way up there like that.” Let me tell you. The only thing that you get in strategies like this, hockey stick strategies like this, is disappointed.

Because never in my career, in the thousands of business that my firm has worked with, have we seen that hockey stick happen. What we see is a gradual step up. So we step up and kind of flatten out. We give ourselves some rest. We step up and flatten out. This is moderation. This is a rocket ship. We can get the rocket ship to happen if we take the proper steps along the way. We can’t do it, though, when we are stressed all the time.

Go home and ask yourself, and maybe gauge your stress every day, Where am I today, zero to 10? Try to get to five every day and then ask your people, “Where are you on a stress level? Are you stressed? Tell me a little bit about what’s causing that stress.” “Oh, you dumped this marketing project on me.” “Well, great. Let’s take that off your plate.” Let’s focus on the client for a minute. How many of you feel like you maintain a stress level of five? Good.

So this cycle of fear creates this cycle in your practice, or part of this cycle. What happens is you come to meetings or conferences or you hire consultants. They do an assessment. You define what strategy that you’re going to put in your business. Then you say that you’re going to implement the strategy, and then you do too much all at once. Many people will go out there and do a whole day strategy session. They’ll have a whole list of things they need to do, and nothing happens. And the reason nothing happens is because you overwhelmed the system.

So, they get here and they start prioritizing and then nothing gets done. And then a year later, you do the same thing again. You get an assessment and then you define your growth, and then you do a strategy and nothing happens. Then you do it year over year, just like this. [visual] In this circle, see this little white space right here? That means nothing is happening except a whole lot of stress.

So the goal is actually to get out of this circle cycle. Go have a strategy meeting to figure out what you want to do in your business. Define your growth. I’m going to teach you then how to get the growth without having rainmaking function. Have a strategy around that and then prioritize it. And then every two weeks, get into this cycle. Every two weeks, you’re going to implement something.

In your business, you have eight areas of your business. You have to manage all of these eight areas at once. A lot of the executive functions fall in these areas. Within these eight areas, what we want to do is get out of the cycle of strategy and into the cycle of implementation. In order to get out of the cycle of strategy and into the cycle of implementation, you have to literally go home, sit your butt in a chair, put your feet on a desk, get bored and then start thinking about strategy and start creating. Creating new ways of doing things, not doing the same thing that you’re doing now.

Audience: Could you tell us from back here, what words are in those frames?

Herbers: Certainly. So, I think I might have actually a bigger chart. But, I’ll tell you from here. [visual] So, the top is leadership. Then it’s corporate finance, client service, operations, management, human capital, sales and marketing. I’m going to read those one more time because if you’re going to try to fix your business, if you’re having lots of problems in your business or if you’re having a profit issue or a growth issue, you actually fix them in this order.

Leadership
Corporate finance
Client service
Operations
Management
Human capital
Sales
Marketing

How many of you solve problems in your business by adding more marketing and sales or adding more people? It’s a very common problem. For most founding business owners or business owners who haven’t necessarily gone to business school or maybe that’s not their first love, the easiest thing to do is to grasp for anything outside of the business to solve the problem.

“I just need another client. I just need another marketing plan. I just need another employee. I just need another something out there.” We can solve a lot of problems first by looking internally — looking at your leadership, looking at your financial strategy, looking at your client service, looking at your operations — before we go spending money grasping other people.

Spending money, grasping other people is the hockey stick; looking inside the business for the answer is the moderation. I can tell you right now. How many of you work with or have more than 100 clients? How many of you have more than 200? How many of you have more than 300? How many of you have more than 400? 500? 600? 700? 800? If you have over 100 clients, your greatest asset in your book is not any one externally. It is that client base.

There’re three assets in your business: your brand asset, your client asset and your employee asset. If you want to grow, look to your clients. If you want to get more profitable, look to your employees. If you want to destroy your business, ignore your brand. The No. 1 job of a CEO is to protect the brand. OK, questions about fear?

Audience: Could you just say that one more time, if you want to grow, you look to your clients? What do you mean by that?

Herbers: There are three assets in your business: the brand asset, the client asset and the employee asset.

Audience: Can you elaborate a little more, and the actual plan to do that?

Herbers: Sure. Let me finish this first. The client asset. Look to the client asset if you want to grow. Look to the employee asset if you want to be more profitable. And the brand asset is the process in which you deliver service. And your brand itself goes way beyond your logo. It’s how the business gets destroyed. The No. 1 job of a CEO is to protect the brand.

So, what most people will do is they’ll look to sales and marketing. They want to go out there and find a salesperson, or they want to develop a marketing program when they want to grow. So they look externally.

The vast majority of the problems that we see in the business are in client service and in operations. Those are two areas where most founding owners don’t want to go. They don’t want to go there because they believe that their client service is the best and better than anyone else’s. And they believe, or they don’t like, to put the operations into place.

So, death of a rainmaker is exactly about how do you look away from sales and marketing and into client service and operations and get the result of growth? How you do that is to educate the client.

Audience: So when you talked about employees and clients, mine isn’t that easy. But you were talking to the people who have like 800 clients. Or were those three principles the same, no matter what size the business is?

Herbers: It’s the same if you have over 100 clients. If you don’t have over 100 clients, you have a problem. I mean, what you have to do is get enough scale to be able to look to the client base for that growth — to go from external growth to internal growth. But anyone who has over 100 clients, you already have the asset. You’re holding the ace; you just don’t know how to play it yet. And I’m going to teach you how to play it.

Audience: Why do you implement change every two weeks?

Herbers: There’s a two-week cycle, and it’s particularly around processing. So, the reason two weeks is because you’re allowing time for the step-up to happen. So, you can put a strategy in place, but then there’s not enough time for the culture to get back to center. You put the strategy in place; you’re focusing on that one thing. It’s a micro-focus or a macro-focus every two weeks. You’re focusing on that one thing; it actually gets implemented, and you’re focusing on the next thing and it actually gets implemented.

What lot of people will do is say, “Hey, for 2018, for the whole year, we have this one big goal.” Well, that one big goal doesn’t get implemented because it’s not broken down into reasonable steps. And let’s just face it, we’re not publicly traded companies, and we don’t have resources coming out our wazoo. We have to take it one step at a time to get what we want to do, to get what we want in place. If we had big, huge budgets, even then I would question whether they work. But, if we had big, huge budgets, we might be able to take bigger steps along the way. Small little steps within two-week increments. Little itty, bitty micro-goals.

Audience: Do you recommend, say if we’re talking about step planning the year, and so in 2019 say, “These are our first two-week goals,” and then going over that with your team?

Herbers: Yes. So I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. And how I started the consulting firm, and this will help you, is that I did what other consultants do. I went out there, and I said, “Hey, we’re going to do a big, all-day strategy session. We’re going to get all the annual goals in place. We’re going to do vision, mission and core values. And then I’m going to check in with you every quarter.” Most of those firms never went anywhere. And the reason is because those were too broad.

When you have the CEO function and the CMO function and the COO function all competing with each other, you can’t get to the goal because you’re running around trying to figure out what happens. So over the years, what I’ve figured out is to actually move the company, we don’t do long-term goals — usually not one-year goals, five-year goals or three-year goals. We do two-week goals. And we accomplish those two-week goals. And if you get really good at doing that, you’ll get clear, very clear, on what the long-term goal is. Two-week goals and accomplish them.

What you’ll find out, though, is if you do the two-week goals, you’re going to overestimate at the beginning. You’re going to have two-week goals and then you’re going to feel like you’re defeated because you didn’t get any of those things accomplished. So then you’re going to start trying to accomplish them in four weeks, or you won’t move to the next set of goals until all of those are accomplished. If you establish two-week goals to start, and you don’t get those accomplished, who cares? Take those two-week goals and throw them in the trash from the previous week, and reset your goals for the next two weeks. Then take those in the trash and reset them. Eventually, you will get realistic goals in your business. You will break the fantasy.

Audience: How long does it usually take to sit down and create this two-week goal plan?

Herbers: It depends on who you are. I’m going to share with you the way we do it with clients. We do it with clients in 15 minutes. Because usually the first thing that comes to your mind is the thing that’s bothering you. So we tell clients, “You’ve got 15 minutes to dump on everything you want to accomplish in the next two weeks. We’re going to make a list.” And then I ask them to go accomplishment it. They fail. Try to go accomplish it. They fail. We throw it away. We start doing it more realistically.

And over time, you start to train your brain, “Listen, I don’t need to be thinking about a year from now. I don’t need to be living in five years from now. I don’t need to be daydreaming all day about what I’m going to have when we’re a $5 billion company. That’s not helping me right now.” Every two weeks, and if you can get those accomplished, what you’ll find is you’ll wake up one day and you’ll be like, “Wow, I never actually thought we’d get here.” And you didn’t spend or waste any energy and time thinking about where you want to be. It’s heaven on earth, to tell you the truth.

Most of what you do in the business function is about decisions. The most important job that you do is about decisions. If you’re making poor decisions, you’re getting poor results. If you’re making decisions on past experiences, you’re usually getting poor results. So when we get into this cycle of stress where you’re overwhelmed all the time, how are you making decisions and are you making good ones? Or are you just still in the trial-and-error phase?

Let me just tell all of you, congratulations, you made it. You’re there. Now, you get the luxury of sitting down, thinking and making decisions without stress or without the worry of putting food on the table. So we don’t need to fear anything anymore. All we need to do is to make really good decisions. Poor decision-making is very normal. The goal is to make better decisions — more realistic decisions, more decisions based in reality, not in fantasy. I want you to start telling yourself, I have the time. And I need help. I have the time, and I need help.

If you continue to tell yourself that you don’t have time to focus on the business, you won’t focus on the business. If you continue to say, “I don’t have time to go out and hire another rainmaker or to focus on the rainmaking function,” the only thing that you’re telling me is that you can’t do it. You don’t believe you can do it. You don’t believe you can free your time; you don’t believe that you can ask for help; and you don’t believe that you can have the help that you need for your business.

You telling yourself this is actually hurting you and your business and your employees. You telling yourself you don’t have the time is hurting you, hurting yourself and hurting your employees. And I hope that it doesn’t hurt your families.

Audience: Are you trying to say that as business owners and as salespeople and advisors, we’ve created our business and become successful by dealing with the clients? So we should remove everything else that doesn’t have to do with dealing with clients and give that over to someone else to do and just focus on just getting more clients and servicing those clients?

Herbers: Yeah. I love this question because almost always I get this exact same question right here in this presentation. What I’m telling you is that you have to make a decision. You have to either decide that “I’m going to focus on the client and work with the client and give the business functions away to someone I trust” or “I’m going to have to find someone whom I really trust, or a lot of people whom I really trust, and they’re going to focus on the client and work with the client, and I’m going to go run the business.”

Inevitably, that is, if you continue to succeed, inevitably you will not be able to avoid that question. The more you avoid it, the more you just go up and down and up and down and up and down. I’ve worked with a lot of firms that decide to give up even the CEO function and all the executive functions to people whom they trust. They hire them in their business. And those other people run their businesses. And I’ve also had others say, “Listen, I can’t work with all the clients anymore and take care of the clients as well as I think the clients should be taken care of and run the business, too.” Making good decisions, or making the right decisions for you and for your business and for your clients, is what it’s all about.

Is it OK to work with the big clients and give the small clients to someone else? That’s how you do it. You start to give the smaller clients away, and you keep the larger clients. But if you continue to grow, inevitably, you will have no clients left. Some of the CEOs whom I work with will choose just to stay involved with the really large clients. They will choose to have maybe 3 percent or 5 percent of their time dedicated to client work. But even then, an argument could be made that you aren’t actually taking good care of the clients because you’re not focusing on it 100 percent of the time, or at least 80 percent of the time.

There’s no right or wrong; it’s just making the right decisions for you. But eventually, your functions split, and that’s a hard thing to do. We’ve built this business by doing everything, right? Working with the clients, getting the clients, the operations — we’ve done it all. Eventually, as the business gets bigger, all those parts of you and what you’ve done start getting handed out to someone else, and what remains is one. And that’s a hard thing to let go of.

Audience: I created this piece that I’ve got to take care of, and I’m also meeting clients and writing business like you said. You hit a crossroad in your career where it’s like I have this business I want to run, and I want to help clients at the same time. I’m right there, where they take away from each other. And luckily I found somebody whom I can trust. So we’re starting that transition cycle actually right now. And this is perfect, so thank you.

Herbers: You’re very welcome. I love what I do. I’m glad to be here. That conflict is the hardest place to be. And it’s really hard to take it out of you. I’ve been through it, so I understand that conflict really well. I’ve been through it three times, actually. And so, when you’re growing your practice and you’re kind of ripping your pieces apart, it’s hard. It’s hard because it takes a lot of work. And it hurts because it takes a lot of time.

So, I want to tell you about how the business actually runs. We can predict the growth of advisory businesses now through analytics and a lot of research. Now, that’s not to say that this won’t change in the future because we don’t know what the future will hold. But as the business grows, what you will see is the business actually not doing this hockey stick thing, if your revenues are growing like this, which is illustrated here in the blue line. [visual] If your revenue is growing consistently, your expense line, which is this light blue in your business, is working like a heart monitor.

So each time when you get to these points, you know the saying “You’re working harder for less money”? It’s true. It happens; it naturally happens. It’s called a “growth barrier.” So what happens is your expense line starts to inch closer to your revenue line. So you have less profit; you’re taking home less money. But if you keep pushing through that, what will happen is your expense line will go down, and then you’re making a lot of money. The difference between the two lines is profit. You’re making a lot of money in the happy times, and then you’ll make the next investment to get to the next level. That expense line will go up. So your expense line runs like a heart monitor if your revenue line is running straight.

So it’s just normal. The fears that you have, the things that you’re going through, the move in your profit, the income going up and down, that’s just a normal part of growing the business. But, let me give you some permission. If you don’t want to go through the next growth barrier and you just want to take the profit, just do it. Just figure out how big you want to be and stay there. You’re not going to lose your clients. They’re your greatest asset; they’re going to keep coming back. You can do that if you want to. I ran a business like that for 10 years. It served me well. It’s called “creating a cash cow.”

So you can create a cash cow in those low times. But if you want to push through, you’ve got to do things differently at each barrier. And what happens when you push through is that you’ve got to look at different places in your business. When we’re under $300,000 in revenue, we’re looking just at marketing. When we’re at $750,000, I want you to see, where does marketing live? Anywhere past $350,000. It doesn’t live anywhere. I’m not saying don’t focus on it; I’m just saying it can’t be your primary focus. So at $750,000, we know that we have to scale, which is putting in good technology and adding professional talent.

At $1.2 million, we have to look at client service. Client service changes. And we have to look at human capital, and then we get to $3.3 million, we will look at management, C-suite talent, compensation. At $8.5 million, we’re looking at org structure, rainmaking in particular if it hasn’t already died by then. And then, when we get up here to $15 million, innovation, division, control. If you follow each one of these steps along the way, focusing on the right thing at the right time and making decisions about this, you will push through these growth barriers faster. The problem is that people will get up here, and they’ve pushed through barriers. [visual] Mostly, they’ve sacrificed their own self; they’ve sacrificed their own owner’s income; they’ve invested all their money back in the business.

And what happens is they get here and realize, “Wow, I can’t do this anymore. And we have to go back to these steps and fill in the pieces before we can push them through.” So, as you get larger, if you don’t solve the problem, the problem just multiplies and multiplies and multiplies.

Audience: What’s an M&A?

Herbers: M&As are mergers and acquisitions. So, just so you know a little trick in the industry on our side of the world, meaning the clients who come to me and say, “We’re deploying an M&A strategy,” what they do is they actually go out and try to find those of you who are at the top of this growth barrier. Because you’re stressed, you’re overwhelmed, and you’re making less money, they can get you on the cheap. So they seek you out; they call. They want you here. They want you in pain, and then they promise to take your pain away. And then they buy you on the cheap.

So, if you’re going to sell, what you want to do is you don’t want to sell when you are in pain or desperate to get relieved. You actually want to sell down here at this point. So, there’re a lot of big roll-up firms in the country. They’ll call my consulting practice all the time. “Angie, we need some people in pain; we need some people in pain.”

It really depends. It solely depends, almost always, on the way that those owners or partners are making decisions. So, if they’re making poor decisions, it’s hard for us to push through those growth barriers. If we’re making really good decisions, we can push through.

Every business is different, and every business is unique, so I can’t put timelines on it. Now, I can tell you my experience. I’ve had some clients, one in particular, who is part of MDRT. He pushed through this really fast because he called, he asked for help, he took the advice. There wasn’t a whole lot of resistance or pushback in the client relationship, which is really common. There’s often a lot of pushback, and we pushed through the first growth barrier really quickly and into the next growth barrier fast.

And it looks like this. [visual] And I have to give my grandfather credit. He owned a really large engineering company. He mentored while he was alive, up until just last year. He said to me, “Sweet Angie, this is what you have to do in your business. When you hit those growth barriers, you have to do this. Let go.” And it literally feels like that. You’ve got to go ask for help, and you’ve got to take that advice and you’ve got to let go of it. It is a leap of faith. There’s someone out there who knows something that you don’t know. You’ve got to find the right people whom you trust, who are working in your best interest, and then give them the faith to push you through.

If you’re really good at running a business, and you’ve already got the clients off your plate and you’re not all intertwined all that much anymore, the good news is that you might be able to let go on your own. And in letting go on your own, you’ll push through. You can’t let go without stress.

I have a business that just started, and they shot all the way up here, they’re somewhere right around here. [visual] And they were very aware of the growth barriers and strategies, so they got private equity and shot all the way up to the top. We just deployed a huge marketing strategy, but we did all of these things somewhat in the reverse. We never let the rainmaking function happen. We built the business with an already established C-suite. So it just really depends on all the different structures in the business.

Audience: As a sole proprietor, is there any way to scale that down? I mean, to go from say MDRT, we make $100,000 first year, $150,000, $200,000. It could be a long muddling along to get to $8.5 million. You know what I mean? I guess is that your point, do we need to change what we’re doing?

Herbers: I think more of my point is just to ask for help. I mean, you’re in already a really great organization that you have support from. But, at the point where you put your feet in the sand and say, “I’m not changing this,” that’s the thing you need to go change.

Audience: Is this somewhat scalable though? Or not really?

Herbers: Well, it is. But there is no escaping it. Let’s just use the $300,000. If you’re sitting at $300,000, and you’ve made it to $350,000 and you’re going through the $750 growth barrier, you could jump all the way up here and get rid of org charts or develop the org strategy, develop the sales process, get rid of the rainmaking function, start looking at mergers and acquisitions, and work at it backward to scale faster. [visual]

The problem is we oftentimes don’t, as sole practitioners, have the resources for that. You can go out and leverage up, meaning go acquire debt or find private equity or venture or something like that to get you there faster. But the reality is we just have to take the steps. And we have to be OK with that. Building a business is a process, and we don’t know how long it will take. Sometimes you get luck along the way, and you get thrown up. Thrown up here faster. But, you just have to come to the reality that it’s just steps. Take those steps. And then challenge yourself to take those steps faster, which means making really good decisions faster.

So many of your clients come to you because they want to make better decisions. They want to make better decisions, and they want you to help. They want you to help them build the life that they want. Right? Find a friend who will do financial advisory work for you. Find someone who can help you. Whoever that may be. Pay them to do it. Most of the time, people who aren’t paid to do that stuff are not your friends.

OK, so the good news is as we’re climbing here, we know exactly what the growth barriers are, so we know, to some degree, how to prevent getting into them very deep. [visual] We don’t want that blue line to go past the revenue line. That’s the worst-case scenario, when we get into a negative profit margin. And we want to be able to keep going along the way. But, that rainmaking function can’t depend upon us, so here’s how we do it. Here’s how we solve the problem. And solving the problem is incredibly easy. It just takes some time to sit down and get used to it.

How many of you go into the client relationship, you sit down, you just have a pad of paper, you connect with the client, you talk to the client, you figure out what they want and then you propose something to them? How many of you do that? How many of you have a very strict process, scripted process, that you use when you first talk to a client? OK, we’ve got a couple. How many of you walk into the client relationship and just allow the client to unload on you, and then you give them something for free, and then you hope that they will sign up? Good.

So, the first thing that you need to know is you don’t need to show the client anything. You just need to build the trust. You guys are ahead on that one. So here is what I want you to not do. I don’t want you to hire a rainmaker. Never, in my entire career of working with over 1,000 advisory firms, have I ever, ever seen it work out. In the times that it may work out, partnership was given, and then we had a breakup within the unit. So, I want you to be careful. I’m not saying it can’t happen; I just want you to be very careful, not taking on partners because they have really good rainmaking functions. And believing that you can go out and hire them.

What we’re going to do instead is focus on your client asset. We’re going to focus on client service. And here is how we do it. As you grow up in the organization, the clients and the employees and you start to ask yourself this question subconsciously: “We don’t know who we are anymore.” We don’t know who we are anymore; a lot of things are happening. Our client service has evolved; it’s changed. Our clients have changed. We now can get bigger clients than we were able to before. We are in a different place. We can’t do all these jobs anymore. Our employees are in a different place. So what you do along the process of those growth barriers is you are constantly redefining yourself and improving yourself all of the time.

So what ends up happening is, you’re defining each day when you go into the business, who are you? Really. Who are we? Who are we as this business? That’s the brand. The brand question is, who are we, really? Really. Who are we? When we take clients through this process, I’m going to start a presentation. When we take clients through this process, there is so much resistance. If we ever get fired within the client relationship, 99 percent of the time it’s right here.

Because we’re questioning nearly everything that they have done up to the point of where they are. OK, I’m going to go through a presentation, and I’m going to give you a pitch on what this firm is. [visual] Now, this firm is a fictitious firm. It doesn’t exist. It’s one we made up in my company because no client of ours will let us use their presentation as an illustration. So, we made this one up. Any of the logos and all of that stuff on the presentation are also made up. But, I want you to imagine that you’re sitting in front of your client, and you’re saying:

Hey, listen. You’ve been with us for five years, or six years, for a long time. We’re glad that you’re here. We’ve grown and developed over the years, and I’d like to just tell you a little bit about where we are today.

Today, we are still the company we’ve always been, to some degree. A lot has changed, but the name hasn’t changed. We’re LifeStyle Financial Planning and Education. Our goal is that we want to make sure that you’re living the life that reflects your attitude and value. Today, I’m just going to tell you a little bit about what we are and give you more details about what’s happening on the inside.

We are a firm that is focused mainly on three very core missions. Those missions are: We focus on your goals. We focus on you growing as a person. And we focus on guiding you through that. We strive to make sure we focus on every client who comes into our organization, and we measure each client who comes into our organization on this mission. Are you goal-oriented, are you growth-oriented and are you willing to allow us to guide you?

Here are our client philosophies. We have four of them. The first one is we take action. We take action on helping you improve your lifestyle, and it is your job to take action on improving your lifestyle, too. We are objective. We give recommendations in your best interest. We are committed. We are committed for life. That commitment for life develops a lifelong personal relationship. We care about you; we are achieving your dreams and goals, helping you achieve your dreams and goals. We measure you based on the mission, and we measure you based on the philosophies, and that’s why you’ve been with us for so long, and we like to celebrate that. We do a celebration.

Here is who we serve now. We serve a diverse group of clients who fall into three stages in their life. First is the growth phase. This is when you’re adding to your portfolios and you are growing within your own personal life. Second is the transition phase. This is when we need to protect what we have grown through looking at other avenues, such as insurance and tax and estate planning. And then we have the maturity phase. This is when you’ve accomplished those things, and now you’re using the fruits of your labor.

Any of the clients who come into our company fall into one of these phases, and we follow the same process to take them through that phase, building the lifelong relationship.

Then you pause with the client, and you say:

We haven’t had time to really get personal about your particular situation, so we’re going to do it in the meeting today. We’re going to hit the reset button, and we’re going to talk to you a little bit about where you think you’re in your lifestyle today. What are your Top 3 financial goals today? What are you worried about today? What are the financial resources that you currently have that we don’t know about today?

And you restart the conversation with that particular client by focusing on the client and the client’s needs, and you have that conversation with them.

After you have that conversation with them, you say:

Over the years, we have developed a process that we have followed. To some degree, you follow that process, but we’re making it clearer today. Here’s the process. We’re going to start you like we have every existing client — every client who comes into our organization. Now we’re going to hit the reset button, and we’re going to start by taking you through this process.

First, we’re going to do a planning meeting. Second, we’re going to do a presentation meeting. Third, we’re going to do a six-month follow-up. And then we’re going to have an annual meeting after that every year, asking you these same four questions. And then you have the certainty behind the scenes that we will be able to give you whatever it is that you have within your organization — tax help, insurance help, whatever, monthly rebalancing.

You’re going to tell them what you do for them ongoing.

Our areas of focus in our company, when we started, we had to focus on everything, but we can’t focus on everything anymore. So we’re going to focus on the things that are most important to our clients. The things that we focus on are goals, retirement, income, giving, and the investments. Many of you will have, potentially, insurance up here as well. I like the insurance component because we can also say we’re protecting you. We’re protecting what you have built.

How we do that is through a four-point team. That four-point team looks like this. [visual] We have your advisory team; we have your client service team; we have your planning team; we have your investment and research team. I can’t do everything for you anymore. I have a team that will help you. And the team is divided into these four categories. If you need anything, you can call me, but it’s important that we go to the experts, now, within our organization.

Finally, over the years, we have an investment philosophy, whatever philosophy you have — investment philosophy, insurance philosophy, tax philosophy. We have a philosophy that we take the clients through, and I want to tell you about this philosophy, and here’s the philosophy. You know this because we’ve been taking you through that philosophy, but we’re also developing it over time. We are a work in process as well as you, and we just get better and better every day. And our goal, with your lifestyle, is to take you through a process of helping you get better every day. So would you like to reset the button and start the process?

And they will usually say yes. Over 99 percent of the time, you restart them. If you have to have paperwork, you do paperwork. If you have to schedule a meeting, you schedule a meeting. But you get that meeting on the calendar. And then you tell them thank you. And write them a thank-you card, and you celebrate that relationship up and to that point.

Now, why do you do this? Do you do it to enhance client service? Not usually. You do it because if you tell all those clients the exact same thing, they will start talking. And the best rainmaking is talking. Your clients actually do the rainmaking of you.

What my hope is for you is that you go home and you follow this same process. It’s pretty much set up for you. This exact process we’ve used in thousands of firms. Only it’s unique to them. It’s never the same. This one we just made up, but you make it unique to you. You make your process very special to your organization. That becomes your brand.

You tell your clients the presentation every time. Your clients will start talking for you, and they’ll start rainmaking for you. And then if you tell the prospects every time, those same prospects, and you follow the process and you deliver the expectation, will start talking for you. The best marketing is word of mouth. And the best way to start word-of-mouth marketing is to start talking to your greatest asset. And your greatest asset is your client base.

But in order for you to do that, you have to be very clear on who you are. And once you figure that out, and you have the presentation put together and you continue to talk through it to clients and to everyone else, then you’ll see your business multiply and multiply and multiply. And as you see that business multiply, and other clients coming in that you aren’t working with, then you will be able to run that business, making good decisions without running around trying to grasp something outside of the business that doesn’t always turn out that well.

Audience: On the slide, one of the four steps. Let’s say you’re at the point you can hire somebody to do planning. Is that going to cost a lot of money?

Herbers: So this is what we call “organizational strategy.” I wish I could get into organizational strategy with you. I could talk to you all day long. Organizational strategy is not necessarily that you have one individual person in each one of these seats, but when you start out, remember, you are doing everything, right? So, when you look at you, and everything that you’re doing, you have to split out those functions. So then you go out and you hire one client service person, one planner maybe, whoever it may be, one someone else. You’re just splitting yourself up. So, in this, yes, you might have a team. But you might have a team of two. And the team of two is you are doing the advisory work and the planning work, and then your client service person is doing the client service work or the investment research; usually it’s a research analyst position.

Then you get a little bit bigger, and you can hire a research person and you can hire a planner. And then you get a little bit bigger, and you could build an advisory team. I think the best example I can give you is like cell splitting. Right? You’re one cell, and as you get bigger, you’re just splitting your cells. That’s all your doing. And then you’re splitting the cells of other people, and your business will get to a point where you’ve got one person, and the only thing they do is work with clients or the only thing that they do is work with clients on estate planning. Or only work with clients on one component of the advisory function or one component of your business. Your business just keeps splitting.

Audience: What do you do when you get to the point where you put in place the client service team and the investments and research team and your advisory team? Now your advisory team is dealing with clients, and you have too many clients for them to deal with. Do you just add more advisors onto your clients who have come to deal with you as an individual?

Herbers: So, this is a really great question. He’s asking what you do when the advisors get too full. So, you’re working in the growth process; you’re working through all of the phases, right? Your advisors get too full. You can keep adding advisors to work through all of the phases of life, or you can actually get more focused on each one of the phases.

So in your situation, where you have your advisory team and your advisory team is full and they’re at capacity and you have all of the other departments developed, one of the first things that we do is we’ll go sell off the small clients to free capacity. And right now, we can sell small clients with a phone call and at two times revenue. So we’ll sell off those small clients to a firm that focuses only on small clients, and then all of a sudden we just freed up capacity and profit margin quite significantly by decreasing the revenue but increasing our margin. And we then get more focused on one of these phases.

So, as you get bigger, what happens in client service is that you no longer have clients who have zero dollars all the way up to $10 million. We have a group of clients who are only $5 million or a group of clients who are only $10 million. That is the best way to do it. Now, some firm owners decide they don’t want to break the phase structure, and in that case, you just have to recognize that you’re giving up profit, which is fine. To add more advisors, that’s the only thing you can do.

Audience: It kind of reminded me of something you said earlier, that I have to basically get to the point where I think it becomes a greed and fear thing, where I make enough to live my lifestyle and now I’m willing to give up some of the profit that I am used to making to get to that next level. And then the fear comes in or, “Oh my gosh, I’m taking home less money. Am I going to be able to survive my lifestyle?”

So, I’m going to basically bet that money on my business that I can get to the next step. But I’m going to have to give something up to get something. And that can become a battle within yourself. Is it greed, is it fear, or is it a little bit of both? Am I making $200,000? Now all of a sudden I could make $250,000 or $300,000. Well, maybe $200,000 is enough, and I take that extra $100,000 and dump it into whatever the next step is. And hope that it actually gets me to the $3 million level.

Herbers: So I love this question more than anything, more than any question that I ever get. The solution is easy. The solution is, you can’t see it objectively so all you need to do is go hire yourself a financial advisor. You’re in conflict. The only way to get yourself out of conflict is to get someone objective to help you with your own personal financial situation so that you can focus on what the business needs. And once you get that in balance, then that problem will be solved.

So the first question you have to ask yourself is, what do we do? And then answer the question, what do we do? The next question is, how do we act? And then answer the question. Those are the client philosophies. The next question is, whom do we work with? That’s your target client; that was the lifelong phases — growth, transition, maturity. And then you ask yourself the questions. What questions do we ask the client, which means how do we connect with the client? And then, what is our process? What are the steps that we take the client through?

And as you’re writing down what your process is, you better be able to deliver that process to every client, regardless of size. If you change the process for a B client or a C client or a D client or an E client, you’re creating confusion in your messaging and your marketing. And you’ll never get the clients to start talking. So you have to deliver the exact same service to every client. That doesn’t mean it has to be priced the same; it just means you have to deliver the same service to every client in the same process.

What are we good at, which is core focused? That was the area where I said investment goals, income. Where you can put insurance. Talk about protection. Who is on the team? Talk about your team. Don’t talk about you anymore. We don’t care what you do. We care what the team does. And then, what is your investment philosophy? Or what is your philosophy about anything? And then finally, tell them how to start. Do it. To every client. And if you do that, you will have enough growth and no more rainmaking.

Then, you take that same presentation to every person in your organization, all the way down to the receptionist. How many of you know what Toastmasters is? You create with your organization a Toastmasters type of program where everyone, all the way down to the receptionist, every week comes in and practices giving that presentation in front of the rest of the team. And then the next week, another person practices giving that presentation in front of the team. And then everyone practices. Every employee practices. Every employee knows that presentation by heart. And then you’ve unleashed your third asset, which is your employee asset.

If your employees know how to talk about your business when they’re out and about, they’ll start repeating this presentation. And when the clients are repeating it and the employees are repeating it and it is a reflection of your brand, then you know what? You’ve got another problem to solve, and that means everybody’s talking about you.

After you’ve trained your people, then you start telling your clients, and you continue to tell your clients and you continue to tell your people. And then you’ve killed the rainmaking function. You don’t need it anymore.

The biggest problem that we have in most of my client firms is how do we find enough talent fast enough to keep up with the growth? Every problem we solve creates a new problem. The goal, the goal, the sole goal in life and in business is to have good problems to solve.

Angie Herbers is the founder and CEO of FourPointe Consulting.