Hello again and Happy New Year!  Wishing you much success in your practice this year.  

It’s time for all of us to revisit our goals both personal and professional.  What goals have you already set for 2016?  I often talk to advisors about their goals for bringing on new clients, growing their practice, having better time management, finally hiring new people, etc.

The trick to setting goals is to be “specific”.  It’s not just about “getting new clients”.  For example, getting more specific…”I want to add 5 new clients each month in 2016 for a total of 60 new clients”.  Then break that goal down into the “how” you are going to make that happen.

Remember that you can’t keep doing the same old thing and expect new and better results (assuming the same old thing isn’t really working).  You have to try new things.  Some will fail miserably.  Some will work great.  Some will fall in between there somewhere.

Did you know that” perseverance” is one of the top qualities of business owners?  Being able to persevere, adjust, change courses, and try new things to reach your goals.

Setting AND revisiting your goals AND working on them all are required to ACHIEVE them.  Let me tell you a story about Torrid.  About 3 years ago I set a goal to redo our website.  It was a bit dated and a little cluttered.  Too much information on the home page.  It was overwhelming for people to look at.  I realized we needed a complete redesign.

In 2013 I investigated our options.  We have our own web developers and thought about just having them do it all, but most of them are better “coders” than “designers”.  And I wanted fresh ideas anyway.   By the end of 2013 I knew we wanted to use WordPress, but that was about it.  I didn’t keep pushing towards the goal hard enough.  I kept procrastinating and putting it off.

In 2014 it was still on the goals list.  The website was still looking bad.  This time I broke it down into steps.  First, I ran a web design contest on 99designs.com.  I described what I wanted and let the designers battle it out.  It took way longer than I thought to just pick a winning design and get it tweaked.

Once the winner emerged, they just gave us the photoshop design files.  We then had to convert it to actual HTML and images for the web pages.  That is a bit of a special skill, so we hired a contractor to do that part.  That took a couple of months right there.  By this point we were already into 2015!

I doubled down determined to get this new website done.  I hired another firm that was going to convert it to a WordPress template.  They did that… in about 4 months.  But the navigation wasn’t right.  The images needed all kinds of sprucing.  And on top of that, we still had to set it up on our server AND move over all the content we wanted to still keep.

Still focused, but taking a lot of time, I had to hire yet another firm that would move everything from the development firm to our server.  Now luckily our own people manage our web servers and could set up the site and the WordPress and all that goes with it.  These new guys moved over the template and tweaked it until we liked it, including the navigation.   Then they moved over all of our pages.  It took a lot of work to get that done.

Our new site rolled out in the Fall of 2015, almost 3 years after I first set the goal!  So sometimes we have to “persevere”, but none of it would have happened if we hadn’t set the goal and pursued it relentlessly.

There are many ways to design a website and in retrospect I picked the “custom website” route, which is the longest, hardest, and most expensive route.  Regardless we did finally hit our goal and more importantly learned many lessons on the journey.

On the “success” side of goal setting, if you didn’t see the webinar we had one in December with advisor Bill Schultheis.  His firm Soundmark Financial grew 700% from $80 million to $550 million in AUM over about a 9 year period.  Talk about setting goals and hitting them!  If you haven’t heard his story you can see it at

www.DoubleYourAUM.com.