A couple weeks ago I was supposed to be in Florida. This was prior to knowing about the hurricane. I was supposed to be a speaker in front of a national group of financial advisers. I had put together a presentation…that never happened…because the conference never happened…because no one was able to get-together…because of the unforeseen hurricane that plowed into Florida.
For this week’s blog, I want to go through some of the things that I was going to be talking about at that conference. I had wanted to talk about my entire Mondays, and what we do on our Mondays at the Financialoscopy office. The presentation was going to cram 8-hours of my day into about 45-minutes. Now, I'm going to take that 45-minute presentation and cram it into about a 5-minute blog post.
Mondays for me are about getting up early and beginning the day as positive as I can. Beginning at 5am (which is the latest that I get out of bed), I get up, feed the animals, have a cup of coffee, and read the paper. I make sure that I journal for about a half-hour, have some quiet time, read some scripture, and make sure that I am focused for the day. Then, I do the treadmill for about 30 minutes at which time, I watch about 10-minutes of the news. In today’s negative world 10-minutes is usually enough. I try to read from an inspirational book, etc.
Some of the things that I've been reading or videos that have been watching lately have been videos by Seth Godin. He is a great marketer and has wonderful ideas on how to market yourself better and how to really create a business environment that not only your team members will enjoy working in, but people who are actually interacting with your team will actually be engaged and they will be very, very positive. If you want to see one of his best videos, search YouTube for “Seth Godin, Nordic”. It’s an awesome hour!
I also like to spend some time, in addition to that, with some thoughtful theology insight, if you have some interest in that. I like to spend a little bit of time with Robert Morris of Gateway Church, which is located in Texas or with the show Time of Grace out of Appleton, WI, where Mike Novotny talks about how to live your best life today, the way that you should. I also enjoy watching videos by author Malcolm Gladwell. In fact, one of the best podcasts that I really enjoy right now is his Revisionist History. If you want something that will really blow your mind and will have you second-guess maybe everything that you've always believed to be true, you might want to check that out this podcast.
Once I get to the office at 8:30, I plan out my day from 8:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. Then, for the next 45-minutes to an hour, we have a sit down meeting with the team. I might grab a book that I've been inspired by recently and read from it. We’ve been reading the book Fans First by Jesse Cole. He is a co-owner of the Savannah Bananas – a college-level baseball team in Savannah, Georgia. He’s written this great book on how to take the structure of your company and have it focused in on your clients, your fans. It’s about making sure that your fans get everything that they should. After that, we typically have some educational training for about 15 minutes. Then it's on to what kind of video podcast and blog am I going to be planning for the week. So, you're seeing that happen right here, right now in this blog. We do the production of that. We have to get all the completed podcast ready to go so we can send it out to our compliance department so everything can be pre-approved.
Lunch eventually happens. I typically have that at the office. I make a lunch during the early morning hours for myself and for my spouse. I usually do lunch at my desk because there's so many things to accomplish. At 1 p.m. I am finally able to look at the plans for the rest of the week. Do we have everything we need for every single client to engage as well as we possibly can? Do we have all the information we need? Do we need to go out and get additional information to be able to engage our clients in the best way that we know how? After that, we take a look at everything that we've done over the course of the last couple of weeks. Has paperwork been completed? Have we followed-up on everything that is in the pipeline that clients have requested to be taken care of? Have any problems on our radar been resolved? Then I sit down with the team, and we go over every single appointment that we are going to be having not only this week, but actually two to three weeks out. What needs to be accomplished? What kind of information do we need to ask for? Are we set and ready to go?
Finally, I have an opportunity to read and reply to emails, voicemails and phone messages and engage those clients that may have had questions over the weekend that need to be handled by myself, if not by my team. Maybe they've already been taken care of by my team, but I want to make certain that everything and everyone was followed-up appropriately. By mid-afternoon, I'm with our team checking if we have everything in place for clients for meetings that are going to be happening on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of the current week. After some additional time for regular ‘clean-up of loose-ends, we have about an hour and a half of weekly continuing education. I will literally go through training on how we can serve better; what kind of calculations should we use, what kind of software programs should we use, are we going through enough details so if someone has a question, we've already asked ourselves those questions, and we know what the answers to those questions might be. Then finally, we finish up of the day and it’s 5:30pm.
So, that's just our Mondays. That was the presentation that I was supposed to present over 45-minutes and it represents my entire 8-hour Monday. So, when somebody asks me during the weekend, “Are you looking forward to your Monday?” I say that I'm always looking forward to Monday because of the wonderful things that we're going to be engaged in. I'm excited for every brand-new week to begin.
