goal setting Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

Essential Working Habits to Ensure Your Success as a Financial Advisor

February 27, 2023 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

In recent posts, we have outlined why financial advisors must master critical habits for prospecting, calling, and selling, without which success can be elusive. However, while you may identify as a financial advisor, you are, first and foremost, a businessperson. You can have all the best habits for prospecting, calling, and selling, but you need to have the vital working habits of a successful businessperson or entrepreneur to help you in the long run.

If your business lacks direction or you can’t manage your time effectively, you are essentially practicing your craft on borrowed time. Without self-discipline and a results-oriented mindset, you’ll be less likely to progress to the next level. These are just some of the working habits that, when mastered, make it possible to exercise the revenue-generating practices of prospecting, calling, and selling to the greatest extent possible with much better outcomes.

To succeed as a financial advisor, you must create a sustainable business that supports your efforts to grow your clientele. These are the crucial working habits any businessperson must master to be successful.

Only Elite Advisors Step Out of Their Comfort Zone—Do You?

July 5, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

It’s human nature to seek comfort in familiar habits and patterns. When anything comes along to threaten the status quo, we naturally feel uncomfortable, even anxious. Most of us will take great pains to cling to our comfort zone just to avoid those feelings, rejecting change and its unpredictability. The inevitable result for many people is to languish in predictable mediocrity. While they may feel safe, they eventually slip into obsolescence.

In the financial advisory business, if you are not constantly working at getting better, you are getting worse. That’s because successful advisors always strive to improve, to find ways to perfect their craft, which often requires breaking from familiar habits and stepping outside their comfort zone. They know that if they continue to live inside their complacency zone and do what they’ve always done, they’ll continue to get the same results. As a financial advisor, that is ultimately a formula for failure.

4 Key Strategies to Kick-start Your Financial Advisory Practice

September 9, 2019 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Establishing yourself as an advisor will take dedication, time and sound strategic thinking. Here are some key strategies that will help you kick-start your financial advisory practice.

#1. Develop a business plan

No one succeeds without a plan. It’s the first step in building a credible business. No matter how good you are at your job, if you don’t know where you want to go, you won’t grow a healthy business.

7 Things Many Financial Advisors Don’t Do, and Fail as a Result

June 17, 2019 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Much of the failure in this industry comes down to non-observance of the basics. Too many advisors fail not only to develop their soft skills but lack the necessary business acumen to remain viable. If you want to succeed as a financial advisor, learn from their mistakes and make sure you ‘do’ what they are ‘not doing’.

Here are some things that many advisors are not doing – but should be.

5 Things Financial Advisors Should Do to Make the Most of This Holiday Season

December 25, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

As the year draws to a close it’s the ideal time to reflect, regroup and make plans for the New Year. What went right and what went wrong? What things can you do to make sure your career is in great shape going into the next year?

Here are five ways to help you hit the ground running next year.

How to Develop a Repeatable Process

September 4, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

If you want to make your life easier and become a truly elite advisor, make sure you have repeatable processes in place. This especially applies to tasks such as prospecting, presenting, following up and servicing your accounts. Remember: Repeatable processes produce repeatable results so make your goal consistency, not perfection.

In this post we’ll look at some practical steps you can take to incorporate repeatable processes into your working life.

What’s The Greatest Cause of Burnout among Financial Advisors

May 15, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

A Blueprint for Aspiring Million Dollar {Producers to Follow - AskDON

Here’s a question I received from Ricardo in Portugal. He’s writing about burnout with an interesting question.

What’s the greatest cause of burnout among advisors in the United States?

I think that actually is very easy to answer. Whether it’s Los Angeles or Lisbon, it doesn’t really matter.

Listen to the audio or read the transcript below to learn what Don thinks the greatest cause of burnout among Financial Advisors is.

Take Back Control of Your Financial Advisor Career

May 1, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

If you feel your career is at a crossroads, or that things are not going your way you need to adapt your attitude and learn to make better decisions. In the words of the late Earl Shoaff ‘Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for fewer problems, wish for more skills”.

The only thing holding you back in life is you. You alone determine your future, not the outside world. So, if you don’t like where you are – get in the driver’s seat and take control.

Weekly Focus: Goal Setting

January 2, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 1 comment

The beginning of a given year is the time to rewrite our goals, our mission statement and our business plan. For some of us that will involve a major overhaul and for some of us it will involve a tweak. For all of us, it will be a thought-provoking experience. Goal setting comes first. Decide what you want to accomplish and write it down. Set a date by which you will accomplish each goal. If you were charged with running a twelve-minute mile and nobody posted a finish line, you would have no way of knowing if you succeeded. It’s no different with business goals.

Take Action Now if You Want to Succeed as a Financial Advisor

August 29, 2016 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Financial advisors often fail or stay at a mediocre level because they procrastinate. They don’t understand that success requires looking to the future, setting goals and working hard to achieve those goals. Instead many advisors think they can get by day by day on the bare minimum. Unfortunately, success doesn’t just ‘happen’. No matter how talented you are your star won’t rise unless you get proactive about growing your business.

1 2