Author Archives: Noel R. Vincent

Strategy: Pulling it all Together

What is a Statement of Strategy?

The strategy is the bridge between your mission and your vision. It’s how you are going to get there. It takes you from where you are and what you are doing to where you want to go and what you want to become. You know what you ought to be doing (mission). You know what you want to become (vision). Now, write out a brief plan for getting there. Something pithy, that’s easy to remember. It should only be long enough to convey the key thoughts. Think about the how of getting there. My firm’s strategy is:

Concierge Service, Real Diversification, Complete Management

Concierge service refers to the extra special care we give to making every client appointment or event memorable. Real diversification regards our university endowment model approach to portfolio allocation. Complete management encompasses all our in-house professional services, including investment, tax, risk, and estate planning, which are provided by licensed or certified financial advisors, tax preparers, risk managers, and attorneys.

What are the key strategies you will employ to bring about the realization of your vision? Will they work? Are they working now? Is someone else modeling these strategies for you to follow, or are you blazing your own trail? If the latter, be flexible. Constantly compare your strategy against your results. Make adjustments, experiment, and take risks until you find your unique profit formula. Then, keep refining it and refining it. Remember the longest journey begins with the first step. Keep taking steps toward your vision and you will eventually get there.

A Final Word on Communication

“The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.” – John Steinbeck

Prepare your mission, vision, and strategy statements, and then live and breathe them. Become so in tune with them, that they begin to permeate every action, plan, and decision you and your staff make. Communication is the key. Not only must you become immersed in your mission, vision, and strategy, but your staff and your clients must as well.

First, your staff. Review your statements at every staff meeting. Teach them to your staff. Have them memorize each statement and reflect on them. When making plans or decisions with staff, ask, “How does your suggestion help us conduct our mission?” Probe further with, “Explain how this decision will bring us closer to realizing our vision.” Or, “Does this action coordinate with our strategy or work against it?”

Finally, your clients. Share your mission, vision, and strategy with your clients. Not only will they appreciate being brought into your trusted inner circle, they will also be better positioned to explain your practice to other affluent investors who may wish to become your clients. The better a satisfied client understands your business, the more effective he or she will be in recommending you the right people from their circles of influence. Lastly, when you share your mission, vision, and strategy with your clients, they will be equipped to let you know when you are not measuring up to your own standards and objectives. They will become your allies. Clients are the best source of constructive criticism at your disposal. Take full advantage of them for your sake and theirs.

Vision: The Forest and the Trees

What is a Vision Statement?

A vision statement is a pithy description of what you want your business, organization, or life to look like, if you actually achieve your goals. It is a snapshot of the future. Many people work at making their businesses successful, but, at best, have only a fuzzy idea about the future. Sure, they want more clients and more income, that’s success, right? But, too many people never really sit down and map it out. As they say, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.’ Where are you going? What do you want your business future to look like? It’s time to dream a little. What realistic, satisfying future can you conceive of that will get your juices flowing? That is your vision statement. The vision of my practice is to:

Become the Premier Wealth Manager in Our Market

Sound familiar? It’s the tag line for this blog. Now, I don’t necessarily want to become the biggest. And, certainly, I’d like to be the best. But, there is always someone out there who might be a little bit bigger, or a little bit better. Being the best is something to strive for, yes. However, it is not my primary objective. I want to be the exclusive, boutique, go-to practice for the most affluent clients in my area. I want joining my firm as a client to be the equivalent of getting accepted into the most desirable club in town. If you are with Senior Partners, you have arrived. No one does it like them.

Everyone knows that a glass ceiling can throw a wet rag on even the most ambitious person. Your advisors and support staff have desires and goals, too, and they hope to achieve them through your firm. Without a vision statement, they are forced to operate under a glass ceiling of ambiguity and failure. A vision statement removes the glass ceiling. It is a breath of fresh air for those suffocating in a job that has no future. When your team understands your vision, they can navigate for themselves, and carve out a future of their own.

“Without vision, the people perish.” – Proverbs 29:18

Mission, Vision, Strategy

Or, what are you doing, where are you going, and how do you plan to get there?  Many well-intended folks have made the honest errors of forming committees, conducting focus groups, haggling over minutiae, and taking months to write elaborate mission, vision, and strategy statements, only to set them aside as unrealistic, too complicated, or out of touch with the real world.  Conversely, others have written excellent statements and then erred in their implementation by allowing the statements to become trite platitudes with no real force or meaning.  There is a better way!

What is a Mission Statement?

Before you can write one, you must understand exactly what a mission statement is, and what it does.  A mission statement is a pithy summary of what your business ought to be doing.  When a NASA space shuttle blasts into space on a new mission, there are always several mission specialists on board who have lists of objectives they intend to accomplish on their journey.  Their missions are what they are supposed to be doing.  The mission of my practice, Senior Partners, LLC, is to:

Provide the Finest Relationship Experience in Our Market

We know that we are in competition with Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, Edward Jones, and a host of other big name wire houses and investment firms.  They have thousands of employees; I have twelve.  They have research departments; I have a paraplanner.  They have advertising budgets; I rely on word of mouth.  They have fancy downtown offices; I am in the neighborhood. They are household names; I can provide a superior relationship experience.  Neither can Merrill nor Fidelity match the experience I can deliver to their clients, and we win them away, everyday.  We don’t do this by dropping their entire $1 million 401k rollover into a mix of our own proprietary mutual funds or one of our cookie-cutter managed stock portfolios (we have neither). We do this by spending a minimum of an hour and a half in every client meeting to make sure we understand the client’s needs and deliver value to their portfolios.  We do this by serving them freshly ground Starbucks coffee with steaming baked pastries in the morning, and piping hot homemade cookies with herbal tea or an icy cold glass of milk in the afternoons, all delivered on our finest china.  We do this by finding them unique investment alternatives to traditional stocks and bonds so that their portfolios are well diversified.  We do this by sending a car to pick up elderly clients or drive them home when the sun sets before their appointment ends.  And, we do this by taking a slow, step-by-step, rather than a quick, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, approach to bringing on new accounts to ensure that both the client and the firm are a good fit for each other. In short, we make our clients feel special (and they love us for it), and we deliver real value to their financial lives (and they thank us for it).

Why a mission statement?

It is a rallying point and a decision screener.  First, a rallying point.  People have trouble getting excited and committed to vague notions of purpose.  They want to know what they are supposed to be doing, so that they can accomplish their tasks, find satisfaction in their work, and enjoy the fruits of their labors.  Without a mission, the people become listless, robotic, time card punchers, longing for quitting time, and daydreaming about the weekend.  Give people a mission they can sink their teeth into, and watch them take pride in their work.  Watch them keep their coworkers on track.  Watch them self-start, continuously improve, and set their own goals.  A mission statement is a framework for self-fulfillment.  Every organization needs one.

Second, a mission statement is a decision screener.  Every decision gets screened by the mission statement.  If it doesn’t serve the mission, we don’t do it.  Everything we do must be consistent with our mission.  As I have coached my team on the mission of our practice, they now bring far fewer decisions to me.  They know we’re in the relationship business.  They can now make many decisions on their own because they have the tool to do so.  It’s the mission statement.  They are empowered.  The practice is empowered.  The client reaps the rewards of an efficient, focused, savvy investment advisor, who knocks the ball out of the park every time he meets with them, because his staff has his back.  If you don’t have a good mission statement, you won’t make the best decisions.

Stay tuned for Vision and Strategy, which will be addressed in subsequent posts.

Book Review: The One Minute Manager, By Kenneth Blanchard, PhD and Spencer Johnson, MD

INTRODUCTION

Kenneth Blanchard, PhD received his B.A. in Government and Philosophy from Cornell University, an M.A. in Sociology and Counseling from Colgate University and a PhD in Administration and Management from Cornell.  He has served as business consultant to many major U.S. corporations including Chevron, Lockheed, and AT&T, and as professor of Organizational Behavior at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  He has written numerous books, including Management of Organization Behaviour: Utilizing Human Resources, a business standard now in its seventh edition.

Spencer Johnson, MD, received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Southern California and an M.D. from the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland.  He has held medical clerkships at Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic.  He served as Medical Director of Communications for Medtronic, a pioneering manufacturer of cardiac pacemakers, Research Physician for the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, and consultant to the Office of Continuing Education at the School of Medicine, University of California, La Jolla.  His other books include The Precious Present, and the Value Of series of books with Steve Pileggi.

SUMMARY

The material in the book is presented through a fictional account of a bright young man who is looking for an effective manager and wants to become one himself.  In his search, he meets a “One Minute Manager,” (p. 11) who describes in detail his personal management style which is then adopted by the bright young man.  Authors Blanchard and Johnson have developed an effective people management system based upon three simple techniques: One Minute Goal-Setting, One Minute Praisings and One Minute Reprimands.  One Minute Goal-Setting is organized into six steps:

  1. Manager clearly communicates responsibilities and expectations.
  2. Manager and subordinate define and agree on goals.
  3. Manager establishes and communicates clear performance standards.
  4. Subordinate writes out up to six goals on a single page using less than 250 words.
  5. Subordinate reads and re-reads each goal regularly.
  6. Subordinate regularly examines own performance and compares it to goals.

One Minute Praisings are broken down into seven steps:

  1. Tell people in advance that performance feedback will be given regularly.
  2. Praise performance immediately.
  3. Explain specifically what the subordinate did right.
  4. Explain how the performance makes the manager feel and how it helps co-workers and the organization.
  5. Pause for a moment to let the subordinate feel the impact of the praising.
  6. Encourage more of the behavior being praised.
  7. Shake hands or touch in a way that makes the manager’s support clear.

One Minute Reprimands are arranged into nine steps:

  1. Tell people in advance that performance feedback will be given regularly.
  2. Reprimand performance immediately.
  3. Explain specifically what the subordinate did wrong.
  4. Explain how the performance makes the manager feel and how it effects co-workers and the organization.
  5. Pause for a moment to let the subordinate feel the impact of the reprimand.
  6. Shake hands or touch in a way that makes the manager’s support clear.
  7. Reaffirm the subordinate’s value to the organization and that the performance, not the person, is the issue being addressed.
  8. Realize that the reprimand is over

CONCLUSION

The authors’ novel presentation of personnel management concepts through a fictional story is effective.  The actual techniques presented in the book are real tools that can be adapted to almost any management style with simplicity and ease.  The writer of this paper has used successfully the methods in this book in business, church and family settings for twenty years.

Goal setting is often a daunting task, and, as a result, avoided by many.  The book’s simple outline for goal-setting (p. 34) makes the seemingly overwhelming task appear not only approachable but inviting.  The method keeps the process focused and manageable, and it encourages and facilitates regular reexamination of goals, behavior modification and improvement.

Praising subordinates is essential to the health of an organization.  Praisings, according to Blanchard and Johnson, should be spontaneous, immediate, specific and genuine (p. 44).  Managers may be reluctant to praise some people whom they fear will perceive the praise as an approval of poor performance, yet people tend to repeat behavior that results in praise.  It is possible to praise good behavior and reprimand bad behavior effectively, as subordinates learn that the One Minute Manager will be fair and sincere in both areas, and has the subordinates, as well as, the organization’s best interests at heart.