Your Top Goals: How to Stay on Track

If you were asked about your top objective for your practice, you might talk about increasing AUM by 30% in the next two years or growing your team and moving your client base deeper into the high-net-worth space.

Whatever it is, it may be your top goal, but it’s probably the first thing that gets sidelined when your day fills up.

Odds are the growth and development you want to see isn’t going to happen on its own. It will require sustained effort by (in some combination) you, your team and your external partners. So here are some strategies that we’ve found can help maintain progress toward practice development objectives.

Break it down into parts.

Once you’ve defined your goal and a target completion date, see if you can break it down into realistic steps and assign dates to those steps as well.

If you want to target more high-net-worth prospects, ask yourself what it would take for someone in that market to perceive your service as the right choice, and what means you have to reach out, engage and convert them. From there, set up a general development timeline and adjust it as time goes on.

Assign responsibilities.

If some of the steps you’ve outlined are outside your wheelhouse, taking it all on yourself could end up creating additional delays and underwhelming results.

So consider who is best suited to complete these tasks, what resources you have on hand that you could leverage, and what kind of investment you’re willing to make at each step.

Block off time in your calendar.

Many of our clients find it helpful to have a recurring check-in call so that project standstills are minimized, or a placeholder in their weekly staff meetings to ensure any new creative is reviewed promptly.

Depending on the timeline you lay out, this may also mean setting aside some time each week to focus on development tasks—time that cannot be occupied by client reviews or other day-to-day responsibilities.

Despite how easy it is for practice goals to drift off track, you may also be surprised by what’s possible with a little consistency.