" "It's important to recognize that most of us, in reacting to change, want to slow it down. But if we accelerate it, we can move ahead."

Seven Steps for a Successful Change

By John Bowen

Our industry is going through a dramatic change and the reality is, most of us will have to transform our firms from what use to be effective to what will be effective. We have to address the value-added services and products that our clients are demanding or we will fall further and further behind.

Reprinted from:

Worse scenario: Even if we don't care about growing and decide to continue doing the same thing that we have done year after year, we can no longer expect the same results. With the increased competition and the pressure to lower fees, not only will we not even get the same results as we have in the past, but also find our businesses slowly eroding.

What choices do we have? None. We have to change and evolve with the market if we are going to serve our clients well. Without growth you do your clients and yourself a disservice. You will not have the resources to adequately meet their needs. In addition, the equity in your business will slowly and painfully slip away from you.

The challenge is how to change, not if. We brought in a very successful change consultant, Henry Miller of The Miller Group, and he guided our firm through his seven steps for effective change. We have incorporated these steps into our firm to meet this challenge. I believe these seven steps with allow you to meet change head on.

Step 1: Create the commitment.

Define a shared vision of what you want to commit to it. Without a clear commitment, we create chaos for the change.

At our firm, we recognized that we needed to dramatically increase the value of our services to our clients to get back on our fast growth path. We had moved in an evolutionary process from being a financial planning firm to being purely an asset management firm. We now recognize that wasn't enough. We wanted to reposition our firm to becoming a world-class provider of high-end wealth management services for affluent and super affluent private clients. We recognized that this would not be any easy goal for us to obtain. However, by committing to this goal we could focus our resources to make sure we got the results we wanted.

We have found that focus is often the most critical variable in determining whether a financial advisor is going to be successful. We are blessed to be in a great industry that presents each of us with limitless opportunities. It is this shear number of opportunities often side tracks us to jump from one deal to the next. This lack of focus often explains why bright, talented financial planners never seem to achieve the level of success they deserve. Creating the commitment brings us back to what we want to achieve and allows us to measure our activities against this commitment and ensures that we stay focused on our vision.

Step 2: Form the coalition.

Once we create the commitment of what we want to our vision to be, the second step is to form a coalition of all stakeholders. It's not only your senior management, but it is everyone that is involved with your company as well. You must include both internal and external members of your organization. Because we work as a turnkey asset management provider to independent financial advisors, we needed their agreement to this commitment if we were going to move forward successfully.

Don't underestimate the time you will need to form your coalition. All of us react negatively to change initially. We all need time to digest and understand "what's in it for me." Each of your stakeholders will be hearing it for the first time. You need to allow them time and provide them with information to reach their own conclusion that it is not only in the firm's best interest, but also in their own interest to help make this commitment a reality.

Step 3: Envision the future.

Paint a picture of what the firm is going to look like when this journey and transformation are complete. Many individuals who are part of your team will have difficulty understanding what the changes you are attempting to incorporate into the business really mean. They are going to ask how the change is going to affect the company and, more importantly, each individual within the company.

We showed how, by offering these services, we would be able to grow significantly faster while providing our clients with a much higher value service, and that this would create more opportunities for each of our stakeholders. At the same time, if we didn't change, we were going to fall behind in the industry, leaving fewer opportunities for employees, becoming a less important partner in our financial advisors' growth, and not doing all that we could in assisting our investors to achieve their financial goals. It was not a very tough decision for our stakeholders once they had the information and time to confirm our vision.

How do you see your future? Use your imagination to visualize what you would like your firm to be in five years. Share this vision with your group. Visualization will help guide you to the commitment that you will need to make to build the firm you want. It will also help your stakeholders assist you if they share your vision of the future. Very few great things in life are every created by a single individual, so allow your team to share in creating your new company with you.

Step 4: Begin the transformation.

To begin, put together a step-by-step action plan with dates, milestones, and who's responsible for the achievement of each. It easier to paint a picture of your future than it is to get started creating it. However, it is empowering to reduce the steps necessary to create the future into manageable steps. Let's say that five years out you want to triple your asset under management while providing your clients with continuously improved private client services. By the fifth year you out, you want to deliver services that rivals what private banks offer. For many this commitment might be overwhelming. But if you break down all the steps you need to take by month, it can easily become a reality.

Successful change is a real challenge because no one reacts well to change except the person that is driving it. When change comes, we all tend to immediately put our hands up and try to figure out how to avoid it. Behaviorists tell us that 80 percent of us are reactive thinkers who will do anything to avoid change. Twenty percent of us are creative thinkers, meaning we initially try to avoid the change, but then examine and judge whether it's a good change or a bad change. If we think it is a good change we will incorporate it into our lives. If creative thinkers believe it is a change for the worse, they will just figure out ways to go around it.

The only way to ensure that change occurs smoothly is to have a road map that outlines the process that you will incorporate into your firm to make it work for your benefit.

Step 5: Embed it in the culture.

Everything you're doing should be consistent with the commitment. In so doing, you create a new culture. In our case, our commitment was to wealth management for private clients. We wanted to provide the best advice to private clients available in regards to their life management issues. So we had to in effect destroy our old company and create a new company that would be able to achieve the results we wanted. With every action we took, we asked ourselves if it was consistent with what we wanted to achieve. Would it help us achieve the end results that we wanted? We did not want to lose our focus in achieving that which is important to us.

It is so easy to get side-tracked in our industry. Most of us are very tactical in our strategy so that we move from opportunity to opportunity and never give ourselves the chance to reach the next level of success. You have to establish systems in your organization that will embed both you commitment and vision of the future in your organization. We have established meetings where each employee gets together with their team leader and the team leaders get together with senior management to make sure we stay on track.

Step 6: Accelerate the pace.

Create a sense of urgency. It's important to recognize that most of us, in reacting to change, want to slow it down; but if we accelerate it, we can move ahead. There is no shortage of reasons for changing your firm. Help everyone see the increased competition and the need to differentiate yourself from all the other firms. Let them understand the likely outcome if you don't make the changes. Let them know that it is okay to be uncomfortable with change but that the winner in business will always be the one who most effectively adapts to the new environment. The rewards of winning are great. Asked them if they have every have been on a team that made things happen, whether in business or in sports. Many will have and will know about the excitement and the feeling of satisfaction that only a winning team can bring.

Step 7: Continuously reinvent yourself.

Start the journey all over again, recognize that there is no "there." There is no final destination for this journey; it's a continual process. The world is constantly changing. Think of some of the largest firms in our industry only twenty years ago that are no longer here. They stop reinventing themselves.

You owe it to all of your stakeholders to be all that you are capable of being. These seven steps will help you make it a reality.