The Easiest Business in the World

The Easiest Business in the World - by Rick Barrera

Posted on Mon, Dec 21, 2009

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How's this for a fantasy? Each day you arrive early at your office only to find that you already have several voicemails and emails from potential clients who having been referred to you, would like to transfer all of their assets to you, and would like to meet with you to see how soon that would be possible. Wouldn't that be the Easiest Business in the World to run?

"It would be awesome," you say. "My life would be grand! No more cold calls! No more seminars! I would be rich!" But how did your business get that way. The only way your business could get to that place without being a complete fantasy would be to design a practice that consistently delivered an EXTRAORDINARY CLIENT EXPERIENCE.

It's time for a reality check. How extraordinary would your client experience have to be for you to get daily or weekly unsolicited referrals from your clients? What service levels would you have to provide? What systems would you have to have in place to ensure that you are delivering that level of service to every client in every Rick Barrera interaction? What level of employee would you have to recruit? How well would you have to train them? How organized and disciplined would your meeting preparation have to be? What quality of advice would you have to deliver? How would they have to feel about you at the end of each meeting? How well would they have to sleep at night knowing that you had their financial back? How much trust would they have to have in you to refer their closest friends and colleagues to you, suggesting that on their say alone, those people transfer control of their entire financial life to you?

Before you read the next paragraph go back and answer each of the questions above. REALLY! Do it RIGHT NOW! You'll get nothing from reading this article unless you get out a sheet of paper and really do this exercise. You've already taken time from your practice to read this article so you may as well take a little bit more to get some real value from it.

Now, compare your answers to those questions to the REALITY of your current business. I think you'll agree that there is a considerable gap between the ideal practice you outlined above and what you and your team are delivering now. I know you are trying hard and everyone is doing their best. That's not the point. Your competitors are doing their best as well. But without a deliberate business design to create an EXTRAORDINARY CLIENT EXPERIENCE it will never happen.

That's what Overdelivering is all about... designing your business on purpose to ensure that at each critical client TouchPoint, you, your systems and processes, AND your team are all seamlessly aligned to create a specific emotion in every client interaction. Only when you can consistently generate your desired emotion, on cue, for every client, will you have built the referral generation machine you fantasized about at the beginning of this article.

If you've written out detailed answers to the questions above, your next step is to have your team do the same. Then, you'll need to have regular meetings to work ON your business until you have systematically closed the gaps between your ideal business model and your current business model. To get there quickly, you'll need to set aside several hours each week to design your future business model and implement the actions required to close the gaps.

You'll know you have succeeded when you start to consistently receive unsolicited referrals to clients who fit your Ideal Client Profile. Of course it's a lot of work, but you knew that already. My title didn't fool you a bit. The Easiest Business in the World isn't a fantasy. It is the reality that is well within your grasp, if you design your business to consistently Overdeliver EXTRAORDINARY CLIENT EXPERIENCES.