How do You Build a Successful, Profitable Financial Services Business?
I’m going to give you a simple formula to use for building your financial services business.
Not just building any business, but building a successful, profitable business.
Because I know from my journey that there are times where, and you may feel this too, you overcomplicate it, and you’re sometimes unsure what metrics you really need to be tracking in order to be able to move forward.
You may lose sight of where you’re going, and what you need to do.
You may drop the ball on a few things in terms of the numbers that you need to be monitoring.
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Everyone talks about KPIs, (key performance indicators) and tracking, but are you actually really doing it?
I think tracking your metrics is one of the most vital things you could do.
If you understand this really basic principle, you are going to be successful as a business owner, entrepreneur or as a self-employed person.
So in this post, I will go over the key metrics you need to be tracking, and how to improve in every single one of them.
Before we go into detail on the metrics, I want to give you some context.
First, the main thing you need to think about is your life. We all have our reasons to start our own business and you will have your own reasons for doing it.
- Maybe it’s the fact that you didn’t like your boss.
- Perhaps you thought you could do it better than your boss.
- You may have had a falling out that forced you to want to go self-employed
- Or for like so many of my mentees, maybe it was the thought of actually building a business around your lifestyle, having more time to do what you love with who you love, spend time with your family, your friends, your children, that was your motivation to start your business.
From 2009, up until 2020, I had office premises that I went to every single day. It was only due to COVID that when my office lease expired, I had a home studio office built, that I now see my children and my wife more than I ever have done.
And that lifestyle balance has been amazing.
Consider Your Business Goals
And I think it’s really, really important that the first thing we think about, and you think about in building your business is your own personal goal.
And not just your lifestyle goal, like spending time with family, but also your income goal.
How much does your lifestyle cost you now? How much does will your dream lifestyle actually cost you?
Because once you put a number on it, you have a target to aim for and measure.
Some people say, “Oh, I’m not motivated by money. Money doesn’t do it for me.”
I’m not being funny, but money buys you the things that make your life easier.
Holidays, cars, lifestyle, schools, time out, dinners with the family, events, trips, all this stuff.
Money also gives you options.
My wife and I, we’ve talked about having a fourth child. But one, we have a four-bedroom house. So that would mean two of the children would have to share, or we’d have to get a bigger house.
The next thing is we would have to then change our car to fit a larger family.
Then holiday prices go up, everything gets way, way more expensive.
Therefore even if you are not motivated by money, you still need to consider the opportunities you may gain if you have more money, and those you might miss out on if you don’t.
So going back to the original point of how do you build the most successful and profitable business? You just need to monitor the numbers, starting with your personal income goals.
Let’s Look at the Key Performance Indicators You Need to Be Tracking
- Leads
- Conversion to sale rates
- Average sale value
- Number of times a client transacts with you
- Profit margin
If you monitor these metrics, and you can just increase each one a little bit, you will have a significant impact on your business.
Now let’s say, for example, that you get a hundred leads in a month and your conversion rate is 15%. If you get that to 20% you’re doing more deals and you’re making more money.
Let’s say you keep the same 15% conversion rate, but you manage to increase your average sale value from £1000 to £2000. All of a sudden, you’re doing the same number of deals, but you’ve doubled your income.
Then you’ve got your profit margin. You know, if your profit margin is 10% and you can knock off a load of expenses, like I just got rid of an office in 2020 for the first time in 11 years, that’s £18,000 pound a year saved. All of a sudden, the profit margin increases as a direct result of that.
So imagine what’s going to happen if you multiply these improvements across all of your metrics?
The Challenge for Financial Service Professionals
The most challenging metric in financial services is the number of times your client transacts with you.
Your client’s only going to realistically buy one house with you, perhaps one house a year if they are an investor.
If you are in financial planning or will writing you might do annual reviews.
So you can’t really, in financial services, increase the number of transactions per se in a year. But you can increase your numbers for each sale value, which is why I focus mostly on those metrics I can control.
So I would urge you to focus on the metrics and the numbers that you can improve.
The One Surprising, Simple Thing Every Financial Services Business Owner Needs to Be Doing
The best businesses and the best business owners are the ones who understand marketing.
Because what is at the top of the funnel is what going to drive your ability to convert to sales. Which in turn enables you to increase your average sale value, which increases your ability to improve your profit margins.
If you reduce your lead costs, your profit margins go up. If you convert more from lead to sale your sales go up.
If you attract more of the right client into your business, then your average sale goes up.
So everything starts with lead generation.
Getting More Leads Into Your Business Without Spending on Marketing
To get more leads I have developed a 4 step process:
- Personal Brand
- Knowing your customer
- Gaining attention of customer
- Increasing your sales
Let’s look at each of these areas in more detail:
Personal Brand
For building personal brand Joe Wicks is a perfect example.
He’s not the best personal trainer. I know he’s not the best chef, but he is the most visible.
He was the only one that you saw doing 8:00 AM workouts during the COVID environment.
He made 1.2 million pounds worth of sales in six weeks. Because he put himself out there. Because he helped others and because he had passion and showed other people how to get up in the morning and do a workout.
So ask yourself: Are you really putting yourself out there and building a personal brand?
Know Your Customer
When you try and talk to everybody, you appeal to nobody.
So you need to become laser focused on who you want to target.
Here supermarkets are a good analogy. You have Aldi, Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, M&S and you have Waitrose.
They all have their ideal demographic that they want to target. They know whether they are cheap and trying to attract the masses. They know whether they are more expensive and trying to attract, let’s call it the middle class, for example.
The supermarkets understand who they want to attract. And you can do the same thing in financial services too.
Identify Your Ideal Customer
You just need to identify who that customer is and who you love to work with five times a day, five days a week, 52 weeks of the year.
Because when you know that, when you know the one person that you really want to speak to, you then have the opportunity to attract them through social media, through SEO, through email marketing, or through Facebook ads.
And you might think that you’re going to lose out, but you’re not because you’re going to gain the bigger market share in a smaller environment.
Gaining Attention of Your Customer
The attention phase is all about putting the right content out.
Now there’s a thousand and one ways in which you can grab somebody’s attention.
Facebook groups, video, audio podcasting, blogs, LinkedIn articles, all the social media channels, stories, personal brand articles, magazines, being featured in the press. There’s so many different options that you can do.
You don’t have to do all of them. It’s a question of knowing which ones work for you, your client, your niche and your opportunity and focussing all of your efforts there.
For more on social media: How to use social media to explode your client list
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- Grab your prospects attention better than your competitors
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The Problem With Social Media
The problem with social media, as I said in one of my workshops, is that Mark Zuckerberg is almost like Thanos if you’ve seen the Avengers films. He controls so much of the world’s population.
And the danger is that if you leave your customers in social media, in something that you don’t own, then you don’t own your client list.
Because if Thanos, okay Mark Zuckerberg, clicks his fingers, your business is gone. Not just your business, but your leads, opportunities, prospects, and your potential slice of the future.
If you’re not taking them from social media into your own world, where you control their data, be it their phone number, their email address, whatever it is, then you are risking and your future.
Grab the customers that you want coming to you. What you do is you offer them something for free in order to be able to attract their email address and their phone number.
Once you have their contact details, then you own the opportunity, as you own the name and the number.
Increasing your sales
Focus on marketing
When you focus on marketing, which only you can take control of, you can then increase the value of your business.
When you are attracting more clients into your business you can then focus on measuring and improving the KPI’s because you have the clients to sell to.
Your Action Steps
So if I can urge you to do one thing today, it is going to be to start understanding marketing. It will transform your life as it has done for me, without a doubt.
I’ve gone from being stressed and anxious and worried in 2015 through to having not only more success, more leads, more sales and more profit. But also more time with the ones that I love to do more of what I love.
And it seems to be the more I build my personal brand, the more people like you I try and help, the more results that I get.
The more I give for free, the more the trickle-down revenue comes into my businesses. Whether it be to my mortgage brokerage or whether it be to my coaching and mentoring space.
This enables me to help hundreds of financial services professionals to create leads, sales, and profits.
So to summarise:
- Understand marketing and build a personal brand.
- Know your customer better than you know yourself.
- Attract and understand how to gain their attention.
- And then do the new form of selling, which is pre-selling to get them onto your database.
I hope that gives you something to think about and some action points that you can implement today.
I’m here to support you, so make sure you connect with me on social media and join our community of like-minded financial services professionals in our Facebook group, the Financial Pro Community.
