Regaining Past Success

The following is based on one of The Covenant Group’s clients. All of the names and telling details have been changed.

After years of running a thriving business, Jan Peele found herself struggling and desperate to regain the success she’d had in the past.

When Jan began working with us, she’d been an investment advisor for a few years and was determined to build a $100-million book of business. At the time, we asked Jan to write down the names of the twenty most successful people she knew and estimate their net investible assets. The average for each individual was $2 million. We told Jan that each of these people knew another twenty whose average investible assets were also $2 million, giving Jan access to $840 million. This number excited her and made her $100-million objective seem totally reasonable. All she had to do was acquire 12% of the total pool.

Throughout the 90s Jan set out to network within her group of twenty and to gain introductions to their wealthy friends. Our work taught her to employ six to eight promotional strategies in order to reach these prospects. As a number of her key contacts were women, she ran a series of workshops focusing on issues important to female entrepreneurs and professionals. She also organized concept lunches once a month, wrote a regular column, had a radio spot, volunteered for charities and worked on a number of local community projects. So effective were these strategies that by the first quarter, she had a book of $240 million. She began contemplating a book of half a billion, but then March hit, and eighteen months later, her book had plunged to $190 million. She finally reconnected with us two years later.

When we met, Jan looked worn out physically, but worse, her spirit seemed shattered.

“I don’t know what I’m doing in this business anymore,” Jan said. “All I seem to do is crisis management, counselling my clients and dealing with the fallout from the market. It’s difficult for me to find the strength to bolster them because I got clobbered too.”

“The correction derailed every advisor in the industry, Jan,” We explained. “But some advisors weathered the storm better than others. In fact, many grew stronger from the experience. My concern is where you’re at now. You seem lost.”

“My pipeline is dry,” she said. “I never had trouble maintaining a steady flow of high-quality prospects. That’s what motivated me, what fuelled my business. Now I don’t know where my business is going to come from. I’m maintaining client relationships, but not getting beyond that.”

We asked Jan about her promotional strategies and how they were going.

“I haven’t done much in that area.”

“How come?” We asked.

“I just couldn’t keep it up when the market corrected. I spent all my time doing damage control.”

“But now that the market has turned around a bit, why aren’t you going back to what worked in the past?”

“Frankly, I don’t feel I have the credibility anymore. It’s hard for me to believe that my clients will willingly introduce me to their wealthy friends and acquaintances.”

“You need to get your old confidence back,” We explained. 

“But how?” she said. “After what I’ve been through.”

We asked Jan if she remembered coming to us a number of years ago and telling us she wanted to build a $100-million book.

She answered yes, adding that she was naïve and cocky back then.

“Do you remember what inspired you to turn that vision into a reality?”

“You asked me to analyze my top twenty relationships. When I saw that I had access through them to a pool of $840 million, I knew I could do it.”

“So what’s your objective now?” We asked.

She laughed wryly, “I don’t have one anymore.”

“Jan,” we explained, “you couldn’t have achieved the success you did if you didn’t have a vision driving you. You need that today.”

We talked some more and Jan eventually said she’d like to get back to her quarter-of-a-billion-dollar-book level within eighteen months. She’d look beyond that later, but for now, recovering her lost ground was her major priority.

We explained, to Jan that she needed to do the same thing she did in the past - analyze her top twenty relationships.

She spent the next few minutes doing a rough calculation and came up with an average of $5 million in investible assets per client - a pool of $100 million. And by extrapolating to the next tier, another $2 billion. Jan was amazed, and we could see the beginnings of a renewed enthusiasm for her business.

“Jan,” we explained, “you did an expert job of achieving success in the past by diligently employing a cluster of robust promotional strategies. But you made a mistake many advisors make - as soon as you achieved your targets, you let go of the strategies that got you there.

“It’s like dieting,” we explained. “People set a target - to lose thirty pounds, for example. They choose a diet and stick to it. Once they lose thirty pounds, they go off the diet and their weight starts to slip again. People tend to put back all the weight and then some, until they get motivated to start another diet. For many, the process repeats itself again and again. The truth is, diets don’t work. The only thing that works is a long-term lifestyle change. It’s not about having an endpoint, it’s about making a fundamental shift in your approach to life. And the same principle applies in business.”

“You’re right,” Jan said, “I might have let up once I achieved my objectives, but the market also took me off course and I didn’t have control over that.”

“Markets go up and down. You don’t stop doing what works because the market corrects.”

“But it was a difficult time for me and my clients. I couldn’t have run concept lunches and seminars back then.”

“That’s exactly what you should have done. You needed to maintain communication with your clients and people in your network. You could have tailored your topics and the issues you dealt with to the concerns about the market. By changing the way you worked, you showed your clients that the market correction took you off your game. If you had kept up all your activities, to the best of your ability, you would have demonstrated confidence. Your clients would have seen that the market correction was a normal reality of the marketplace. Furthermore, maintaining your activities would have allowed you to keep your pipeline full. The point is you can’t put your marketing efforts at the behest of whether markets are up or down. You have to help your clients understand that markets move in cycles and that they’re invested for the long-term. You’re not asking your clients to introduce you to their associates because their portfolio is up. You’re doing so because you are their trusted advisor and you’re building a relationship over time.”

Jan agreed she needed to do the things she used to do in order to revitalize her business. She spent the next couple of weeks developing her six to eight robust promotional strategies, which included such things as running a series of seminars, re-establishing her media outlets, and getting back into community work. As she began to implement her strategies over the next year, she focused on asking her clients for introductions, recommendations and referrals. Her pipeline began to fill up again and by the end of the year, she found her revenue was up for the first time in three years - an impressive 28%.

Lessons Learned

Jan learned four important lessons about revitalizing her business:

• Many advisors make the mistake of dropping their marketing and promotional activities once they reach their targets or once they encounter challenges in the business, such as a market downturn.
• If you treat effective growth strategies like a diet that you go on and off of, your business will roller coaster up and down, just like a yo-yo dieter’s weight.
• Consistent growth comes from the discipline of applying six to eight robust promotional strategies over the long term.
• When your business falls off track, you need to take a close look at your activities. Have you stopped doing the things that once brought you success?

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The Covenant Group is referred to by many as the place entrepreneurs go to become Business Builders. They are considered to be thought leaders and have authored the best-selling books, The 8 Best Practices of High- Performing Salespeople, The Entrepreneurial Journey, and The Business Builder.