You Have Permission To Be Yourself

As a business owner, do you give yourself permission to be yourself? Many business owners in the financial services industry are told their personalities are a great fit for the position. You may have taken a profile-based assessment such as a DiSC® assessment before becoming an owner.

We even built a DiSC® assessment into our self-awareness best practice within Optimal Outcome, because it makes sense that certain personalities tend to do well within certain positions. It’s not an absolute, but it is a guide.

Many agency owners get started because they are great at talking to people. They like to educate clients on options and help them chose the products and services that will protect their financial futures. In the DiSC® profiles this is often known as an Influencer.

Yet Influencers often struggle with the detail work needed to complete paperwork and organize follow up tasks. It’s not because they can’t do it. Or that they won’t do it. They can and will, but they might also put it aside in favor of talking to a client. Be honest, how many of you have work sitting on your desk that could lead to more business? If you just completed the detailed work of completing a quote? Or if the follow up task was on your calendar?

So what's the solution? Certainly, you can put systems or processes in place to make changes. You can develop habits so that you get that work done. For some, that works. For others, it’s looking at the systems in your business and giving yourself permission to find a different way for your business to achieve the same results.

Your business needs someone to complete the detailed work of putting together quotes. Your business needs someone to ensure that all those tasks that come from meeting with clients are scheduled on someone’s to-do list. But you don’t have to be the one that does that work. You can design your business to get these results without doing the type of work that you don’t like and tend to procrastinate.

A great example of this is to take a hard look at how your sales process handles tasks from a client meeting. How much of the information from these meetings lives in your head, waiting to be captured in a client folder or your CRM? How often do you follow through to complete follow up opportunities? How often do opportunities sit on your desk, until you have time? How much time is spent by either you or your team entering or transferring this information?

Chances are unless you have a good system/process that works with your personality, your answers will show there are opportunities to improve. And that’s when it’s time to intentionally design a business that works with your personality. You don’t have to feel like you must fit into a role that frankly you don’t like.

We need to be clear, this is by no means a get-out-of-jail-free card. Every agency has core functions that someone must do for the agency to survive and thrive; and sometimes that someone is you. 

We all have the need to continue to grow, learn, and improve. However, part of growing is the realization that your talents and time might be allowed to shine more if you’re intentionally designing the agency of your dreams.

Look around your business and ask: what frustrates you? What do you dislike about how you spend your time? What doesn’t get done? What gets procrastinated? And for each of these tasks, take a hard look at your system. Does it need to change? Talk to your Optimal Outcome business coach about how your system can be redesigned. And if our example rang true to you, check out this newsletter: Are Follow Up Tasks Weighing You Down?