As I think back to the earlier days of my career, I was excited, passionate and eager to grow my business. The sense of fulfillment I would receive knowing I was improving someone’s financial situation was euphoric. So euphoric that it would actually cause me to take my foot off the gas at certain points.

My activity would decrease because my psychological income would increase. I felt good and therefore I was happy. As you can guess, this wasn’t conducive to building a predictable, sustainable and profitable business.

One of my mentors shared with me the correlation between activity, anxiety and the level of your success. On the surface it makes a ton of sense. The more people you’re seeing on a daily and weekly basis, the less a reschedule, cancellation or reversal will throw you off.

The more activity you have, the less emotional energy needs to be spent on negative aspects of your day because you still need to bring the fire to all the people that do want to meet and do business with you.

But where it got a bit confusing was with how much activity was needed to decrease stress and anxiety in my business. I wanted to spend some time and break it down below for all of the financial advisors out there. I have NEVER seen someone follow this system and fail. I have, however, seen people not follow it and succeed but that percentage is very small. What I’m about to share is the McDonald’s equivalent to franchising. This is a system that’s been tried and tested and proven to work at different firms and different economic conditions.

This system starts with the amount of outreach you need to make on a weekly basis as well as the amount and what type of meetings you need to have on a weekly basis. I’ve laid it all out below. All metrics are for a 5 day work week…

1. 200 dials (texts, emails and messaging on social media counts towards this number)
2. 10 New appointments scheduled for fact finding/discovery meetings
3. 20 referrals
4. 25 meetings on the calendar
5. 15 of those 25 meeting actually keep that week
6. 6 are fact finding/discovery meetings (derived from the 10 you schedule every week)
7. 6 are closing/proposal meetings
8. 3+ are annual reviews, prospecting meetings, or delivery meetings (where you deliver the completed financial plan)

These are metrics that should be measured and tracked on a daily basis, no negotiation here. The more you track and measure, the more likely you are to follow through with those activity metrics. This allows you to recalibrate if you get off to a slow start in a particular week.

At the end of the month, your goal is 100+ points. You get one point for a fact finder, one point when you open up a new case, one point for a closing/proposal meeting and a half a point for every referral you get.

If you do this every single week, every single month, and you do that on a consistent basis, I guarantee that your business will be predictable, sustainable and profitable. But before you embark on the journey toward that, you must understand something…

Let’s say that you only book 6 fact finders per week rather than the 10 that I shared above. Let’s do some math together…

Over the course of a year, you are only booking 312 fact finders rather than the 520 that you should be booking. That’s a difference of 208 scheduled. When you take into consideration a 60 percent kept ratio, that’s 125 people that you didn’t give the opportunity to meet with. From there, about 30 percent of those people will become clients. That’s 37 households that you are not bringing on as clients! 37!!

Let’s say that each household, on average, produces $2,500 in revenue for you and your practice—that’s $92,000! $92,000! So next time you plan to throw in the towel and do less activity, just remind yourself how much impact and income you’re leaving on the table.

This system has been studied and measured for over 60 years. Simply put, it works. You can choose to do it your way and maybe it will work, maybe it won’t; or, you can follow this system to a tee per M-W and guarantee your success.

The choice is yours.