Robert N. Veres

The Magic Elixir

By Robert N. Veres

This article by Bob Veres (www.bobveres.com) articulates one of our core philosophies so eloquently that we asked Bob's permission to use it on our site. If you are serious about building an outrageously efficient fee-based business, its message should speak loudly to you. If you've been around the industry for any length of time, you probably already know and appreciate Bob's work.

A visionary thinker, Bob publishes an excellent newsletter called "Inside Information," which should be required reading for everyone in our industry.

Back when I started out as a magazine editor for the planning profession, I set myself an important task: to talk to successful planners and discover what it was they all had in common. To find the magic elixir that separates the truly successful from those who merely eke out a living.

We interviewed thousands of prominent individuals. On the surface, they were all different - specialist and generalists, rainmakers and technicians.

But in the end, they all had two simple things in common. This is their elixir: Successful planners never get completely buried by their daily grind. They've taken the time to define where they want their practice to be five or ten years down the road.

And every day, they look up out of the foxhole, with all the deadlines, reports and client phone calls flying at them, and pay a little bit of attention to that larger goal.

No matter how crowded their schedule happens to be, they set aside a little time each day to work on marketing to a new clientele, mentoring a new associate, or developing some other strategy to take them one more step forward.

They do more than get through the workload on their desk. They make progress.

Successful practitioners are flexible enough to experiment with new ideas. If a seminar topic works, they'll try a variation to see if it works better. If it doesn't, they go back and try another variation.

And they tend to spend time at national and regional meetings and conferences, looking for two or three good ideas that somebody else has already performed years of R&D on. Ideas they can try in their own practice and fiddle with until they work even better than they did for the people who developed them.

They are always moving forward toward their own personal definition of success.

As you look up and see this, take a moment to refresh that part of yourself which has identified future goals worth working for. Don't allow yourself to be buried, even for a day, in the effort to meet your daily obligations.

If you do that, the ideas you receive will become far more valuable to you, and no day will ever be wasted.