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Hi, Rob Brown of Encore Partners here. Quick question: Who’s on your bus?
You know, that was a big question several years ago when Jim Collins wrote the book Good to Great.
He wanted you, he wanted business owners, business leaders to understand who was on their bus, because that is critical to driving towards your success. You can’t just have anybody on your bus.
They have to be people who really buy into your vision, who really understand their roles, who understand your role to make sure, as a leader of your business, you’re taking it, you’re spending time where you need to.
And that’s a common problem that I see with many advisory practices, with many RIAs, is the people that are on the bus are good people.
They’re nice people, they’re people that the advisors don’t want to get rid of, and maybe they shouldn’t; but they don’t truly understand what their roles are, how they’re really helping them advance their goals, how they’re really making sure that the people on their bus have the same vision.
The same sense of urgency that the advisor has, that the leader on the team has towards driving towards those big goals, whether it’s business growth, greater team unity, greater community involvement, doing things in a more productive way so that you’re not wasting time, you’re working more effectively together.
I really want to encourage you to ask yourself that question.
It takes a lot of guts sometimes to see who is on your bus, to truly assess how they’re doing, how they’re helping you grow and drive your business. In some cases, they may not be the right person, or their role needs to be dramatically changed.
And that’s not something that can be mixed up sometimes. Sometimes we are tempted to think we’re fixing something in our business by changing a role on our team, even though the person that we’re moving into that new role can’t handle it.
I really want to encourage you to ask, who’s on your bus?
When you can answer that question in a way that you’re convinced that everybody is operating at the same speed and the same direction with the same goals, your business will grow much faster. And that’s a lot of what I do when I’m helping my advisors prune their teams or build their teams.
In fact, that’s what I do when advisors add me to their team, add me to their bus.
So, ask yourself the question, if you’re truly striving for excellence, do you have the right people on your bus?