Here's How To Survive In A Fee-For-Service-World...
Financial Advisors: whether you know it or not, you already exist in a billable hours world.
And in fact, you always have.
Historically, you may not have calculated your income on a billable hours basis, but ultimately, the success of your advice business has always come down to what you make per hour.
The equation is simple: how much your advice makes you per year / how many hours a year you work.
So, if you work 200 days per year, 8 hours a day (I know, most of you don't work these part-time hours, but go with me on this), you have 1,600 billable hours per year.
If you make $480,000 in revenue, with $240,000 in costs (other than your wages), leaving you with $240,000 profit, you are billing at $300 per hour, with a profit margin of $150 per hour.
This formula still works even if you calculate revenue on the basis of a % of Funds Under Management or a % of income generated. However you calculate revenue and costs, you still end up with an amount for a time period that can be divided by the number of hours worked in that time period.
It's Time To Reveal the "Dead Time" In Your Business Model.
Under historical revenue generation models, as long as revenue targets were hit, many hours of "dead time" tended to be hidden or go uncosted on a billable hours foregone basis. Now, while the odd golf/lunch/sailing-networking exercises are great for client relationship building, unless they happened every week, they are unlikely to be a great source of billable hours leakage.
The biggest sources of billable hours leakage are the normal, every day things for which you cannot charge (or choose not to charge) the client.
The classic example of this is travel.
Travel adds nothing to the value of the advice given or accepted.
If we break it right down to basics, the revenue generation process is really the delivery to the client and their acceptance of your value proposition. This typically occurs with face-to-face time with the client, plus the advice formulation, presentation and sign-up time.
After the initial meeting with the client - where travel is a worthwhile marketing activity to cement the relationship, the value of travel to the ongoing relationship diminishes significantly.
If it adds no value, it becomes questionable whether the client should ever be billed for it - and indeed, whether they will pay for it. If it is not a billable event, it is dead time which directly impacts on your bottom line.
There Is A Better Way...
Suitebox is an elegant product that cuts travel time to nothing. It allows you to meet with people in a secure online space that both of you can return to again and again and again. The best part is that Suitebox allows you to conduct online the nitty-gritty stuff of business that you previously had to do face-to-face.
From positively identifying people; to the delivery of presentations and proposals; to preparing, collaborating and signing documents; to recording the whole meeting - or just the signing part for compliance purposes; Suitebox does it all.
And for the low price per user per month (assuming your standard meetings run for 60 minutes), you can have as many Suitebox meetings as there are hours in the day. Based on the numbers we did above e.g. $150 per hour profit, you will have paid for Suitebox with just 20 mins travel saved a month.
What About My Clients?
Now, I've never met an advisor who doesn't travel to at least one client a month, but let's assume for the sake of the argument, that you do not travel to see clients.
Your clients still travel to see you... if they are running a business, you are costing them billable time...
Suitebox allows your clients to cut down on THEIR costs of engaging and maintaining you as their advisor.
Whether you travel or not, in a faster, cheaper, greener world, by saving your clients the cost of travel, Suitebox could actually become your edge in client acquisition and retention.
Now, that goes far beyond merely surviving, to thriving in the new fee-for-service world...
