Extra Credit: Show Your Work So They Know Your Value

In the blink of an eye, 24 hours can disappear. Between the 5-8 hours of sleep, 8-10 hours of work and about 6 hours of extracurricular, the pace of life moves fast. With Monday’s good intentions and Friday’s to-dos, one week’s required tasks can easily be pushed to a future date. However, your 8-10 hours of daily work time needs to generate revenue. And, when you know how much your time is worth, your practice can be even more powerful because you understand how precious your time really is.

Front of the house & back of the house

In our previous article, “Love it or Hate it: Time Tracking is Important for Retirement Plan Advisors”, we unpacked the importance of time tracking. By monitoring how much time is allotted to your clients, you maximize the monetary value of your time.

Your work time can generally be categorized into two buckets: revenue generating and daily vitals.

Your revenue generating tasks could fall anywhere between:

• Prospect meetings
• Client meetings
• Developing center of influence relationships
• Marketing campaigns
• Strategic business planning initiatives
• Finalist presentations

Your day to day vitals are the daily activities that are necessary to be a professional retirement plan advisor, such as:

• Preparing for client meetings
• Servicing client plans
• Generating reports
• Learning about service provider offerings and investment options
• Continuing educating about financial markets, regulatory changes and relevant retirement plan news
• Client communications and touch points

When you do the extra credit work, you should get the points

Have you ever worked on a team project or group effort and somehow ended up doing all of the work? We’ve all been there. An ounce of credit would have been appreciated!

When you go above and beyond with your clients, you do so much “extra credit” behind the scenes that they don’t see. Your extra credit might look something like the following:

• 3(38) Fiduciary Status
• Building/Managing Model Portfolios
• More Servicing/Meeting Hours:
  • Committee meetings
  • Education meetings
  • RFP and vendor due diligence
  • Consulting with a TPA for plan design guidance
  • Custom presentations

How can you bring this hard work to light and put value behind it? Time tracking your “extra credit” client tasks is a good start but getting your clients to see the value and pay your fee with a smile is a whole other ball game.

Don’t let your time (and fee’s) slip away

The Fiduciary Decisions Dashboard has not only the Meeting and Hours Tracker record your work and to keep you organized, but it also includes the Value & Fee Benchmarking report and FeeBuilder. Now you’re able to keep track of those extra credit items, report them to clients and confidently set your fees with the help of the Fiduciary Decisions’ benchmarking exercises.