Building Communities; Driving Growth
The year ahead is a blank canvas. What do you want to create as your masterpiece this year?
As you think of your business plans for the year ahead, I wanted to share highlights from some recent episodes of my podcast,
Turning the Page, to help spark some ideas. I thoroughly enjoyed these conversations and I hope you find something in them that will inspire you too. If so, drop me a note and let’s get on a call to talk about them.
“With great power comes great responsibility”
- Uncle Ben Parker
As Spiderman's Uncle Ben said, "with great power comes great responsibility.” In this episode, my guest, Steve Fox and I get into what this sentiment truly means for all of us as business owners and members of a community. Steve is a Wealth Advisor with IPC in Windsor, Ontario. Not only is Steve a successful business owner with 30 years under his belt, but he also puts philanthropy at the forefront of both his business and life.
Steve shares what influenced and inspired him to do this and how he’s made it a core part of his life. He talks about his philanthropic efforts in Honduras, and why it’s a cause that Steve and his family organize and participate in each year. Personally, I have been fortunate enough to have joined Steve on several of these trips to Honduras. I talk about how I was challenged by one of our fellow Advisors to be part of this and what these community trips to Honduras have meant to me. In short, I can truly say that my ‘on the ground’ experiences with the communities in Honduras has had a profound impact on my life.
We’re very lucky here in Canada. As financial advisors, we get to help our clients live their best lives while building successful businesses of our own, all of which gives us such a great, blessed life. As we grow our business, it’s important for us to give back to our community – be it locally or abroad.
Connect with me and let's chat about your 2024 planning!
All great businesses create a community. They create a sense of belonging to something bigger. This is abundantly true in the wealth management business. Great advisors create a community with their clients, share ideas and give them a sense of belonging.
My conversation with Renée Rebelo on this topic was fascinating.
Renee is a Wealth Advisor with IPC in Grimsby, Ontario. Her story of how she got into the advice business and how she built it from the ground up is truly inspiring. Even more captivating, however, is how Renee thrived and grew her business during periods of crisis - by building and nurturing trust within her community. For example, during the pandemic, when the world went into lockdown, to motivate herself first, Renée committed to running ‘live’ sessions on Facebook every day for 30 days. She started by sharing a simple “30-Day Financial Declutter Challenge” to her few Facebook followers. This small act led to a strong growth of followers on her Facebook community to speaking spots on TV and radio, which in turn led to attracting new clients, and eventually receiving a book deal!
In this episode, Renee shares how she’s built her community around mixing her two passions: travel and financial planning, the growth she experienced, and what a sense of belonging can mean to your clients (and yourself).
In this conversation with grief expert, Dina Bell-Laroche, we cover a topic that is difficult for all of us - death and survivor guilt.
When we start a business, there’s so much we must learn. Everything from creating a long-term vision to the day-to-day running of a business, to how we interact with clients. But we’re not taught how to handle the human or emotional side of engaging with our clients. In fact, how we handle emotional, difficult conversations with a client is a significant difference-maker in nurturing deep client relationships and building a better business.
Death or some other tragedy can throw out any plan we have and change our lives or the lives of our clients drastically. As financial advisors, we must be prepared to help our clients navigate grief at some point in their life/financial journey. Having the language to normalize the grief experience and being able to listen to our clients can go a very long way in helping us handle the human side of advice to our clients. Dina who also authored “Grief Unleashed: Moving from the Hole in Our Hearts to Whole-Hearted,” shares some approaches that we can take to help our clients navigate grief.
As you execute on your goals for 2024, I invite you to think about how you want to shape and grow your business, your client network and community. I’d love to hear about your plans and everything you want to accomplish in 2024 over a virtual coffee!
I also invite you to subscribe to the Podcast so you get alerts to the latest episodes as they are released. And if you can, please share episodes of the Podcast that you’ve enjoyed with someone you think will benefit from it.
Let’s choose to make 2024 the best year ever by taking bold, inspired action.
Cheers,
Chris
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