In our weekly team meeting last week it was announced that One Wealth Advisors surpassed $1 billion in assets under management, a level which was impossible for me to contemplate when I started our practice 33 years ago. After the announcement, I allowed for a few moments of congratulations, but quickly reminded everyone that one of the core philosophies of our firm is that we try, as best as we can, to not celebrate results. By that I mean we try not to get too excited when good things happen, and upset when bad things happen.
This philosophy originated from the firm that I worked for when I entered the industry in 1991, which was, at best, a blemish on my resume. However, one of the things the company did teach us new trainees was to keep a daily tally of our efforts. At the time, I had no clients, and we literally had to pick up the phone to try to find people to talk to who might be willing to hear more about what we had to offer them. In other words, I cold called for prospective clients. Every single day, I dialed the phone 500 times – I will take a beat on that and let it sink in – I really did this. I kept a sheet with numbers 1 to 500, put a line in each number when the call was made, and repeated this until I hit 500, then I went home for the day. On average, I talked to 70 people a day, and 10 of them would be “qualified” (they had investable assets and were willing to hear from me again!). I learned that by executing this systematic behavior every single day, I would find myself with an ever increasing business that went from zero to a respectable size in just a few years. That allowed me to plead with my branch manager to hire my brother as my first team member, back in 1997.
The key point is that every single minute, hour, day, and week I was able to feel good about controlling what I could control and had the emotional discipline to not allow highs and lows to hit me with results that I had no control over.
My brother and I have since formed our own company, have a stellar team of 12 people, work with approximately 380 amazing families and, as stated, manage over $1 billion. Importantly, our policy for gaining clients has been through referrals only for well over a decade. Though we no longer cold call for new clients, we most assuredly have systematic behaviors permeating literally everything we do in our company and we celebrate every day when we execute the system. So yes, I am very proud of the $1 billion milestone, but what I am most proud of is the faith that we had in building and executing a system that allowed us to get to this place. We will take a moment to celebrate and then we will get back to work and have small celebrations every single day. I suspect that everyone reading this can see a benefit in their lives from trying to get away from the highs and lows of results and instead enjoy the process.
