Reigniting Your Passion for the Business

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Dan Richards

“By making one small change to my weekly routine, I’ve been able to recapture some of my excitement for the business.” – Veteran top-performing advisor

Successful advisors consistently tell me they’ve lost enthusiasm and passion for their work compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Advisors have two choices when this happens – either accept it as a sad reality or put in place strategies to rekindle the fire that burned earlier in their career.

In many regards, loss of enthusiasm is understandable:

  • If you’ve been at this for a while, you often don’t have the same sense of excitement about winning new clients that you did in your early years the industry.
  • Clients are much more demanding and the media dramatically more critical. 
  • Your focus has shifted from building a business to managing it, often with added complexity and the hassles of managing people along the way.
  • The global financial crisis has added huge stress and put pressure on revenues.
  • Age is a factor – few of us have the same energy at 60 that we did at 45, or at 45 that we did at 30.

And then of course there’s market performance over the past 10-plus years. One veteran advisor described it this way:

“I’ve been in this business for over 30 years. For most of the first 20 years, I looked forward to meetings with clients – they were making money and I felt I was adding value. By contrast, most of the past ten years have been brutal – in meeting after meeting I’ve found myself apologizing for performance.”   

It’s absolutely understandable for your excitement to be down compared to the past. That said, energy and passion are essential to implement new initiatives and inspire confidence with existing and prospective clients.

Here are three different approaches that can help you restore your energy and excitement level, including one that helped a veteran advisor significantly increase his enthusiasm.