The Uncomplicated Way To Running Your Advisor Firm… For Peace-of-Mind

Business - like life - can be complicated.

Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.

-Woody Guthrie

Guthrie was a poet of the people; Guthrie wrote some of America's most essential songs, including "This Land Is Your Land." He penned ballads that captured the heart of hard economic times and war. 

Early in the 1990s, the writing was on the wall. Our specific industry was going to witness some dramatic changes. Changes that were going to affect how we would turn more profits and pressures on our resources were heating up. The future landscape was ever-changing, things that were out of our control.

This deemed the question; what can we control to future-proof our business?

The beginning of a journey of learning and discovery… the goal then and still is today, to look for a way to develop an unfair advantage in our marketplace that would pay us well into the future. All while leveraging the assets in our control.

You know the old cliché that when you want something great enough, the teacher will appear?

In my case. Many teachers appeared. The most valuable came from outside our industry.

Many influencers in my search to study how to motivate a team’s quality and productivity started showing up everywhere. I learned from the teams that won championships that I played on and coached in hockey. I had an appetite for learning more about team management principles and observing what great coaches and teachers do.

I came across Dr. W. Edwards Deming in 1992, and his view on how one must look at the total system and every decision, every policy, and every action must be directed towards optimizing the entire system. This was a business/organization management mindset game-changer.

Donald E. Petersen, Chairman of the Board, Ford Motor Company, 1986, says, “I’m proud to say I’m a Deming disciple, and we at Ford are committed to his operating principles, particularly to the ethic of continuous improvement and the involvement of all employees.”

It is no coincidence; Ford Motor Company has proven to future-proof itself over decades in time. Managing hundreds of thousands of people and adapting to ever-changing dynamics is not by luck alone.

From the book The Deming Management Method, Dr. Deming's core message, written by Mary Walton, was: “You can produce quality. You have a method for doing it. You’ve learned what quality is. It would help if you carried out consumer research. Look toward the future. Produce goods and services that will have a market, years from now, and stay in business.”

Failure to understand people in your organization and your best clients is the devastation of why some businesses will thrive, and others will decline.

Deming’s concept fit into my plan three decades ago to develop a system to leverage our organization. Because an organization involves people, a plan to optimize our most crucial asset, relationships with people, became a priority. The challenge was juggling what made us successful and finding time to develop this system.

Hopefully, this post gives you some guidance on simplifying your life and how important it is to get a team management system working for you—modelling something working in a natural business setting. Not just someone’s philosophical research. 

If you like this content, have questions, or want me to dive deeper into this topic, leave a comment on my LinkedIn page. Here’s how to follow us https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-asset-ceo