How Advisors Can Get 10 Hours Back Every Week

SUMMARY

The conversation opens with an acknowledgment that nearly every operational and growth challenge inside an advisory firm traces back to the way time is allocated. Rather than “managing time,” Aaron and Allan frame time allocation as the act of managing priorities against a clear vision for your ideal life and the firm you want to build. Advisors often believe that adding more staff will solve the problem, but the hosts argue that growth is not strictly about getting bigger; it’s about scaling intelligently—doing more with less, improving the client and team experience, and increasing the firm’s efficiency without diluting focus. They introduce the concept of “time poverty” as the gulf between advisors who have control of their calendars and those whose days are governed by interruptions, reactionary work, and fires that need extinguishing. Far too often the business runs the advisor instead of the advisor running the business, which creates a cycle of busy days without productive outcomes and an inability to see beyond next week.

They highlight three of the biggest time sinks: constantly reacting to email, picking up unsolicited phone calls, and maintaining a fully open-door policy that results in frequent “just a minute” interruptions that compound into hours. Email is necessary, but the Pavlovian urge to clear the inbox every time a notification pings undermines focus. Unsolicited calls—from wholesalers, home office, broker-dealers, and even clients—must be managed with a hierarchy that respects priorities and scheduled windows. And open-door policies, while well-intentioned in close-knit offices, can materially erode the advisor’s ability to concentrate on high-value work. The message is not to reduce accessibility forever but to protect focused blocks of time so that the advisor can deliver greater value and empower the team. Many advisors begin their careers doing everything—from strategy to paperwork—and retain habits that keep them in others’ lanes. The ability to do a task is not the mandate to keep doing it. As a firm matures, advisors who still operate in a purely reactive mode carry calendars that are full, but their vision remains short-term and clouded by the urgency of daily tasks.

The solution sits at a high level in time blocking, time allocation, or—in their words—calendar rebalancing. The practical sequence begins with personal time. Advisors work to live, not live to work, and the calendar should reflect the intentional inclusion of family commitments, health, faith, reflection, and personal growth. When that foundation is honored, the firm’s operating structure becomes more sustainable. From there, the calendar should reflect management time—research, meeting prep, team huddles, administrative steps—and clearly defined appointment times for clients based on meeting type and prep requirements. The hosts stress the importance of scheduled windows for email and phone return rather than leaving those activities to interrupt the day at will. Crucially, they carve out “working on the business” time to address strategic planning, team alignment, process improvement, personal development, and ongoing education; this is distinct from working in the business on a day’s immediate tasks. The final category is high-impact activity, including relationship management calls, content creation, and proactive business development. Growth-oriented advisors—especially those with junior team members—benefit from protecting these blocks so marketing and outreach don’t become aspirational ideas that never make it into the day.

While the framework is straightforward, the challenge is consistency. Most advisors try time blocking and then drift back to old habits. Aaron and Allan share stories demonstrating the impact of structure: one advisor who couldn’t imagine taking a full day off created a “flex Friday,” then a half day, then no Fridays at all, and eventually felt confident booking a two-week vacation. Another advisor reclaimed Fridays, initially to pursue hobbies like sailing and motorcycling, then chose to reinvest the time in branding and community presence—work that ultimately contributed to significant growth in assets. These examples underscore that time allocation is liberating, not restrictive; structure is what creates flexibility and freedom.

To take the idea from concept to execution, they recommend weekly time allocation built into the calendar—either in standard weekly templates or alternating weeks with buffer. Exceptions will happen, but the structure should be followed the majority of the time so exceptions remain exceptions. The practical first step is a calendar audit: review the last two weeks, categorize and color code activities, and observe where time is actually going. Advisors then define the guardrails for their ideal work week: how many appointments, what hours, whether Fridays are optional, and where daily start and end times should be set. With those parameters in place, they backfill the calendar with the time block categories. They insist on buffer time between meetings—fifteen to sixty minutes—so the advisor can catch breath, reset, prep, and avoid burnout. Color-coding creates immediate visual clarity: personal time might be yellow, management blue, appointments orange, communications pink, working-on-the-business green, and high-impact activities another distinct color. Meeting types can carry different colors or tags to signal prep needs and agenda differences, helping the support team align responsibilities.

Beyond the calendar, the hosts encourage limiting the open-door policy to promote team learning and ownership. If a question isn’t mission critical, it should be documented and addressed during set windows, not interrupting focused work. Advisors can institute a brief daily huddle—about fifteen minutes—to clear non-urgent questions, set priorities, and point teammates to internal resources or outside contacts when needed. This simple ritual reduces ad hoc interruptions while building discipline and clarity. They also recommend creating a telephone answering and appointment scheduling protocol that defines priority, routing, and timing rules—especially helpful when paired with client classification—so calls are triaged appropriately and the advisor’s focus is protected. For many teams, Mondays become planning and prep days; Tuesdays through Thursdays host the bulk of client meetings; and Fridays serve as catch-up, marketing, and “work on the business” time—or a flex day that reflects the advisor’s personal priorities.

They emphasize that this process is about progress, not perfection. Small changes in allocation can produce outsized results, and advisors can implement incremental steps: start by protecting Mondays or Fridays, then add communications windows, then refine appointment blocks, and so on. The ultimate goal is to transition from reactive busyness to intentional productivity, where each week reflects the advisor’s priorities and the firm’s strategy. Time allocation, approached with discipline and a clear ideal life in view, becomes a structural advantage that reduces stress, improves client and team experience, and expands the advisor’s capacity to grow. In their words, structure creates freedom, and when the “why” is clear, the “how” becomes easier to execute and sustain.

TRANSCRIPT

Aaron Grady, Advisor Consulting Director at USA Financial - Welcome back to another edition of the Rare Advisor. I'm your host, Aaron Grady. And with me again today is my coworker, my friend, Pareto coach and practice management consultant at USA Financial, Alan Oehrlein. Alan, thanks for joining me again today.

Allan Oehrlein, Practice Management Consultant at USA Financial - Good to be here, Aaron. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Aaron Grady - I'm glad you could be here. You know, I jokingly said this before, but seriously, we've really got to consider making you a co-host. You if I'm going to have you on this often, we might as well just go ahead and make that seat permanent. But for today, the reason I've asked you to be here is to talk about a topic that I know you and I both really understand the importance of. Whenever we engage with a new team and whether it's a team that's just getting started or a team that's very well established, one of the first places we start outside of understanding the ideal life that an advisor wants to lead, it's understanding where they're spending their time. And the idea of time allocation is so crucial to so many of the other things that we do, you know, whether it's client advocacy building, whether it's running a better, more efficient practice, whether it's helping an advisor get to that ideal life. All of these things really foundationally start with time. so time allocation really isn't about managing time. It's more about managing priorities and making sure those priorities are in line with what you really want out of your practice out of your life. You know, some would often say, you can't manage time, but you can allocate it.

Allan Oehrlein - Yeah, there's an old adage that we've heard for years now. It's time is money. And when it comes down to it, it's simply not true. Think about your most valuable resource or asset that you have as part of your financial advisory firm. When we ask advisors this, many of them say, well, it's my team or it's my knowledge base that I've accrued over the decades that I've been doing this job or even the assets that I manage. But the truth is, the most valuable asset is time. There's only 24 hours in a day. We can't make more, we can't buy more. So in that respect, time is much more valuable than money.

Aaron Grady - You know, it's funny you bring that whole topic up. I hear it a lot as well. And look, somebody's probably listening to this or watching this podcast and they're saying, well, you know, hey, look, the solution is I'll just throw more bodies at it. I'll just continue to, you know what, if I need more time, I'll just hire more personnel. Well, that's a solution. But it's not always about how big we can get.

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm.

Aaron Grady - but often it's about how small we can say. How do we manage revenue? How do we manage profitability? How do we manage a better P &L statement? It's about scale and scaling a business. If we can do more with less and create a better experience, both for your clients and for your team, I think that's the ultimate goal. And so some of these things can be done through time allocation. leading up to this conversation, one of the topics that were

Allan Oehrlein - Yeah.

Aaron Grady - headings that kind of popped up to us was the idea of the problem being time poverty in the advisory role, which I absolutely, you I love that concept, the idea of this gulf or this gap, you know, the haves and the have nots, those that have the time and those that don't have the time. And it's not about success or failure, it's more about being able to do more. And so, you know, when we...

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm.

Aaron Grady - Oftentimes when we start this coaching process and this journey, you know, what we see advisory teams doing is we run into so many of these practices where the business is actually running them as opposed to the advisor running their business. And there's an old adage, an old saying that goes that if you raise your business to be a spoiled and impetuous child, it's gonna act as such. so taking back control of your business, getting back to a place where you can focus on these other things. You can continue to build client relationships. You can continue to look to market and attract new clients. If you're at max, if you are just, your ceiling is max as far as the time you have and capacity wise, it's gonna affect a lot of different areas. And in fact,

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm.

Aaron Grady - You know, I know you run into this as well as I do. Whenever we have the conversation with advisory team, one of the things we always like to point out is, you know, there are three primary or I could say the biggest time sinks or time sucks in an advisory practice, the things that draw an advisor away from those priority things they need to be focused on. And number one, email, you know.

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm. Yep.

Aaron Grady - emails a necessary evil. We all have to deal with it. But if you are like Pavlov's dog, where every time the alert goes off and it chimes that you think, oh, I've got to empty that. I got to empty my inbox. I got to get to that right now. It's working against you. Unsolicited phone calls is the second most popular or biggest time sink. And that's not just, you know, phone calls from the outside world, like from wholesalers. I know you were a wholesaler, Alan, so you were making some of those calls. It's calls from the broker dealer or from the home office or even your clients. And I know you want to be available for your clients, but understand there's a hierarchy there as well.

Allan Oehrlein - yeah, guilty as charged. Yep.

Aaron Grady - The open door policy is another biggie. And look, the open door policy, as we kind of round up the top three, is one of those ones where I've dealt with a lot of firms that maybe are more intimate. They're like family offices or, you know, they're a tighter knit group setting. And the advisor is always like, well, hey, look, you know, we're a smaller office. I always want to be available for my team. It's going to help them develop. You know, if they've got questions, I want to let them know that I'm here and I'm available for them, the sentiment. The problem is, is that if someone knocks on your doorframe and they say, can I have a minute of your time? And that minute turns into five minutes and that happens 10 times a day. You know, that's an hour that you don't get back. And if you are the sole rainmaker, or even if there's multiple rainmakers in the practice, but if they're all affected by the same challenges or issues, this is where you start.

Allan Oehrlein -Yes. All right.

Aaron Grady - spending your money in the wrong place and time, you know, is your most valuable resource. this is where we need to be more intentional about time allocation, making sure that we're allocating time for these important topics.

Allan Oehrlein - Right. Absolutely. And advisors, you when they walk into the office, they've always got the best intention, right? They've got their to-do list, the things that they need to accomplish and get done to move forward and have a productive day or productive week. However, what we find is advisors are spending incredibly too much time on basically being reactive on different low value activities, activities that would be better delegated to someone else within the firm, right?

Aaron Grady - Mm-hmm.

Allan Oehrlein - But a lot of that comes with that entrepreneurial ownership mindset of if something needs to get done I need to you know pick up my bootstraps and just knock it out because I know if I if I take care of it It's gonna get done and it's gonna get done the right way versus Empowering your team and trusting their roles and responsibilities that you've laid out for them So there's a big big difference between being being busy and being productive again

Aaron Grady - Yeah.

Allan Oehrlein - time and time again we talk to advisors who say hey I just I had the busiest day I've had so much stuff to do and you just ask him was it was it a good busy or was it a bad busy was it stuff that was driving the business forward was it revenue generating activity or was it more so putting out fires and going from one fire to the next more times than not it's it's a combination of both but usually the majority of it is being reactive and putting those fires out so that's what we're trying to get away from in the grand scheme of things

Aaron Grady - Absolutely. Well, and you know, so many things you said there are just so on point. The idea of, you know, many advisors, they started out being the chief cook and bottle washer. I mean, they were doing everything in the organization. And so they step into the other person's lane or one of the support people's lanes. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. And I understand, and I have this conversation over and over again, this becomes a hindrance. It's better to help. find a way to allow your team to continue to grow, which I love you brought that up. But too often this ends up being many successful advisors scrambling around with a calendar that's full, where there's not a moment of time anywhere, but really without any vision or future for this, you know, with an uncertain future, because they can't even see that. They can't see past next week because they are so busy. And so the solution ultimately is, and there's multiple layers to this, but at the highest level, it's starting out with time blocking or time allocation or another great term, calendar rebalancing. You know, coming back and re-centering to the things

Allan Oehrlein - Yep. Yes, love it.

Aaron Grady - that are most important. And so we look at this as a core concept in the coaching with time allocation. You know, the first one of the first areas that we always tell an advisory is start with defining those allocated time blocks. What are those gonna be? What are the priority items that we need to make time for? Now look, there's lots of great theories on this. There's lots of great methodologies you go about this. There's lots of great thought leaders that talk about this. These are just the ones that we typically lead with and they're up for interpretation. But these are at least a starting place for you. So in a particular order, know, feel like people's like to say there's no particular order, but there's a particular order here.

Aaron Grady - place I would tell you is start with personal time. know, the first place we always start in coaching is about ideal life. People work to live, not live to work for the most part. And so this business should serve you. It should afford you the ability to live the life you want to live. So

Allan Oehrlein -Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Aaron Grady - If it's important to you, family time, gym time, personal growth, faith, reflection, any of those things that are, know, family dinners, make sure that that's on the calendar. Block time for that. Make sure that you've carved out time, whether that's in the morning or the evening, you know, whether it's, you do it over lunch, whatever it is, make sure that that's on there. Start that, start with your ideal life first. Then, you know, I would say the next most important would probably, and probably not most important, but next one I would look at is probably management time.

Allan Oehrlein - Yep.

Aaron Grady - This covers things like research, meeting prep, team meetings, huddles with your team, know, anything that really kind of fits around the administrative or kind of research side of things. And then an important one, appointment times. And we're going to talk more about, you know, those client meetings. How do you define those? You know, there's whole process around this, which, you know, probably should do a whole other rare video podcast on this concept, and we probably will.

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm.

Aaron Grady - That's an important one. And then emails, phone calls, returning those. So if we say that's such a big time sink or time suck, carve out time for it. Don't be reactive to it. Make sure that there's time dedicated to the calendar for when you're going to return those calls, when you're going to return those emails. Make sure you have time for those. And then make sure that you have time allocated for working on the business. This is for your planning. This is for team alignment and personal development business side of things.

Allan Oehrlein - Yeah.

Aaron Grady - This is like increasing your knowledge around the investment philosophy, doing your investment, you you're maybe studying for the CFP, right? So working on the business time. And then last, but definitely not least, allocate time for high impact activities.

Allan Oehrlein - Right.

Aaron Grady - When we talk about high impact activities, we're talking about relationship management. These are those form phone calls that we would talk about. This is business development activities. So I deal with some teams that have some junior advisors, young advisors, or advisory practices that are still really forward thinking when it comes to growth. And so the ability to create content or do marketing activities, you need to have time dedicated for that as well. You can't leave it.

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm.

Aaron Grady - to the whims of time, you really need to kind of figure out when that's going to fall on the calendar.

Allan Oehrlein - Right, right. And the thing is, it seems like such a simple concept, right? Time block, piece off things on the calendar and be intentional about when I'm going to take care of these particular activities. But the fact is most advisors will start doing it and then just kind of revert back to. what they were doing previously. But we've seen the incredible impact that it can have on a practice. Within a few weeks, there's countless stories that we could reference, but the ones that really stick out, was one advisor who straight up told us right when coaching began that he could not foresee himself taking a day, let alone a week, off of work and spending it on vacation or just having that time away from the office.

Aaron Grady - Mm. Yes.

Allan Oehrlein - He just thought there's no way he could do it. So implementing some of the time blocking strategies, basically the first goal was to create sort of a flex time on Friday. He wanted to be able to maybe take off a few hours on Friday, whether it was to, you know, go golfing or whatever the activity happens to be, just to have that type of flexibility. Well, once we started implementing things, it very quickly went from a Friday flex to a half day on Friday to not working Fridays at all. And then from that point, it was, I want to book a two week vacation because now I see that it's very possible. Now that things have been opened up a little bit and I've been diligent with sticking to these time blocks. Another great story, one of the advisors that we first started working with years ago, he wanted to achieve that Friday optional lifestyle. We were able to get there relatively quickly. initially he wanted to spend that time doing fun activities. He was really big into motorcycles and sailing. However, after experiencing that time off for a bit, he decided, you know what?

Aaron Grady - Yep.

Allan Oehrlein - I could be having fun and going off and doing these other extra activities that the time now allows for, but I kind of want to put that back into the business. So we ended up spending that newfound time working on branding, working on how can I be more of a presence in the community and really building that ecosystem so my company name is more prevalent, again, in this community that I live and work in. And that ended up becoming a...

Aaron Grady - Yeah.

Allan Oehrlein - I guess a great step and a great addition to building his practice and taking it from this level to again, doubling the practice of AUM eventually at some point in time. So a lot of great things that can be born from this idea. So one of the quick things that we wanna ask when having this conversation is what are the simple steps or what's the one thing we can do as an advisor to get started?

Aaron Grady - Yep. And, and, know, the idea it's, it's not just get started. It's, how can, you know, we hear advice, you know, how can, how can I take this from concept to execution? Cause you know, somebody may be listening to this podcast today and they may be saying, well, this is all well and good. And you've talked about the idea of having defined times, but give me some, give me more, give me something practical to implementation. And so what I would say, if you're looking to implement a weekly time allocation, and that's the big thing. So this is something you're going to institute under your calendar.

Allan Oehrlein - Yes.

Aaron Grady - on a weekly basis. Now, some teams will actually do this as it's an alternating week. So maybe this is a standard work week and next week is, you know, kind of a buffer week. I have teams that will do stuff like that. But many will just do it. This is what a standard work week looks like. And understand, there's always exceptions. We build,

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm.

Aaron Grady - a process so that we can follow it and understand that we're going to follow it for 90 % of the time and there will always be exceptions. But let those exceptions be the exceptions and not the rule. And so by structuring a time allocated,

Allan Oehrlein - Right.

Aaron Grady - week, now we can really kind of focus on this important thing. So where I would start and where I would tell you to start as an advisor would be audit your own calendar. know, take the last two weeks and kind of color code out the activities are on there. You know, so if you've laid out, so these are the categories that we're going to look like, we're going to look at, you know, let's start defining where we've been spending our time up to this point. So is it very reactionary? Is there a lot of stuff on there I should be doing? If there's stuff that you're identifying that maybe you need to hand off to someone else, that's also important. But from there I would say, let's then go to defining your ideal work week. So.

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm. Right.

Aaron Grady - How many appointments do I want to have a week? Do I want to have 12? Do I want to have 10? Do I want to keep it to eight? How many hours a week do I want to work? Do I want to work Fridays? So when do I want to start in the morning? When do I want to leave in the afternoon? Once you've set the guardrails, the parameters for what you want, now we can start filtering in and implementing those different time blocks around the time available in your calendar.

Allan Oehrlein - Right, absolutely. And when you're creating that framework, first and foremost, we always tell advisors, don't go back to back with all the appointments and all the important tasks. You absolutely have to build in that buffer time. Even if you think you can go back to back and run four, five, six client meetings in one day, you're gonna get burnt out at some point in time. It's inevitable, right? So again, first and foremost, make sure you allocate for that buffer time, whether it's 15, 30, one hour between the meetings.

Aaron Grady - Yep. Yep.

Allan Oehrlein - From there, we always recommend doing some sort of color coding for a quick reference, right? So just for example, for your personal time that you're putting in there, code that yellow. Blue could be time for management stuff. Orange is appointment times and client meetings. We talked about having that specific time for returning emails and phone calls. So let's make that pink. And then for the time working on the business and really focusing in on improving things, let's throw that one as a green. And then any other high impact activities, just designate any other color you want. just having that kind of key and that legend set up so you know each one is assigned a particular color, that's a great place to start. And then One other point I wanted to bring up too as far as spending time or allocating time for working on the practice, always recommend doing at least minimum one to two hours a week solely dedicated to working on the practice. Now if you're in some sort of coaching or consulting program, typically that time is allocated for that, whether it's preparing for the next coaching call that you've got or doing that incremental implementation of what you've gone over the previous week.

Aaron Grady - Yeah.

Allan Oehrlein - And then from there, it's really creating dedicated days. So many advisors I work with dedicate their Mondays to prep and planning for the upcoming week. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are strictly reserved for things like client meetings. And then Friday can be sort of that catch-up day, office day, talk through marketing, working through prep for the upcoming week, or a variety of other things.

Aaron Grady - Yep.

Allan Oehrlein - Any thoughts on that, Aaron? Did they hit all the hot button?

Aaron Grady - Yeah, mean, yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head on a lot of those items. And there's nuances to all of this. And for the sake of time, we're not going to be able to get into all of the intricacies. When you set your appointment days, what are the times that you're actually going to host appointments? Make sure that you leave the buffers in there. I love that you brought that up again. Again, this is all about creating order inside of your practice, right? So this, what I would say to any advisor when you're looking at this process, you're looking for things that you need to shift off of yourself as well, know, time-wasting tasks and things that probably should be pushed to the support team or into the CRM. This is about protecting your time.

Allan Oehrlein - great.

Aaron Grady - But here's what I would say, know, it's tough whenever you're starting a new endeavor, whenever you're trying to put a new process in place. So what I would encourage every advisor is understand that this is about progress. It's not about perfection. You know, we talked about that 80 % achievement.

Allan Oehrlein - Yeah.

Aaron Grady - You know, if you set a goal for yourself of, you know, go to the gym or whatever it is and, you know, you don't attain a hundred percent, you get discouraged and you stop doing it. That's not this. So even small changes in allocation can create exponential results. And we've shown through some of the conversation, and I know you shared this with me the other day, the idea around incremental implementation. so, you know, some advisors may be hearing what we're talking about and they say, well, I don't know I can do all of this today. Great. Well, maybe it's just a matter of.

Allan Oehrlein - us. Yes.

Aaron Grady - blocking Mondays or blocking Fridays for specific tasks. And then you ease into maybe defining more specifically the times for appointments or when you return phone calls and you get the idea. I think there's a way to kind of ease into this process. But here's what I would say, if we think about the quick hits or the

Allan Oehrlein - Mm-hmm.

Aaron Grady - you know, the tactics that I would take maybe if we want, if we want to kind of peek behind the curtain, you know, like I said, we don't have time to get into all the minutiae and details, but Alan, if we were going to talk about maybe four or five tactical or advanced next level tips that we could share with advisors that are wanting to implement this type of process, what would be one or two that you would share with an advisory team?

Allan Oehrlein - Sure, and I touched on these just a moment ago, the whole concept of time blocking and color coding specific activities on the calendar is essential. But you can even take that a step further. So for specific appointment types, you can assign different colors to that. So for example, your annual review or as we refer to them, the strategy and tactical meetings, that's differentiated from a fit meeting because there's different prep, there's different agenda.

Aaron Grady - Yep.

Allan Oehrlein - There's different things that are entailed. even as you're bringing in your additional staff, they know what each one means. They know that there's additional responsibilities that go along with those types of meetings. So again, further boiling down these color coding ideas into different appointment types. So strategy, tactical, fit meetings, onboarding meetings, and so on and so forth.

Aaron Grady -I love that idea of the color coding because people are very visual and if you can look at your calendar in a snapshot and see the entire week and you can see my colors, you're like, okay, I know I've got this stuff to do. I don't have to exert myself too much because as opposed to just being time is all taken up, you know what the time is being used for. I love that kind of, you know, that mental approach.

Allan Oehrlein - Absolutely. And then just a quick follow up on that. This was the first thing I kicked off with on the last segment, which was scheduling those buffers and the buffer time between the meetings. Even though it's probably implied that there's going to be some sort of gap between those events, actually scheduling it and putting it on the calendar creates a big psychological impact for you as well, knowing that there's a little bit of breathing room, there's a time to catch your breath and review anything quickly prior to the next meeting. And also in the grand scheme of things, the long-term effects, scheduling those mental buffers like a vacation or something six months down the road, having something to look forward to. I know it's kind of off-topic a little bit, but the concept's still the same. You don't want to burn out on a weekly basis or on the semi-annual or annual basis as well.

Aaron Grady - Yeah. That's great. That's great. Yeah, I love the idea of continuing to tie the idea of we're doing this to take back control, to get back towards living that ideal life. time out occasion is not about creating more stress. It's about alleviating that stress, both mentally, physically, on you and your team. If I was going to add a few, I would probably say limiting that open door policy that we talked about. So we talked already about time to return phone calls and emails, but we didn't talk about that open door policy. And so if you can limit that open door policy, this is to do a couple of things for your practice. One, it's gonna force your team to learn and grow. What I would encourage you to do is say, look, if this is something that you absolutely need an answer to, if unless the building is on fire, you know, or it's something mission critical, write it down. our team is gonna learn that if they don't wanna wait for the answer and it's not mission critical, they'll go find it. The other thing is I would say, when you teach them this, it's when you give them the answer, it needs to go as part of your procedures manual or they need to document it so that they don't keep coming back to the well. It's too easy, it's human nature that if I can go to you for the answer, I'm supposed to have to expend my own energy to go find the answer, I'm gonna take the path of least resistance. so limit the open door policy. Make sure that they understand that when you're on the phone or when your door's closed,

Allan Oehrlein -Yes. Right.

Aaron Grady - that or that when or when you're in your prep time, even if your door is open, guard that time. The other thing is as part of this, connected to it, what I've had many advisors do is they've started adding a 15-minute daily huddle. So this allows that.

Allan Oehrlein - Yeah.

Aaron Grady - if there are those questions that aren't mission critical but still need an answer and they can't find it on their own, that at the beginning of each day before the team takes off to do their things, you catch up for 15 minutes and say, okay, what things can I answer for you? And here's where you find the answer or maybe you need to call the home office or here, reach out to our attorney or our CPA. So adding those huddles is another great way to kind of bridge that gap. And then lastly, I would say as far as like deep dive, more advanced things is implementing a telephone answering and appointment scheduling protocol. And this is something that we work with teams to develop because part of protecting your time is, and this also gets into, it dovetails with the client classification, is understanding who gets priority treatment on calls coming in. It's protecting your time. It's not about you not wanting to take a call. It's about you

Allan Oehrlein - Yes.

Aaron Grady - guarding your time to take care of the other things. Because those unsolicited phone calls are the things that pull you away. having a defined process for that, and we've got all kinds of tools and messaging to start there as well. as we circle kind of wrapping up today and maybe talking about what next steps could be for advisors, what are your final thoughts? What would you like to share with an advisor who's thinking about maybe getting started with this type of process in their practice?

Allan Oehrlein - Yeah, and reference back to the stories I shared about what structure can provide and by utilizing the time blocking and the time allocation, what that's going to mean for your mentals and your sanity, but also going forward with your practice and how it's going to grow and what you want to get out of it at the same time. just remember that my takeaway is structure creates that freedom and time allocation isn't restrictive, know, it's liberating.

Aaron Grady - I love that. Yeah, it's not, we're not, we're not handcuffing you. We're freeing you by creating order in your practice to do more. I really love that thought. So.

Allan Oehrlein - Yes.

Aaron Grady -If you're interested in getting started, here's what I would tell you. The very first step, as we mentioned earlier, is do an audit of your time. Look at your week. Look at the last couple of weeks and start auditing where are you currently spending your time. From there, I would encourage you to lay out your ideal work week. How many hours a week do you want to work? When do you want to start? When do you want to get off? know, when do you want to shut the office down? You know, do you want to work full day on Friday? How many appointments do you want to have? Kind of frame that out and then backfill in with those important things. And then if you're interested in needing some help with some of this, we've got some great resources that kind of help along with this. We've got a time allocation worksheet. We've got an ideal week template that actually kind of shows some representative examples of what some really ideal weeks look like. If you like copies of those, please reach out to us here at USA Financial. More than happy to send you a copy of those for you to use. And as we close out today, thank you again, as always, for listening to the Rare Advisor podcast. You know, and if you enjoyed what you've heard on today's episode, as always, make sure that you like and subscribe. As it's always been said, when the why is clear, the how becomes easy. So never lose sight of your why.

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The RARE Advisor is a business model supercharged by Recurring And Repeatable Events. With decades of experience coaching successful advisors, your host, along with other leaders in the industry, discusses what it takes to grow a successful practice. With the aim of helping financial professionals and financial advisors take their business to the next level, this podcast shares insights and success stories that will make a real impact. Regardless of the stage of your practice, The RARE Advisor will provide thoughtful guidance, suggestions for developing systems and processes that work, and ideas for creating an authentic experience for your clients.

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