You will be able to estimate how your mix of new and existing clients should shift over three years.
In his first year, Daniel spent almost every evening and most weekends meeting new people. By the end of the year he had about thirty clients and was tired in a way that sleep did not fix. A senior colleague asked him a question he had not considered: "In three years, where do you want your new clients to come from?" He had no answer. He had been planning one month at a time.
Early in the career, most of your time goes to finding new people. You have few clients, no reviews to run and no one yet to refer you. Lesson 6.4, Build a compliant 30-day prospecting plan, was written for that stage.
Over time, the mix should change. Each client you take on adds reviews, claims support and contact between reviews. Each one who is well looked after becomes a possible source of referrals. So a healthy practice moves gradually from mostly prospecting to a larger share of time on reviews, servicing and referred clients. Nobody stops prospecting entirely, but the proportion of new clients who arrive through people who already trust you should grow.
If it does not, something is wrong. Either the service is not good enough to generate referrals, or you are not asking at the right moments, as in lesson 8.2, Ask for referrals after value, not after signing.
The way to know whether service is working is to track, each quarter, how many new clients came from referrals and how many from everything else. Divide the referred clients by the total new clients to get your referral share.
Daniel looks back at his first year. Of his 30 new clients, 4 came from referrals. That is 4 divided by 30, about 13 percent. All figures here are his examples.
One quarter's number on its own tells you little, because it bounces around. The trend over several quarters is what matters. A share that rises steadily tells you clients value what you do enough to put their name to it. One that stays flat after two or three years, while your client numbers grow, tells you to look at your service and your asking.
The other half of the plan is capacity. There is a limit to how many clients one representative can look after well, and a book that grows past that limit starts to fail in exactly the ways modules 5 and 7 warned about: reviews missed, files written late, clients drifting.
Work out your own limit with a simple estimate. First, how many hours a year does one client take to service properly? Include the review itself, preparing for it, writing the file the same day, and contact between reviews. Daniel estimates five hours a client a year: about three for the review with preparation and file writing, and about two for everything else.
Second, how many hours a week can you give to servicing, steadily, alongside prospecting and everything else? He decides twelve. Over 46 working weeks that is 552 hours a year. Dividing 552 hours by five hours a client gives about 110 clients.
Your figures will be different, and they are estimates, so round down rather than up. Treat the number as a planning limit to stay under, rather than a target to reach. If your book is heading past it, you need to change something before the service drops: more servicing hours, a more efficient review process, or slower growth.
With a referral share and a capacity limit, you can sketch three years. Start with how many clients you have, add how many new clients you aim to take on each year, and check the total stays under your capacity. Then set a target referral share for each year.
Daniel's sketch: 30 clients now. In year two, 24 new clients, a quarter of them from referrals, which is 6. In year three, 20 new clients, 40 percent from referrals, which is 8. If no clients leave, his book reaches 74 clients, well under his limit of about 110, which leaves room for clients who stay longer and need more. He writes down that if his referral share in year two stays near 13 percent, he will look hard at his reviews and his referral ask before adding more prospecting.
This lesson deliberately stays with numbers you can plan. Building your presence on LinkedIn and through content is taught in Social selling and referrals: LinkedIn, content and word of mouth, which goes much further into the channels themselves.
Everything in this lesson comes down to two numbers you choose: how many clients you can service well, and what share of your new clients you want to come from referrals in each of the next three years. In the activity below you write both down, with the working behind them, so lesson 8.4 has something solid to build on.
Write down how many clients you can service well and what share of new clients you want from referrals in each of the next three years.
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