It’s understood that we can’t add more time to our day, we have to work within the confines of what we have and make the most of it.

Close to a year ago when COVID-19 hit and quarantine began, we all seemed to have a bit more time on our hands. Now that life is starting to pick up and we are seemingly on the other side of COVID, (people are getting back to work, some kids are in school, businesses are slowly reopening), the flexibility we all once had might be fading away and our time is getting pinched again or will be soon.

I’ve spent some time in the Financial Services Industry, so to some extent, I understand the financial sales executive role, I spent time in business development and marketing, in the financial services space. I understand the stress that comes with the job and how maximizing your time can make an incredible impact on your bottom line. On the other side, I understand fitness and the power of having a coach or a personal trainer to hold you accountable to life’s goals, not just business goals.

Over the last 12 years I’ve been in the fitness industry and the biggest roadblock that I’ve consistently heard, regardless of the industry, is that we “don’t have enough time.” We don’t have enough time to lose the weight that we want to lose. We don’t have enough time to track our nutrition. We don’t have enough time to get our workouts in and we don’t even have enough time to drink more water (if you can believe it!)!

So, to be candid, not having enough TIME comes down to two main factors:

1. How are you managing your time?
2. How are you prioritizing your time?

Colin Lake and his team at Developing The Next Leaders very effectively help folks manage their time, however, this blog is about strategies to prioritize your time for your fitness goals, regardless of what they are.

No matter how you wrap it up, you always have some time BUT that time you have is dependent upon your priorities and how you are partitioning those priorities. If your fitness goals aren’t a major priority, then success is going to be more challenging AND take a lot longer. So before we get into these strategies, you first need to answer this one question:

On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the most) how important are your fitness/health related goals to you?

If the answer to question is anything less than a 10, my next questions are Why didn’t you give a lower score? And what’s the worst case scenario of not achieving this goal?  

As a sales executive, you may know that FEAR is a greater motivator compared to anything else. In order to prioritize and manage your time more effectively, what you may lose always “out motivates” what you may gain.

If you’re motivated and ready to make the changes necessary, below are 5 proven tips and strategies to help you prioritize your time more effectively and help you crush it in the sales world AND on your fitness journey!

1.) Talk To Yourself

The first strategy is how to reframe the way you talk to yourself. You need to literally avoid saying things like “I can’t”, “I won’t” or “I have to do (insert activity)”. You won’t prioritize anything if you don’t believe you can do it and you sure as hell won’t act upon it.

How does changing how you talk to yourself give you more time? The easy answer is, it doesn’t, however, it sets the stage for you MAKING THE TIME to do anything. We are more likely to AVOID doing things if we don’t believe we will make it happen.

This is true for your sales goals as it is for your personal health goals.

Strategy: Change from “I can’t” to “I can”, “I won’t” to “I will” and “I have to do this” to “I get to do this”. You’re confident in your role, you need to take the same confidence and put it towards your health. The power of positivity can go a long way and it doesn’t matter how much or how little time you have if you talk yourself out of it. Get into the habit of doing this when you talk to your clients as well, it can make a noticeable difference!

2.) Priority Reminders

This gets into something called Emotional Reasoning. Emotional Reasoning is the habit of making decisions based on how we feel rather than what we value. When we use our emotions and feelings as evidence for what we should or shouldn’t do, we end up spending all our time running away from discomfort rather than toward the things we really value.

Examples:

I’m not going to work out today, I just don’t feel it.

Or

I’ll eat the rest of the cookies and start eating better tomorrow…

We often believe that successful people need to be motivated before they do something. The reality is successful people understand that action comes before motivation.

Strategy: Writing your goals and putting them up on the wall or somewhere that you can see it every day is one strategy. What I have found to work better for our clients at Prototype Training Systems is to take what is most important to you (your fitness goal) and make it the background on your phone. Every day you wake up and look at your phone, right? The first thing you see every morning should remind you of why you are getting up and should remind you of why you need to make the time to prioritize fitness.

3.) Create Appointments You Can’t Cancel

When you have an appointment on your calendar (Doctor or Dentist as an example), you’re less inclined to cancel that appointment. You made a commitment. When we have to hold ourselves accountable to taking action, we have to do the same thing. You need to schedule that workout in your calendar and treat it like something you can’t break or cancel. When we make verbal or soft commitments to ourselves, we are less inclined to follow through.

We call this a Commitment Device and it’s an incredible tool to hack your likelihood of success.

Strategy: Map out your next week’s workout schedule over the weekend. Set the appointments in the calendar on your phone with multiple reminders. This will allow nothing to get scheduled over it (if you use a scheduling software) and you will have a higher success rate of completing them. Additionally, add some buffer time before and after your planned workout (5-10 minutes) so nothing can be booked immediately after or before your workout in case your time runs over by a few minutes.

4.) Self-Accountability System

To piggyback on the previous point of Commitment Devices, when we make verbal commitments to ourselves that we are going to do something, we are less likely to follow through on them. We need something in writing to hold us accountable. That’s why people that take the time to write out their goals are more likely to be successful than the people who just keep their goals in their heads. Same principle here, if you struggle with self-accountability, you need to put it out there.

Strategy: Take a few minutes and write a Facebook post on your personal page outlining your goals and the commitments you are going to make. Let your whole social circle see it! Does this make you uncomfortable? Good, then you should do it! In a year from now, that post/memory will appear in your news feed. The next question is did you decide to follow through or not?

5.) Start Before Everyone Else

Have you ever said to yourself “I can never get up early” or “I’m not a morning person”? At some point in your life, you probably said that. I said that when I was in college. I would go to bed around 11:30 pm and wake up at 6:00 am for a 7:00 am class. I can see why I said I wasn’t a morning person, I didn’t get enough sleep! Here’s the thing, there are people who are more inclined to be a morning person vs. a night owl, I get it. But getting up early and getting the hardest part of your day over with is a decision. If you want to maximize your time AND your productivity, get up early, and get it done. A great quick read to help you with this is The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, give it a read it can change your life!

Strategy: Start on Mondays (first day of the week) and get your workout in first thing in the morning, before everyone else is up. Do that for 4 weeks. Then add on the 2nd day… and so on. Gradually get into the habit. Start the week off on the right foot. YOU CAN DO THIS!

I hope this helps, now get after it and PRIORITIZE THE TIME!

Some sales teams are turning to delivery services like Door Dash and Uber Eats to create socially distanced lunch meetings with advisors who are working from home, consultants say. But some compliance teams aren’t sure whether the practice is kosher. 

Sending an advisor a meal to enjoy during a virtual meeting can help wholesalers engage with their contacts and break through “Zoom fatigue,” says Colin Lake, a wholesaler consultant and founder of Developing the Next Leaders.

Josh Brown, CEO of RIA Ritholtz Wealth Management, last month received his first invitation to a “‘virtual wholesaler lunch’ where they send Uber Eats to your house while the pitch is Zoomed,” he tweeted in April.

Brown ultimately didn’t take the delivery, he tells Ignites. Although he doesn’t remember which firm sent the invite, he admits the idea is clever.

“I thought it was an example of an asset manager trying to figure out how to touch their clients in a really difficult time,” he says.

Vance Barse, a financial advisor in the Commonwealth Financial Network, says he’s also received inventive invitations from wholesalers in recent months. One hosted an event at a pizza location in San Diego, inviting advisors to drive up with their families to grab their pizza as well as marketing materials, Barse says.

“[Wholesalers] are going to any length to be creative to try and get in front of and bring value to financial advisors,” he says.

At least one firm has found this approach to be successful: Delaware Life, Lake says.

The Boston-based annuity provider created its wholesaling team in January, says a company spokesman. The firm leveraged technology, including virtual meetings, to connect with financial professionals even before the pandemic hit.

Advisors can be hesitant to meet with fund wholesalers in the best of times, Lake says. Getting creative with meetings can help them get on an advisor’s calendar, he says.

The average wholesaler has an annual travel and entertainment budget of $75,000, says Jeff Cerutti, founder of Rutti Consulting. With travel restrictions keeping sales teams at home, wholesalers have been largely unable to spend that cash. Sending meals to advisors offers one way to use up part of those funds, he adds.

But whether Zoom meals are permitted is a “question mark” for compliance teams, says Hanh Nguyen, founder of Complect, which offers financial service firms on-demand compliance specialists.

Finra members are only allowed to accept gifts of $100 per person per year, Nguyen writes in an e-mail. Occasional meals and other entertainment don’t fall under that cap, unless they happen frequently or are excessive. In addition, the representative offering the meal must be in attendance, she adds. Otherwise it’s a gift.

In the case of brokers’ sending food to their own clients for virtual events, Finra may treat such deliveries as gifts, said Robert Colby, the self-regulatory organization’s chief legal officer, during a recent Sifma webinar.

“If you were to ask 100 Finra employees this question, the answer you would get from 98 is it’s a gift, it’s not business entertainment,” Colby said.

That stance was surprising, since most advisors are stuck at home, says Francois Cooke, managing director for ACA Compliance Group’s broker-dealer services division.

But lunches delivered to brokers from vendors like fund shops may fall under non-cash compensation rules, he says. Such rules allow spending that is considered to be reasonable, and part of educational or training events.

“We are in a new, gray-area situation,” Cooke says. “If this was indeed a training session or a description of the products, and they were delivering a meal … I think that’s in the realm of reasonableness.”

Eaton Vance, for example, has a compliance-approved process to allow wholesalers to offer delivered meals as part of a scheduled meeting or call, a spokeswoman says.

“Similar to how our rules worked before this quarantine period, if the food is accompanied by a meeting it is not considered a gift,” she writes in an e-mail.

Before Covid, wholesalers and others in the fund industry often discussed new business opportunities over meals, says Amy Lynch, founder of FrontLine Compliance. Sales teams that send such meals now should be careful to mail them to a wide range of advisors and to track their spending, she says.

“Ideally the firm would want to be able to count this as the occasional meal,” she says.

Likewise, Nguyen says Zoom meals are likely acceptable as long as fund firms “follow the spirit of the interpretive guidance” by being present with the client on a video meeting.

On the investment advisor side, the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t have specific rules that limit gifts and entertainment, says Josh Broaded, co-head of U.S. regulatory compliance at ACA Compliance. Most advisory firms have their own guidelines, often including how much could be spent on each individual’s meal.

Although the “creative strategies” may spark advisors’ interest, they may have a hard time with uptake. Barse, the financial advisor, says he hasn’t accepted any meal offers he’s received.

“I don’t want clients and families whom I serve to have the perception that there is a conflict of interest,” he says.

Lavish meals may have poor optics, Broaded says. A steak dinner, for example, could present “an improper appearance from a public relations standpoint,” he says.

Some wholesalers who have tried delivering sandwiches for virtual meetings have found the meals aren’t always worth the effort, Cerutti says. It’s difficult to time a delivery to coincide with a video meeting, he says, and it can feel awkward.

“Zoom meetings watching someone eat a chicken parm hero aren’t exactly a great opportunity to present your small-cap growth strategy,” he says.

But in this “new virtual, socially distant world,” firms will be happy with anything that could help engage advisors, says Cerutti, who was previously CEO of AMG Funds.

“If I were running a distribution team, I would not have a problem with it,” he says.

Contact the reporter on this story at cgermaine@ignites.com or (212) 390-7329.