Million Dollar Producer Show

068: Work Less, Earn More: Libby Greiwe’s Guide to Building a 7-Figure Practice with More Freedom

• Paul G. McManus

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In this podcast episode, I welcome Libby Greiwe, host of The Efficient Advisor podcast and and a former financial advisor turned business efficiency coach.

Libby shares her inspiring journey of transforming her practice from 80-hour weeks to a thriving seven-figure business while working just 24 hours a week. Her story and strategies offer a roadmap for advisors looking to scale their business without sacrificing their personal lives.

Libby's Journey:

  • The Turning Point: In 2008, she faced a crossroads when she became a new mom, leading her to overhaul her business to achieve balance and freedom.
  • Key Strategies: Libby highlights the importance of automating, delegating, deleting, and streamlining tasks to free up time and boost revenue.
  • Efficiency in Action: From cutting her hours to 24 per week to quadrupling her revenue, she reveals how processes and systems changed everything.


The Four-Lens Approach to Practice Efficiency

  • Efficiency Coaching: Libby provides advisors with tools, templates, and frameworks to streamline their practices.
  • Tech Integration: She teaches advisors how to use tools like Zapier, AI, and workflow systems to save time and scale operations.
  • Customized Approach: Her methods are tailored to the advisor’s unique goals—whether it’s more personal freedom, higher revenue, or both.


Looking Ahead

  • The Future of AI: Libby emphasizes the importance of integrating AI tools to stay ahead in an evolving industry.
  • Client-Centric Innovation: Advisors who improve efficiency not only benefit personally but also enhance the client experience.
  • Investing in Yourself: She encourages advisors to embrace coaching, community, and lifelong learning to achieve their full potential.

Bottom Line:
Success in advisory practices doesn't require sacrificing personal life. With proper systems, modern technology, and strategic thinking, advisors can build profitable practices while working fewer hours. The key is starting now and allowing improvements to compound over time.


About our guest: Libby Greiwe, host of The Efficient Advisor podcast and and a former financial advisor turned business efficiency coach.

About Your Host:  Paul G. McManus is an accomplished author and expert in helping financial professionals grow their businesses. With over eight years of experience working exclusively with financial professionals, Paul has helped his clients generate tens of millions of dollars in fees and commissions.

Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com

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Speaker 1:

If you're like most advisors, I know you're caught in a familiar trap. Your business is growing, but so are your working hours. Every new client means less time with your family, less time for yourself and a constant feeling that success in your practice means sacrifice in your personal life. You probably wondered is this just how it has to be? Our guest today proves there's a different way. Libby Grywe has not only built a thriving advisory practice, but she's done it while working fewer hours and creating real freedom in her life. She's taken what many of us thought was impossible growing a profitable practice while actually having a life and turned it into a reality. Now she helps other advisors do the same. She's also the host of the Efficient Advisor podcast, where I recently had the pleasure of being a guest. After a conversation, I knew I had to have her share insights with you all. Libby, welcome to the show. I'm excited to unpack your journey and show our listeners that there might be a better way than what we've all been taught about building a successful practice.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, ever since we had you on the podcast, I have been looking forward to this conversation, because it's really not that different than what you're doing right Figuring out an efficient way to write a book and actually get your product out into the world, and do it in less time 100%, and just before we recorded, we were having this nice conversation about AI and it's amazing just the tools that are being made available now.

Speaker 1:

It's just crazy how efficient you can become. I found myself just doing this with AI and using different tools, that my own productivity and efficiency is significantly higher than it was just a few years ago. Thank you for being our guest today and before we dive into the topic, I'd love to have our community just to get to know you a little bit better. So what's your backstory? How did you go from being a financial advisor to now helping advisors create more efficiency and more freedom, more personal time in their own practices?

Speaker 2:

time in their own practices. Yeah, absolutely so. I'll take you back to 2008. So 2008 was a very scary year for me as a financial advisor. For the previous four years, I had been working around the clock like a crazy person, building my business nights, weekends, 70, 80 hours a week. Then came 2008. And usually when I say that, most people will think, oh, because the market crashed and I'm like no, something way scarier happened.

Speaker 2:

I found out I was pregnant and this was great because we wanted a baby. But this was really scary because I had been running around like building this business and I just remember having that moment of gosh. There is no way I can be the mom that I want to be and operate like this. So I set out on this mission to and at the same time, I was really happy with the amount of money I was making. So I was like, okay, how can I do both? And so I set out on this mission to start building more systems and processes to really figure out okay, how do I whittle down from 80 hours a week to my goal of 24?

Speaker 2:

I realized in that moment that I didn't really have a business. I had a Libby, while I had a staff member and I had an office. If I didn't show up, stuff wasn't getting done, it wasn't scalable, it wasn't wash, rinse, repeat. I was winging it, recreating the wheel every single time.

Speaker 2:

So I really set out on this crusade to start actually stepping out of that advisor role and into that role of CEO of my own business and to start thinking strategically right. How do I cast a vision for the business? How do I start building systems and processes? How do I start taking more off of my plate so that I'm not that mom that's tethered to her phone during soccer games and constantly putting out fires on the weekends and bringing out the laptop? And that's really where it started so fast forward three or four years I had quadrupled the amount of money that I was making per hour worked. We had scaled to a seven-figure firm as a solo advisor and I had dropped my hours down to 24 hours a week. You hit the target. Yeah, I hit the target and it was all through really three main things. But advisors started getting wind of what I was doing and it wasn't like oh, she's on the East Coast, where everybody has lots of money, in the West Coast, where I was this advisor in Ohio.

Speaker 1:

I think the haters would think that's like ah, she has it lucky, oh, oh yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, something special is going on.

Speaker 2:

I can promise you there's not a lot of special stuff going on here in Cincinnati. Yeah, I worked with normal clients, right? I didn't work with ultra wealthy. I didn't have these like access to anything that anybody else had access to, and so advisors from all over the country started getting wind of what I was doing. We're like, okay, where do I start? And that's really where the Efficient Advisor was born. I started finding that I loved sharing the behind the scenes. Here's how we did that. And here, take my template Don't create it, Because I used to absolutely despise going to conferences and these speakers would come and they'd share these life-altering ideas and I'd have so many ideas swirling in my head and I'd get back to my office and be just staring at a blank piece of paper going okay, but and that's really where it came from is I wanted to be the how. I wanted to show people how they could fast track it and think about in a way that was so much more simple.

Speaker 1:

I want to follow up with a couple of points that you made. So first, I love your humor. So you're like, yeah, it was 2008 and this traumatic thing happened and everyone's oh, we know exactly what happened the markets crashed.

Speaker 2:

You're like the baby thing way scarier.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that wasn't it. So, going from 80 hours down to 24, but being intentional about it, I love to unpack that a little bit, because the saying I forget which law it is is that work expands to meet the time available, right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So when you realize that and are intentional about your goals, it's amazing what you can accomplish. I think a lot of people just think, whether it's 40 hours or 80 hours a week, eight to five or whatever the hours are, I need to go sit at my desk and do stuff. But that's just ridiculous. Can you share a little bit more about that? Because that seems like 80 to 24, seems like a real revolution. How did you have the confidence that you could make that happen, that you could make that work?

Speaker 2:

I don't even know if I did. I think it was like more of when you have to you figure it out. If I hadn't gotten pregnant, I probably would have just stayed at that pace, like I really needed that. I really needed that incentive to figure it out. I was doing what most advisors do in the beginning, needed that incentive to figure it out.

Speaker 2:

I was doing what most advisors do in the beginning and I see this all the time with advisor clients that I work with is you just go full bore building this business, whether you get pregnant or not. You hit this point where you realize, whoa, okay, everything I prayed for now has come true. I have this business, I have the revenue, I don't have to worry about paying my mortgage and putting food on the table. I'm good. But, holy crap, I'm overwhelmed, I'm super stressed, I can barely keep my head above water, and that's that inflection point where an advisor really has to put on that CEO hat and say I don't have the time but, I, need to prioritize the time to actually streamline this thing, or I'm just going to keep feeling like I'm drowning, playing catch up on nights and weekends, always feeling like I'm behind.

Speaker 2:

That's really for me, like when people hit that moment and they realize I don't have a business. I have a Paul or I have a Libby. I really need to get this quote unquote figured out. And the weird part is when you're at this three, four years in and you're maybe at a few hundred thousand dollars of revenue, you have this weird feeling like I figured it out, like I'm a good advisor. I should have this figured out by now. But the hard part is like you go into this business so that you can have your own business but nobody teaches you how to run your business. You're so engrossed in learning how to be an advisor and how to do the tax planning and how to learn all the things and the sales we neglect, like the backend processes and things that actually help you become a quote-unquote real business.

Speaker 1:

So this is back in 2008. As you're trying to figure this out, what were your influences? Can you point to any book or system or anything at the time that helped inform you so that you could start developing these systems for yourself?

Speaker 2:

There was one book that I can remember someone recommending to me, and it was E-Myth. Yeah, that classic book, and I was like huh, you know what? Yeah, okay, I'm in. And that was the first business book that I read and that then catapulted me into the. What else is out there, what else can?

Speaker 1:

I read.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it was making investments in myself and that was really scary for me. And I don't know if it's just being raised as a woman in the nineties where we poor and we very rarely invest in ourselves, or I was vested in my business and my kids and my husband and all of the things, but being able to actually step outside of that and put money into my own education and that's something. No, you can lose your business and you can lose money in the market and all the things that. This is something nobody could ever take away from me. I wish I would have done that sooner.

Speaker 1:

I listened to the audio book E-Myth probably multiple times. Michael Gerber, I think his name, and he has a wonderful voice. It's almost hypnotic when you listen to it. You feel like you're listening to wisdom and you feel at peace and he's just a great storyteller. What I found in myself? Because at that time I was running a larger business and I loved the ideas, but I found it difficult to translate those ideas into day-to-day operations. In terms of efficiency, I had some wins, but overall it just seemed overwhelming. So I'd love to dive into, like, how do you help advisors actually implement these things? Everyone, I would imagine, has the idea sure I'd love to work fewer hours or I'd love to get paid more per hour, whatever it is sounds great, but the reality is that there's a lot of behavior change that has to happen. Just maybe tell some stories, or just who's that typical advisor that comes to you, what are the typical challenges and what's that transformation that you help them achieve?

Speaker 2:

So the typical advisor is that advisor who's at that inflection point, right, where they're like I have this really great business, I'm super excited about it, but it's running me instead of me running it. And the commonality amongst those advisors is they're really good people, right, they're really good at sales, they're really entertaining. They might be really good at the analysis and analytics, but they're so used to doing all of the things that sometimes it's hard to see the forest through the analysis and analytics. But they're so used to doing all of the things that sometimes it's hard to see the forest through the trees and really figuring out where do I actually need to spend my time. So the first thing that we always do is we start to look at there's really eight core processes that every financial advisory practice has and we start to look at them through the lens of what can I automate, what can I delegate. Look at them through the lens of what can I automate, what can I delegate, what can I delete and what can I streamline? So automate, obviously being like what tools, resources exist out there that we can make this happen automatically Workflows, calendaring, all the little things. Delegating what are the things that are in this upper right-hand quadrant of what's teachable and what's templatable, and how can I start to give that away? Then the most underutilized one is delete, right? There's a lot of things that advisors do because we think we should be doing them, because Dave in the cubicle next to me does them. I was trained by my broker dealer that I should do these things. Often they don't actually have any impact. So we're really picking apart every single thing that an advisor is doing, every little task, and saying is it even necessary? Does this enhance your client experience or is it just neutral? And if it's neutral, if it's not adding to the client experience, we take it away. And so then, of course, streamlining being, can we create a template for that? Can we build something that allows you to do it better, faster, smarter, cheaper, easier? Right, instead of retyping the same email 37 times? Can we make a template? Then it's getting all of that organized, and that's the hardest part for most advisors is we're not naturally organized people.

Speaker 2:

When I started sharing that I have ADHD, I always called it advisor ADD. I'm ADHD. I always called it advisor ADD. I'm like I don't know. Maybe it just started when I became an advisor because there were so many hats Now that I know more about the diagnosis. Like I understand, I've had it my whole life and that's my superpower. But a lot of advisors have started sharing oh my gosh, that's me too.

Speaker 2:

I have a hard time focusing, I'm scattered all over the place and it's really helping them manage themselves so that they can better manage people, and really starting to build some of those things where they can just start the process and somebody else can actually follow it through, recognizing where our strengths are and where our weaknesses are, scaling ourselves first before we just jump to hire somebody. But really looking at every single thing that we're doing in a process and saying is this actually impactful? Does it make a difference? Do the clients care? Or am I doing this because it's something that I think I should be doing, because I was online and I saw so-and-so does this, or I listened to this podcast and such is doing this. But if you're serving a different demographic or a different ideal client, those things might not be necessary or they might actually be taking away from the client experience as opposed to enhancing it.

Speaker 1:

One thing that I see and I'm interested to get your take is that and I struggle with this that you had a very specific goal of wanting to get down to 24 hours because you were a new mom and you had different responsibilities, and so you had a very tight budget of time that you wanted to do it specifically. You had different responsibilities and so you had a very tight budget of time that you wanted to do it specifically. I think for men perhaps, because typically they're not in that role. Myself, for example, I'm always looking for ways to get more efficient, but it's not so much so that I have more time to do other stuff, it's simply so I can grow my revenue. It's simply so I can make more per hour. I'm just curious Do you see that dynamic in terms of if I had more free time, I wouldn't know what to do with it?

Speaker 2:

I would spend it poorly. Yeah, every time I speak at a conference, I include this now in my talk, right? So I do my opening and I talk about how I went from 80 hours to 24 and how I quadrupled the amount of money that I was making per hour. And I always will have somebody come at me and go. It's not work. If you do what you love and I want to work 40 hours a week or I love the grind, I love working 60, 70, 80 hours they say, okay, great. Well, if you're going to do that great, you do you right. I'm not saying working part-time is for everybody, but you might as well be making four times as much as you are right now.

Speaker 1:

I think that's the person who I've been. I'm not sure if you know this person. His name is John Cutton. He has his own podcast called the Quantum Growth for Financial Advisors podcast, and I've gotten to know him over the past, I want to say a year and a half or so. During that time, when I met him, he was already doing 9 billion AUM. Since then he's now at 14 billion AUM and I'm helping him write some books and so I just get like a bird's eye view of him and he's probably the busiest person I know. He just grinds and it's because he just has this passion and desire to grow his enterprise at this time and he's just increasing his value. It's not about, in his case, having more time to allocate elsewhere. It's simply how do you get much more efficient in growing your business?

Speaker 2:

That's interesting because even when I was down to three days a week, I still had massive growth goals. My husband at the time would always go what's the big deal with a million dollars? And this sounds like the most? I am fully aware of how first world this sounds. But what's the difference? If you make a million dollars a year or $800,000 a year, is it really going to change your happiness levels? And I'd say it's not about the money, it's because I know I can and that was always it right, like it was just that way that I was wired was like okay, so now, if I can make a million dollars in 24 hours, can I make 1.2? How about 1.4? Right, and it wasn't even about what that dollar could do for me, it was more just because I think I can.

Speaker 1:

So you're very goal oriented in terms of time. But what I like about what I like about what you're saying is that it's also you still have those growth goals and now and I heard you say it earlier just really more measuring it by the hour, almost right. So it's a little bit different measurement but it's more precise.

Speaker 2:

And not to take it totally off topic, but I always say there's a huge difference between contentment and complacency For me. There are advisors who want to scale, scale and 10X their 10X with no end in sight and hire and have these big mega practices and that's beautiful. And then there were people like me who were like, hey, that's not my jam. Maybe it would have been or could have been if I hadn't done my business, but I just want to make as much as I possibly can in these in this time constraint. I'm not complacent because I still want to grow, but I also just have this ability to be content and for advisors listening that, I think there's always this pressure that you have to form these multi-advisor teams and bring in juniors and more and more. And that's not the only way to grow a business and it doesn't mean you're complacent, You're just happy making a million dollars working part-time.

Speaker 1:

As we're talking, I wanted to go a little bit into processes In today's world. Here we are in 2024, and there's so many different ways to do the things that you said, whether it's to automate, delegate, delete or streamline, and just some of the things that I've done myself or I've seen is you can hire a virtual assistant, and there's technologies like Zapier, online automation processes and, of course, the big one nowadays is AI. So maybe, starting with the first one, about getting, perhaps, a virtual assistant, what are your thoughts about virtual assistants?

Speaker 2:

I always tell people, before you even think about hiring, you really need to analyze how you're spending your own time first, because I know when I started I remember them being like oh, you need to hire a phone call. So there's two things right. Like first, I actually really needed. Before I could bring anybody else in and lead them, I had to lead myself better. Am I really actually maximizing every minute that I'm spending here in my office? Am I being effective? Do I really need to jump to hiring somebody else and do I have my stuff together so that if I hire somebody, I can actually give them a track to run on? So if I'm over here just winging it every time, how am I going to train somebody else to wing every time? The other thing with that is I remember there being like this very distinct pecking order of here's what you do you hire a phone caller, then you hire an administrative assistant and then you bring in someone who's licensed, and it was the road that you followed. What I realized is that I hired the phone caller and I had this phone caller for about three months. I realized she's not that great of a phone. Like I'm better on the phone and meanwhile I'm over here filling out paperwork and getting not in good orders like it was my job because I suck at details. I was great on the phone, so when I flip-flopped us and had her doing the paperwork, I was making the phone calls. We were so much more effective. So it's not just about being efficient, right, being efficient is great, but it has to be effective. You have to be efficient and effective and it has to be enjoyable for everybody.

Speaker 2:

So what I learned through that process was is that everybody has different needs in their business based on their skillsets, who they're serving, how they're serving them, right. So if you're running a virtual RIA where you don't have a physical office space, you're not meeting clients in person, your business needs different things than a 10 advisor office in Boise, idaho, where everybody comes in face to face. Every business is not built the same. So if your business is one, a virtual administrative assistant is huge and I have no problem with where. It's interesting because I just hired a VA outside of the US. It's funny because when I tell that to my friends, everyone immediately assumes that you're going to have very low quality work because it's low cost. I'm like there are brilliant people all over the world that are very good at what they do. I am not great at building funnels and editing video. That is not my sweet spot. I could find somebody here to do it. It doesn't matter to me where they are, as long as they're trained and good at what I need for my business.

Speaker 2:

So I would say it depends on what your business needs and what you need help with. If you need a physical person in the office to greet clients and seat them and make them coffee and deliver experience, or if you need someone overseas, now I will say and I'll probably get shade for this but if you have someone calling your clients, there still is a misconception or a preconceived notion about how people feel about talking to somebody and not being able to understand them if they have a really thick or heavy accent. If you have something that is client facing the world in which we live, it's probably helpful to have someone with a very clear English tone right, like it doesn't matter if they have an accent or not, but they have to be easy to understand. I hope we're moving as a society away from that a little bit, recognizing that there are very intelligent people all over the world. I think hiring help in general, whether it's virtual, in-person, overseas, here, is going to give you the best leverage for your business.

Speaker 1:

I've had an online business location free since 2015. And I've experimented with hiring American contractors, hiring contractors from the Philippines, hiring from Latin America and, interestingly, I found that my preference is Latin America. Some of the reasons is that they're in the same time zone. The accent to your point if you hire the right people, it can be indistinguishable. I have two contractors right now that are virtual assistants in Latin America and you can't tell the difference. They can be on client meetings and unless I say hey, so-and-so is in Brazil, no one knows the difference. But the benefit to it is that the cost per hour is significantly less than hiring an American contractor. So for me, as a small business owner, that can make a huge difference.

Speaker 1:

But to your other point you first have to lead yourself, because I've recommended this to a lot of people. It's hey, you need a virtual assistant, and I think the mindset that people mistakenly come to it is that hey, I'm just going to hire someone and I'm going to say go, do all these things for me and now my life is easy. So they want to dump their workload on them and magically think that they know what they're doing and they don't. And so if you don't have these things templated. You don't have SOPs. If you don't have a process, it's just not going to work out, and you know that better than anybody.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, absolutely. At the end of the day, it all comes down to processes.

Speaker 1:

I want to jump to a couple other things. Now there's automation. I don't know how much you get into this, but there's tools like Zapier and different things that are remarkable once you understand how they work. Of course, email automation, things of that nature but I think maybe what's even more interesting today, in 2024, is AI. How involved in AI are you in terms of your own business, in terms of tools and processes that you are recommending to your clients?

Speaker 2:

I think back to when I started my business in 2004 and we had paper files. And now I think about where we're at today and just the amount of tech change that has happened in the last 20 years. It's only going to continue at that pace, if not faster.

Speaker 1:

It's faster, literally, with AI. I can expect the next big update a month from now.

Speaker 2:

And it's unbelievable. So we're very heavily utilizing AI inside of the business and I have an AI partner that he and I are building out some stuff. It's really just to start teaching advisors at a basic level. Yeah, how do you Zapier? How do you create zaps between Redtail and your Outlook? How do you start just making these simple bridges using AI? Because it is such a big thing for advisors.

Speaker 2:

When I was speaking at XYPN last week, every advisor, when we talked about AI, mentioned note-taking. That's literally where we're at right, like it's like note-taking and it's so much bigger than that, and so that's where. But we have to do it like step-by-step. Okay, the first thing I can do with AI is get my notes off my desk. Okay, now, what else can I do? Now, ben and I are starting to build some programs for advisors that kind of show them like step-by-step, like here's something else. Even if you're at a broker dealer and you can't control your tech stack, there's still so many ways that you can use AI in a way that's compliant to really support your business, and I will share that. If you're not using it, you will get left in the dust. You have to stay ahead of it. You have to stay on top of it. You don't have to be coding and you need to be integrating AI into your business in order to continue to be successful.

Speaker 1:

What you're saying is that this isn't just a fad like the internet?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's exactly and we think about if you use the internet as a great example. Back when that thing came out, it was like an email. People were like, is this really like email? Is this really going to take off? And we all learned it and that's the hard part is resistance of I don't have capacity. Our clients aren't going to be able to learn how to use a portal to upload their docs. We are always putting these barriers in place. We look back and, like my grandmother was born when they still had a carriage that she rode around in and the ice man stopped by and dropped off blocks of ice. When she was 95, she was using a smartphone. So anybody can learn anything. It's just a matter of being intentional and building time into your calendar to learn it and to have your team learn it and to be the best at it.

Speaker 1:

I would agree, and I would add to that that it's just becoming easier and easier. The AI, in my case, is more what's the use case, and you said this before. Right, it's everyone has the note taker. And I was thinking the other day I was on a zoom meeting and suddenly it was with one advisor and before he showed up, he had three AI note takers on the call with me and I'm just like sitting there a little bit nervous, thinking, okay, what's going on here? Then he showed up. I'm like, do you realize? You have three AI note takers, like the best I definitely noticed on these Zoom calls everyone has their note taker, whether or not what they're doing with it's a different matter.

Speaker 1:

There's a couple of tools that I've come across, so I'm big into AI. I got into AI, I think in 2022, just before chat GPT became popular, and this was two years ago. But back in the days of I think it's called Jasper, and Jasper was like the one that went from like a startup to a billion dollar company over the course of a year and I went to their conference in the beginning of 2023. I'm like, okay, I'm sold, I just need to build my business around AI and I've been doing that ever since. I found some really specific use cases where I can't work without it at this point.

Speaker 1:

But there's so many cool tools. Just throw out a couple. There's Claude. So if you're doing any writing, claude is the best, in my view, for writing, whether it's blog posts or for note taking. An organization it's called Notebook LM. It's a product by Google and it's remarkable the capabilities that it has and it's free, and so there's so many different things that you can do Just in your own business. Curious what tools are you using personally to help your workflows?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we use a ton of Zapier, so we have lots of zaps that zap back and forth. Between all the things we do use transcripting and note-taking, ai. We use a lot of chat, gpt to help build content, calendars to create different SOPs. We use a company called Scribe to create SOPs. There's so many cool tools.

Speaker 1:

So, as we start to wrap up, what has you personally most excited about the future? So you're running this fabulous part-time business making, I think you said, a million dollars, pretty cool. What has you the most excited about the future, whether it's just your personal business or the technology or what you're seeing happening in the advisory space?

Speaker 2:

The thing that gets me the most excited. So I was at a retirement tech services conference speaking back in September, and an advisor stopped me in the lobby of the hotel and I had worked with him a couple of years ago and he was like Libby. I just have to tell you we had built out his first 100 days like onboarding client experience and he goes. We changed it and we did all of the things that you told us to do and it's been insane. We've gotten so many referrals in the first 100 days of our clients coming on board and people are more excited to work with us than ever before. And he was like thank you, like what you said actually worked.

Speaker 2:

Those types of moments for me when I see other advisors and that's why I sold my practice and went into coaching is I knew that I could impact the financial services community in a much bigger, much more meaningful way by working with advisors and showing them how to do what I did, but in their own way that works for them and their goals, and that, instead of me just serving 285 households, if I could help advisors stay in the business, not burn out better, smarter ways of doing it, all ships rise together.

Speaker 2:

As far as I'm concerned, and if we can start helping advisors root their processes and client experience, everybody's going to see the benefit of that the advisors, their teams, the clients. The quality of planning is going to go up and that's the thing that gets me most excited is watching advisors have these very tangible results. More so than just like more revenue but more time off than ever before. I leave my computer at the office at five o'clock. I have boundaries. That's the stuff that makes me really excited to see more advisors investing in themselves and doing coaching and not trying to figure everything out on their own anymore and just recognizing I can't know all the things. Of all the things. I'm going to join the masterminds and get the coaching and do the reading and just start testing and trying and being more creative in my business.

Speaker 1:

So someone listened to this and they're like that sounds great. What are some of the misconceptions, or maybe even limited thinking, that people have before they make that leap into embracing everything that we're talking about?

Speaker 2:

I think a lot of people are like I'm not ready yet. I should be further along than I am. I'm clearly not ready yet. I need to get past X, y or Z. If I can just get through this, things will calm down.

Speaker 2:

For me, it's just like investing in a coaching program or a mastermind. You definitely have to be ready to implement whatever you're going to be receiving, but it's like having a baby. There's never actually a good time to do it, and so people kick the can down the road and they're like oh, you know what? I really know that I need that. I'll get that done next year. I really know that I need that. I'll get that done. You know what? I'm going to work on that in six months and it just stays on the to-do list forever.

Speaker 2:

It's just like we tell our clients if you invest a dollar, you're going to have $5 at some point. Same thing invest some time and you can save an hour. This year can do that multiple times. You will start to reduce your overwhelm, reduce your stress, make more money per hour. That's probably the most limiting belief is I'm not ready yet, or I don't have enough time, or I have to just get past this thing or have this one experience. Like I have to hit this certain revenue, like it's all nonprofits, like you just need to jump in and do it and implement the information.

Speaker 1:

I love that analogy of compounding. It seems overwhelming to get to the point where you're not overwhelmed, which is ironic, but it's just getting started and as you get started and you start getting those small wins, they start to compound or snowball. Is there a resource, a tool that you have available? I know on your website you have tons of material for someone that wants to just dip their toes in the water, so to speak. What would you recommend that they look at on your website and also share with us what your website is?

Speaker 2:

So they could definitely check out the Efficient Advisor podcast. It's very tactical. Every week there's literally something that you can do or implement in your business. There's lots of downloads that go with the episodes. We really don't gatekeep anything, so if we're talking about how to develop your ideal client avatar, I'm going to give you a worksheet to help you do that. There's really no secrets. The website is full of videos and templates and samples and examples. We, of course, have our coaching programs, which are just 10 month finite programs that you get in, you do the thing, you get out and you implement it. And then there's some community aspect beyond that, where that we've developed for the alumni of our programs. We've got the group coaching. We've got the podcast.

Speaker 2:

I do a lot of content on LinkedIn. Because of my new VA that has a expertise in video editing, we're going to be doing a lot more short form content and stuff coming on LinkedIn. We also have a free community with about 2500 advisors in it and ops people from advisory practices on Facebook called the Efficient Advisor Community and it's just a great place for people to ask questions, get answers and it's just really cool. Like someone might post hey, I'm using Redtail and I can't figure out where to store my notes and they'll have 30 people respond and say here's how I do it. It's just a really cool safe environment for advisors and ops people to be able to ask questions and just get feedback.

Speaker 1:

Out of curiosity, are you familiar with a community called school? You mentioned a Facebook group. Do you also have a school group or are you more concentrated on Facebook?

Speaker 2:

So our free communities on Facebook are coaching programs run off of Kajabi and that's where our alumni community is on Kajabi.

Speaker 1:

Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you want to share before we conclude today's episode?

Speaker 2:

I think we've covered a lot.

Speaker 1:

Perfect, and just one more time. Where's the best place for people to reach out to you?

Speaker 2:

You can definitely follow me over on LinkedIn and you'll find me under Libby Grywe and on the Efficient Advisor community on Facebook, and then the podcast, the Efficient Advisor.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for your time today. The Efficient Advisor. Thank you so much for your time today. I enjoyed the conversation and I appreciate your time.

Speaker 2:

Thanks so much for having me.