The Leverage Grid: Escaping the Back Office to Scale Your Practice

Success was not supposed to feel this way. You're building a valuable financial advisory practice. You're hitting the numbers. So why do you feel like the business owns you? You didn't become a financial advisor to be stressed. You wanted more money, more impact, and more freedom. Welcome to Deca Millionaire Decoded, the show for financial advisors ready to dynamically scale their practice past $10 million in enterprise value. The strategies we decode work in one of the most regulated industries on the planet. So for those of you who are not a financial advisor, you can apply these strategies directly to your business as well. Hi, I'm Justin Goodbread, bestselling author, keynote speaker, and relentless coach. If you're ready to build a business that works for you, not because of you, you're in the right place. Let's decode the path to DecaMillionaire status together. Most financial advisors believe their growth has stalled because they need better marketing. I disagree. The reality is most financial advisors are drowning in their back office. Think about last week. How much time did you actually spend face-to-face with clients? Statistically, most financial advisors spend 30% of their time actually face-to-face with clients and 70% of our time in the weeds doing things that are not revenue generating. See, friends, I have this belief. As a financial advisor, your job is to find clients, solve their problems. That's it. No admin work, no trading, no research. Your job, find clients, solve their problems. So today I want to show you a quadrant. Once you see this quadrant, you can't unsee it. And it can help you get unstuck and allow your practice to scale rapidly. In fact, this is the exact same frameworks that our clients in the Million Dollar Advisor Program and Club Deca utilize to take their practices through a million dollars in revenue, through $3 million in revenue, and hopefully eclipse $10 million in annual revenue. So friends, I'd love for you to grab a pen, download the workbook below, and let's do some work. There's this loop that I used to find myself working through over and over and over again. And this loop costs me five to seven hours of my time per week. I remember when my coach showed me this, I thought he was psycho. And I remember him drawing, he said, Justin, you're stuck in the inbox loop. I was like, what is the inbox loop? Now, the reality is that we're going to go through the inbox loop, but you can use this when it regards to meetings. You can reuse this when it regards to team conversations. This loop can be applied throughout your entire company. The inbox loop works something like this. An email comes in. We open the email, and it says, Mr. Flintstone needs $50,000 out of his brokerage account to buy a new truck next week. Cool. I look at the email. I said, cool, I can give that to Mr. Flintstone. But I'm going to do that after my next meeting. So we go to our 11 o'clock meeting. 11 o'clock meeting is done. Oh, yeah, I remember. I got to go help Mr. Flintstone. I got to give him some money. So I'd open up my email and I see the email again. I open it up and start reading it again, making sure I read it right. And now the phone rings or your wife DMs you or a team member walks in or aliens invade. Whatever the reason, something happens. You're like, oh, okay, I'll get to that in a second. So now you've taken the time. You've looked at the email again. You put your brainpower around it. And now all of a sudden, you've got to come back. You've got to touch it a third time. Now, if you're like me, you're going to open up the email. You're going to say, wait a second. Mr. Flintstone, Fred himself, Fred Flintstone did not tell me which account he wants the money to go into. Does he want his joint account? Does he want his savings account? Does he want it in his account? Is he putting it in his wife's account? Where is it going? I don't have that information. So now I've got to move on. I'll get that information in a second. And before you know it, we're now in my simple example, four touches, and it's finally done. It's X'd out. We're done. Doesn't seem like that big of a deal whenever we start this loop, but this loop literally happens over and over and over again, not just with emails, but with direct messaging, with social media, with your team members, with meetings, with client engagement. happens consistently over and over, and it's been tracked down to at a minimum five to seven hours of our week is eaten up in this loop. Not only is our time wasted, friends, but there's also this mental clarity that gets drained. At the beginning of the day, after hopefully a long night's rest, and now you've had some exercise in the morning, your mind is fully energized and you're ready to go. But throughout the day, throughout these various loops that we subconsciously find ourselves in, there is this cognitive residual that is being drained all day long. So it's cognitive residual, cognitive residue that's just getting drained all day long. And as you're draining your mind, now what used to take you three minutes now takes you 10. Friends, five to seven hours per week is wasted in the inbox loop. So how do we get out of the inbox loop? I'm glad you asked. I remember the first time I saw this, I call it the leverage grid. Leverage grid has an X and Y axis. On the bottom here, we're going to go into execution mode, which means on the far left side over here, this is all behavior. And over here on the right side, this is all process. On the vertical axis, we're going to talk about their activity value. So we have a high activity value and we have a low activity value. Now, if we just stop right there, most of us as advisors who want to make $5,000, an hour of your production time that means we going to have to be in the high activity value range Well there a grid here simple grid For most of us we want to start off with the audit phase Now, if you notice, that is a high behavioral process. In the audit phase, this is something that only you, the executive, you, the advisor, you, the owner of your practice can do. What you're doing in the audit phase is you're protecting your $5,000 plus per hour activities. You're auditing your schedule. Everything that comes in, if it's not worthy of $5,000 an hour, boom, you're renixing it. Well, Justin, that seems impossible. It's not. I want to tell you a little secret. When I resigned as a financial advisor, I was managing over a million dollars in revenue working one day a month. Pretty impressive. The only way you can achieve that is by working in auditing and making sure that every activity is $5,000 plus per hour. Have you ever done that? Every audit is your time. Okay, let's pause for a second. Pull your calendar out. Look at last week's activities. How much of your time last week generated $5,000 per hour? How much of your time was $10, $20, $30 an hour? Yeah. The vast majority of reasons why people don't scale past a million dollars or get stuck under $3 million is that we do not audit our time at the high activity value things. So if we're dealing with a leverage grid, the first thing we have to do is we have to audit our time. That means in order for us to audit our time, we're going to have to move down and we're going to have to streamline everything. Today, we're going to dive deep into one of the weakest areas of financial advisors and what I call the one-touch protocol. Remember that email a while ago? Yeah, we don't want to touch it four times. We want to touch it once. In fact, everything we do, we want to do it one time. So you want to be a Deca Millionaire. Who doesn't? What's amazing is very few actually achieve that. If you're a financial advisor and you've eclipsed a million dollars a year in revenue, but not yet broke through $3 million in revenue, then friends, the Deca Millionaire Club is designed specifically for you. In that program, we show you the secrets on what it's going to take to double or triple the value of your company within such a short period of time. I challenge you to click the link below. If you're that financial advisor and you want to radically scale to Decker Millionaire status, this club's for you. For me, one of the things that frustrated me to no end was the simple word, NIGO. Not in good order. You do all the work, you have the client fill it out, you send it to the custodian, you send it to your broker-dealer, send it to your back office, whoever it might be, and they say, ah, you missed this. That's a NIGO. That's like, why in the world today, in 2026, are we still missing digits? Why did we not have the address proper? Why did we not get whatever it is, the NIGOs? So in order to eliminate the NIGOs, we want to move into the one-touch protocol. Now, notice it is directly attributed to behavior. Behavior is what governs this particular movement. So we're going to audit. We're going to streamline. Then after we streamline, we're going to automate. I talk to a lot of advisors. A lot of advisors say, yes, we have automation. but then when you dive deep into the weeds and you see where they're doing, they're not automating. They're actually reactionary. One of the things I love to teach maybe in a future episode is what I call the frictionless firm. Did you realize that you could operate your entire company with very little friction? Get back to what I said earlier. I'm gonna work one day a month and I'm gonna treat myself as a doctor where I literally walk in and do five, 10, 15, $20,000 an hour work, Drop it and not do any 10, 30, 40, $100 an hour work. Friends, that only happens when you automate and you have the frictionless firm. Okay, so we automate it. And then number four is compress. We're gonna compress our time. I know a lot of advisors who have moved into the idea of the surge meeting, which is where we're gonna take all of our clients and we're gonna meet with them over four weeks in twice a year, every six months, maybe April and September, maybe it's March and July, whatever it may be. We're gonna surge our meetings together. Not a bad strategy. Mine was one day per month. The surge just didn't work for my client type, but the one day per month did. But we're gonna compress our time down. If we compress our time down, friends, then we're gonna move into an area to where we're hyper-efficient. I mentioned to the doctor earlier. What would it be like, friends, is if you opened up your calendar, you had a stacked day, stacked week, stacked month, and every meeting you get ready to walk into and you have a file folder, hypothetically speaking, or maybe it's a digital folder that you walk in and your case is fully prepared. Everything you need there is in front of you. The research has been done. The advice has been done. All you gotta do is just double check it and put your stamp of approval on it. Just imagine if you could get to that level. How rapidly could you scale your practice? Justin, that seems like a farce. It seems like a pie in the sky. It's not. But it's going to all stem on the one-touch protocol. So let's dive a little deeper. Today, we're not gonna deal with compression. We're not going to deal with how to set up surge meetings one day or the one month, etc. We're not going to deal with the audit. We're not going to deal with the automate. Those are things that we'll deal with another future date. By the way, our clients in our Million Dollar Advisor program and our club deck, and they have access to all this in a logical order that allows them to rapidly scale their company. In order for the one-touch protocol to work, we've got to understand what I'm going to call the law of execution. One of my core beliefs in our business and our framework, the third one over, is relentless execution. Most of us as owners, we have these great ideas, we have these unbelievable ambitions, but we don't execute. Why don't we execute? Have you ever thought about it? Why is it that we execute lethargically? Why is it that we execute unsuccessfully or not efficiently Well because there three elements and oftentimes we missing one of the elements whenever we ready to execute So the first element is we have to have the time to execute. For most of us, that simply means, hey, locking the door, turning the D&D off, not addressing the phone calls, getting rid of the extra windows that are opening a computer, just using one tab dedicated to that particular thing. Yeah, not playing Spotify or YouTube or having the tickers of the stock market flowing over here on another screen, you're going to squirrel off. So most of us, to execute at a hyper level, we have to have dedicated time, uninterrupted time. The second thing is we have to have the proper tools. There's a lot of construction going on in my house right now. There's a guy installing stone, stacked stone on the back retaining wall of our swimming pool. You'll see it before too long. We have a dump truck that's dumping dirt. We have electricians, a lot of different things here. You know what's fascinating is the guy putting the stone on the wall out here. He has a grinder. He has a trowel. He has a mason's hammer. He's got a bucket. There's a drill with a paddle bit on it and a bucket of water. That's all he has. And he's been out here in this hot sun all day. It looks beautiful with what he's doing. The dump truck driver doesn't have any of those things. He has a truck, a CDL, a little tarp that covers the back of the truck, keep the rocks from falling off. And he's got a shovel. Now, why does the dump truck driver need a shovel? Well, when he dumps a load, he's got to go to the back of the truck and knock off all little extra pieces of gravel so when he hits the main blacktop, rocks don't fall off and hit the cars behind him. The point is that everybody has their custom tools. For us to execute the level, we have to make sure that we have the tools. Here's one that drives me crazy. This is my Achilles heel for me in execution. I know I need to go do a software. Let's say it's a research software, trading software, tax research software, maybe it's my planning software, whatever it may be. I go to log in and the password's time for me to change. You're talking about setting me like on fire. I get so sick of passwords. It's like, so oftentimes I'll go to use a tool and I can't get access to the tool. Stop the execution because I can't move at the level. And then finally, the third box is we have to have the intent. How many times have you done the activity because you knew you had to and you didn't want to? You know what that does is that causes your activity, your execution to be lethargic, less than its best. But friends, if we can get all three of these things lined up, then and only then do we start. All right. So our goal for today is to figure out where that 70% is going. We know that perhaps it's the law of execution that we might not have the right tool. We haven't blocked our time. We don't have the right intent. But now it's time to start. What about that one-touch protocol? Glad you asked. Here we go. The one-touch protocol is super, super simple to say. It's kind of easy to teach. It's hard to do because we only want to touch something one time. Again, pie in the sky, but this is my reality. Whenever I was walking in to meet a client, my team would give me the prepared client file. And it would be digital typically in today's world. I can access on my laptop. It would have my previous two meeting notes. It would have any updates that happened from the team between the last time I spoke to the client and this time. It would have some little piece of information about a trip they took. My team would peruse the Facebook or Instagram and see something that I could use as a, hey, I just saw what you guys got back from Greece. Tell me about the trip. How was your family? The client feels like I'm involved in their life. They would get me all these data points, and then I would jump into my standard questions that I would use throughout the entire meeting. When I got done with the meeting, I would hand the file back over to my team. My team would then send the email out, the recap. They would document and they would take all the action needed in order to satisfy whatever the client's needs were. That is my reality. But in order for me to touch that client one time and not touch them again to my next annual meeting, my semi-annual meeting, whatever it may be for that client, I have to follow this protocol. So what is the protocol? Well, the first pillar I'm going to talk about is the gate. Earlier, I was talking about this rate of $5,000 per hour. We're talking five grand per hour. My job under the one-touch protocol is to say, is it worthy of my price point? I'm using $5,000 an hour as my example. But oftentimes, we as advisors are guilty of touching things at $30 an hour. That's something our admin team should do. Or maybe we're touching something that our parent planner can do at $200 an hour. Or maybe you're running the size firm where you're touching something at $2,000 an hour that a junior advisor could do and you don't have to do. The gate is to protect everything to make sure it perfectly aligns with $5,000 an hour. That's your job. Your job is to protect. So once I understand the first rule is the gate. Only allow things in that are worthy of my rate. Then the next step is what I call the ammo. For those of you who don't know, I love to hunt. Case in point, I got some critters on the wall. That was my very first big buck. I actually harvested him when I was about 21 years of age. Different story another day. One of the things I learned about hunting is that I have to get ammo into the rifle. My job is to fire the gun. As an advisor, your job is not to try to locate the animal. Your job is not to clean the animal. Your job is not to do all the grunt work. Your job is to show up, shoot the gun, and leave. That's your job. So when I say the ammo, that's literally where my brain is going. For those of us in the AMO, what we're looking for is everything that you need to do your job has to be handed to you. Okay, this may ruffle some feathers. That means your research should be handed to you. That means your emails should go for somebody else Everything that is not at a an hour rate should go to somebody else or your team I would never do that Justin Okay then you going to have a very difficult time scaling through a million dollars scaling through $3 million and ever reaching $10 million enterprise value. You're having a very tough time, friends. You see, the MO is all about having everything provided for you. All you have to do is literally pull the trigger. Like I was mentioning earlier, when I walk into the client meeting, My entire team has provided me the details for me to do my job at $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 an hour rate. I could do my job with the client, be the best advisor possible for that client, get done, walk away, hand everything to my team, and know what's going to get done. That is the ammo phase. This is part of the one-touch protocol. But do you notice what I just said is I mentioned the third one, and that is the exit. We may call it the handoff. Whenever I get done with the client meeting, I'm gonna literally hand the information. I'm gonna hand this off to somebody else and I'm not gonna think about it anymore. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could hand your emails off to somebody, your scheduling off to somebody, the trading off to somebody, the entire client data gathering off to somebody, the plan design off to somebody, the portfolio design off to somebody. Wouldn't it be amazing where all the things that were not worth $5,000 an hour income that you were gonna pay somebody, hey, I got to pay you five grand an hour to do this. Wouldn't it be amazing if everything else was done by somebody else? You see, friends, the one-touch protocol is going to allow you to operate with one touch. By the way, this is the exact same thing that your team should be doing. Let's take it a step deeper. Perhaps, just perhaps, you have an admin assistant, or perhaps you have a junior advisor, a lead advisor. Let's do junior advisor. Maybe the junior advisor's rate is 250 per hour. then we certainly don't want them doing anything that they need to load the gun with that's less than $250 an hour. And then after they get done with that job and they hand it off, it's going to hand it off to somebody who's under $250 an hour. That's the one touch protocol. Ultimately, there are team members in your company who are going to touch a little bit of this one. They're going to touch a little bit of this one. They're going to touch a little bit of this one. And that's their job. Their job is to make sure that you are operating at the highest and best use of your time and your capacity. So let me ask you a question. What is it that you do really well? Well, for most of us, I think we do a good job around the end, but we do a fair amount on perhaps not scheduling our own appointments. We do a pretty decent job somewhere in the neighborhood and perhaps not trading. Maybe we have a back office team that does that for us, But we don't do so hot whenever we're talking about researching client data, returning phone calls, things of that nature. We don't do too hot on that. I think the weakest thing for advisors that we struggle with is guarding our time. I use $5,000 an hour. Your number may be $1,200. Your number may be $25,000 an hour. In fact, whenever I was scaling my company before I exited, my number that I was tracking was $21,250 per hour of my time. If I was sitting down with clients, it was $21,250. That was my data point. In my coaching business right now, we're pushing close to $30,000 an hour of my time whenever I'm coaching. What is your number? Are you guarding it with all your might? And then finally, how are you doing with handing off? What I'll see with financial advisors in the exit is we do a pretty good job at doing our work as advisors, but then we want to go in and micromanage, overcorrect, give you a case in point. When's the last time the next day you did a follow-up check on, hey, did Mr. Flintstone $50,000 ever get emailed to him? That's because you didn't hand it off properly through a process. Friends, as you grade yourself throughout this entire episode today, let me ask you simple. Are you touching your client's data one time? If not, we've diagnosed it. Why? What improvements could you make today? So friends, we talked about the one touch protocol. We talked about the one behavioral change on the execution. We talked about the one protocol, how you have to guard the gate. Make sure you only let things that are into the gate. We talked about how you load your ammo. Make sure that your team has all the data so that you can go in and fire the shot. We talked about how to release and how to give it to somebody else. This is five to seven hours of your work week back if you do this properly. You may say, good bread, that seems amazing. How in the world do we scale our companies? This is part of the program. If you want to know what it's like to work with us as coaching clients, click the link below. There's a video there that talks about exactly what we do. This will walk you through the exact framework that every one of our clients go through that allows them to radically scale their advisory practice. You may say, well, I'm gonna have to do a sales call. No, we don't do sales calls. We only let five new clients in per month. And whenever you watch this video, it has a secret word in it. Listen to the instructions, follow the instructions, and our team will send you an offer doc. It's a clear doc that says exactly what you get, what it costs, and what actions you should take. You're a smart advisor. You know whether or not you're stuck. You know whether or not you're making $5,000 an hour with everyone in your time. You know if you're spending only 30% of your time in front of clients. If that's you, friends, aren't you ready for a change? Aren't you sick and tired of being sick and tired yet? If so, watch this video. We'll see you next time. Hey, friends, if you found this concept today amazing and helpful, directly impacting your practice, do something very easy. Take your finger and go over and hit that little five-star right now. Yeah, you see it, yeah, the five-star. hit that for us. It helps us and it helps us help you. Our mission is to bring you the most relevant content so that you can apply it to your particular practice and radically break through the resistance and achieve DecaMillionaire status. Thank you so much, friends, and we'll see you next time.