Welcome back to the 175th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Dr. Travis Parry. Travis is the founder of Make Time Institute, which helps business owners, including financial advisors, to regain control of their time and achieve better work-life balance. What’s unique about Travis, though, is that he spent nearly a decade working as a financial advisor as well and living firsthand the challenges of balancing the demands of an advisory firm with the needs of his family and home life before going back to school to earn a Ph.D. in family relations and human development and to study what it really takes to achieve a better work-life balance.
In this episode, we talk in depth about Travis’ “Make Time” approach to creating better work-life balance by overcoming what he calls the three myths of time management. The first myth is that there isn’t actually such a thing as achieving balance, but, instead, it’s better to identify your goals and values and to ensure that your time is prioritized to align with them. Second, that the key to regaining control of time isn’t about being more productive in the work that you do but, again, about learning to prioritize what is really the most important and impactful work you should be doing with your time every day and letting go of the rest. And third, why, in the long term, the key as a business owner isn’t about just investing in your own personal development as a leader in the business but in what Travis calls couples’ development. Because the reality is that for any advisor with a spouse and children, personal development and habit change can occur only if your spouse is on board with the change and you can develop together as a couple.
We also talk about Travis’ own journey through the advisory business. How he started out in a major life insurance firm to leverage the training and resources in working with small business owners, why he decided to transition to the independent channel in order to focus more of his work on helping small business owners with their time and broader businesses than just the traditional financial services products, how a combination of family tragedy and the financial crisis derailed his advisory firm, and the way those disruptions ultimately led him to find what has become his life’s work.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Travis shares why an inability to evolve an advisor’s own time management systems is often one of the biggest blocking points that prevent a firm from growing and scaling, why he thinks Maslow’s hierarchy of working toward self-actualization is wrong and how family plays a crucial role, and how the recent disruptions of the coronavirus may, for many advisors, end up reinforcing the exact kind of restructuring of time and priorities that Travis advocates in the first place.
