How to take half the year off and still grow your assets by 20% annually
Alaska adviser adopts an unorthodox schedule to spend more time with his family.
Financial adviser Micah Shilanski keeps an unorthodox schedule. He meets with all of his 125 clients every quarter at his office in Anchorage, Alaska, but for six months out of the year he is on the road, traveling with his wife and three young children. And yet his client assets have grown 20% a year.
Mr. Shilanski, 34, was on a trip with his family when he rolled up in their recreational vehicle at the Financial Planning Association’s recent retreat near Atlanta to give a talk on his unusual approach to business.
“Clients don’t care where you are, they care if you’re available,” he said in a presentation that included an audience introduction to his family.
One of the most important steps in making this uncommon approach work for clients is to set their expectations from the onset, Mr. Shilanski said. Each quarter he schedules client meetings over a six-week period, blocking off five 90-minute appointments a day those weeks.
In the interim, he is available via email. He pledges to return emails within two days. If there is an emergency, he will jump on the phone with clients the same day.
Mr. Shilanski is one of three advisers at Shilanski & Associates, a firm started by his parents and which lists $113 million in assets under management in its most recent ADV form. The firm’s nine-person support staff is available to clients during work hours all year, and he delegates everything to them that’s not directly client-related.
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“It’s crucial to have a team to support you and back you up,” he said. “Find people who work the way you want to work.”
In addition to Shilanski & Associates‘ office staff, Mr. Shilanski has a full-time virtual assistant who lives in New York and starts her day early so she can spend more time with her children.
She is essentially available to him at any time, though she may ask to call him back if she’s out at the playground when he phones.
“She doesn’t care if I ping her very early, and by six in the morning she’s gone through my inbox and given me a couple of things to do that day,” Mr. Shilanski said.
The firm also depends on technology to help the business run smoothly while he’s on-the-road.
The business is 100% cloud based, mobile-friendly (because he doesn’t want to have to lug a laptop with him) and supports collaboration on documents between workers in different locations.
Establishing and tracking business parameters, like the number of new clients and new assets the firm has attracted, is another way that Mr. Shilanski keeps his finger on the pulse of the firm remotely.
The firm attracts about a third of its clients through referrals, a third with digital marketing, and the rest through seminars conducted for Mr. Shilanski’s core clients, federal employees.
During his time in the office when he is not meeting in person or virtually with clients, Mr. Shilanski said he works extra efficiently and focuses on a few objectives that he sets each morning for that day.
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“When you give yourself hard deadlines of being out of the office, it makes you more productive,” he said. “Think of how much work you get done right before you go on vacation.”
Mr. Shilanski said he believes he’s more energetic with clients and prospects because of his lifestyle, and that it has led to more referrals than he received when he worked a more traditional work year. In fact, he used to work a minimum of 60-hour work weeks, but began trimming work days from his schedule in 2010 when he and his family became concerned that he was working too much.
But it was after his youngest daughter sustained a traumatic brain injury during her birth in 2013 that he established his unusual schedule. The arrangement allows him to travel with his family and help provide the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week care his youngest daughter requires.
His message to other advisers is that they should not wait until life pushes them into adopting a different work style if it would be better for their family and for their own health.
“Should it take a life-changing event to make a change in our life?” he asked. “No one sets your limits but you.”
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