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Shauna Mace is Head of Practice Management and Managing Director with SEI. She’s responsible for programs that help advisors create efficiencies in their operations, differentiate their practices, and grow their businesses.

Our conversation includes:

  • The role of confidence in driving success
  • The importance of setting attainable goals
  • How to break goals into small, tangible and tactical steps
  • The three aspects of confidence: competency, coherence, and community
  • The dangers of overconfidence – from wasted effort to negative feedback loops
  • How to help your team gain confidence
  • The ways confidence affects clients and referability

Shauna has more than 15 years of experience working with financial advisors, asset managers and financial service businesses. She was the founder of Inspire Growth, a consulting and coaching business focused on sales and high-performance best practices for financial advisors. Today, she is also a contributor to SEI’s practice management blog, Practically Speaking.

Take away quote:

“When it comes to clients and referrals, one of the best ways to gain rapport and trust is the non-verbal communication that you provide. It’s less about what you say and more about how you say it.”

Resources:

What Makes You Referable?
Goals to Outcomes worksheet: https://info.seic.com/goals-to-outcomes
One-Page Business Plan Overview: https://info.seic.com/one-page-business-plan-overview

Links:

Website:              https://seic.com/
Twitter:                https://twitter.com/spmace
LinkedIn:             https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunamace/

Want more?
Stephen Wershing: http://advisorchecklist.com/blog/
Julie Littlechild: http://www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

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Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t help talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and on this week’s show, Steve and I are joined by Shauna Mace. Shauna is the head of practice management and a managing director with SEI. She joined the company recently bringing more than 15 years of experience in working with advisors, including creating and running her own consulting business. I would describe the focus of this conversation as laying the groundwork for real success. In particular, we focus on the role of confidence and success, whether that’s overconfidence or underconfidence. I love these kinds of conversations because they can get very real. Shauna breaks down the idea of confidence into three key areas, competency, coherence, and community, to give you a framework to take action. And with that, let’s get straight to our conversation with Shauna.

Julie Littlechild:
Shauna, welcome to Becoming Referable. Thrilled to have you here.

Stephen Wershing:
Welcome Shauna.

Shauna Mace:
Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited to be here.

Julie Littlechild:
Yay. When I first reached out to you, you were working in your own firm at the time, which was Inspire Growth and, but even as we were talking, things were changing in your world. So maybe you could just give us an update on where you are and the work that you’re doing right now.

Shauna Mace:
Absolutely. Yeah. So I think I talked to you just before the change, but so today I am head of practice management at SEI, and that, if I had told myself I was going to be doing that January one, I would’ve said no way, wasn’t in the cards, but really it came about because what I was doing, the work I was doing with Inspire Growth, so growth consulting and coaching, I had two main goals for 2021. And those were one, to launch the new brand Inspire Growth. And then two, to figure out how to scale the advice I was giving to advisors, largely RA, but financial advisors and their teams around growth. And so I did the rebrand the beginning of the year and the next focus was really on scale. How do I scale? And so I had ideas about how to do that.

Shauna Mace:
And interestingly things, dots connect when you look backwards, there was an opportunity at SEI, and I knew John Anderson who was running practice management at the time. And I saw this opportunity and I reached out to him. I have enormous respect for him and what he does.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Great guy.

Shauna Mace:
Great guy. And I just, the more I learned about the role and about the firm and the people and the solutions they have for advisors, it became very clear that this, one, I couldn’t not do this, if I, at least put my hat in the ring. And two, this was how I was going to scale, because the problem they were looking to solve was the same problem I was looking to solve, which was how do we scale advice? How do we scale advice and support for advisors to help them and their firms and their clients grow? And so I’ve joined just over a month ago, and really excited about the work we’re doing around developing, building and providing practice management solutions to advisors and their teams in a very scalable way. So more to come on that in the future, but I’m excited. I’m very excited about what we’re building out.

Stephen Wershing:
That’s great. Congratulations.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Shauna Mace:
Thank you.

Julie Littlechild:
It’s interesting too, because as you talk about that, I think it’s easy to get trapped in this idea of, I have a goal and this is the path, but you actually looked at the goal instead of the path and realized there’s actually another way to do what I’m trying to do. And I don’t know if we always hit pause and ask ourselves that question. Maybe we should.

Shauna Mace:
Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, this was not the path, this is not the path at all, but having clarity what I know and when it comes to growth, and maybe we’ll talk a little about this, but having clarity on the goal on what the future you want is, sometimes there is an aspect we can control, there’s a whole lot we can’t control, and sometimes we just have to, opportunity comes and we have to be eyes wide open and be willing to try it even if it’s not the path that we expected.