Dinner With Chris Barrow

This road trip brought one of those serendipitous chance opportunities where I happened to be in Toronto, ON at the same time as Chris Barrow. Chris Barrow is our business coach & mate and Laura and I have been working with Chris now for about two years. Chris has been instrumental in helping us focus or business and he continues to do this today.

Last night at dinner was one of those occasions and we did a massive brainstorming session about the strengths and areas to strengthen of each others practices.

We had dinner at Jack Astor and they have paper table cloths and they give you crayons so you can write all over the paper table cloth and we did. The paper table cloth was filled twice over with ideas and reflections.

Here is what I came away with.

Here is Chris’s Blog About Our Dinner.

We analyzed each others businesses on the basis of;

– Visibility
– Lead Generation
– Lead Conversion
– Delivery
– Re-enrollment
– Passive Revenue

After reflection, we came to the conclusion that the 9 step program (in my case) may be too general as the weakest link was lead conversion.

The 9 Key Strategies of The Leading Advisor Coaching Program are;

1. Identify And Remove Your Road Blocks To Your Success
2. Construct a powerful three year vision
3. Plan the time to plan strategies & systems
4. Control your finances
5. Attract, hire & lead championship advisors & support team
6. Refine your selling & marketing skills
7. Create a low-cost niche marketing engine
8. Deliver ‘wow’ customer service
9. Maintain balance between work, rest & play

This does however confirm that we are specializing because “Removing Your Roadblocks To Your Success” serves a specific need and once implemented a business owner can move onto other needs like;

– Attracting The Right Assistant
– Attracting The Right Successor
– Branding, Niche Marketing & Client Specialization
– Sales

We called it a night at 9pm as Chris was still on UK time so it was 2am for him and I was also short of sleep.

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting with Chris and it was a real treat to be with someone that is that creative and knowledgeable and we hope that Chris can come and visit with Laura and I in the not too distant future. It’s rare to have one on one time with Chris as he is in the UK most of the time and when we do we do see him it is usually with a group – I believe it is safe to say that this chance meeting really helped to solidify our friendship.