From The Advisor’s Fuel Podcast with Adam Koós, CFP®, CMT®, CEPA, founder of Adrenaline Advisor Consulting.
Financial advisors plan everything. Retirement income. Portfolio management. Tax strategy. Insurance. Estate planning.
For clients.
Almost none of them do it for themselves.
Adam Koós has watched this pattern play out in advisor after advisor: total discipline around a client’s plan, almost none around their own. Below is the planning framework he revisits every year, the same kind of structured thinking he breaks down for advisors most Monday mornings in Talking Points, a four-part system for building a life and a practice on purpose instead of by accident.
Most advisors are analytical, action-oriented people who would rather get to work than sit still and think about the big picture. Koós compares it to doctors, who have a reputation for being the worst patients: the people best equipped to diagnose a problem are often the last ones to apply that same discipline to themselves.
The result is a business run mostly in reactive mode. Advisors keep organizing, reorganizing, and reprioritizing instead of designing what they actually want and then executing against it. The fix isn’t complicated. It’s an afternoon, done once a year, somewhere quiet, with the phone off.
Koós builds the framework like a house. Values are the foundation, the non-negotiables everything else has to stand on. Vision is the framing and drywall, what life and the practice look like several years out. Mission is the finish work, the layer that connects that vision to daily direction. Goals are what get the car out of the driveway: the specific, trackable targets that make the first three pieces real.
You don’t have to master all four at once. You just have to start.
Start by ranking your top five to ten values, whatever they are for you: health, family, financial security, education. Then compare that list to your calendar. Track roughly how many waking hours go toward each one, over a real stretch of time, and turn it into a percentage.
When Koós ran this exercise on himself, the gap was stark: 4% of his time went to health, 47% went to financial prosperity, and both fun and alone time landed near zero. That kind of mismatch, ranking something highest and spending almost no time on it, is what eventually burns advisors out. You can run on energy adapted to other people’s priorities for a while. Not indefinitely.
It’s a detailed visualization exercise: pick a point 5, 10, or 20 years out and write, in specific detail, what a perfect day looks like. Not a vague wish list. The actual sequence, starting the moment you wake up.
Koós walks advisors through questions like: what do you smell when you open your eyes, what’s the morning routine, what does it sound like when the car starts on the way to the gym. The specificity is the point. A vague goal is easy to ignore. A fully rendered picture of the life you’re building toward is a lot harder to walk away from, especially if it gets reread regularly instead of written once and filed away.
From there, the exercise moves into business goals: revenue, AUM, staffing, referral targets by source. Koós recommends writing statements in the format “I will do this by doing this, so I can do this,” which forces a goal to connect to the actual behavior change it requires.
Big goals only become real once they get chipped down: a 3-year goal becomes a 1-year goal, which becomes a quarterly target, which becomes a weekly number that’s actually getting tracked.
Koós walks through an income example to show how concrete this can get. Say the goal is to net $480,000 a year. Backing into that at roughly 60% to account for taxes puts the gross income target around $800,000. Divide that by the days and hours actually available to work, after subtracting holidays and vacation, and the result is a rough hourly rate, the number that shows what your time genuinely needs to be worth. Once that number exists, it’s a lot easier to see which tasks on your plate don’t belong there anymore.
Before getting there, though, there’s a question worth asking first: what are you willing to trade off to get what you want? As one of Koós’s early coaches, Matt Halloran, put it, “Whatever it is you want in life, you have to be willing to give up something of equal or greater value to get it.”
Write personal and business goals on a single page. Koós picked this up from Ron Carson years ago: personal goals in one color, business goals in another, ranked by priority, in a font large enough to read at a glance. Laminate it. Put it somewhere it actually gets seen every day.
Koós keeps his in the shower. It sounds unconventional, but the logic holds up: the best system is the one that actually gets used. A plan nobody looks at again is just a document. A plan that gets read once a week, or even once a month, starts to shape what actually gets done.
None of this requires getting every piece perfect on the first try. It requires starting, and then coming back to it on a schedule that actually gets kept.
For advisors ready to build out the client-acquisition, referral, and onboarding side of the practice once their own planning is in place, the Million Dollar Blueprint is a free, on-demand webinar that also carries 1 hour of CFP® CE credit.
Not sure if working with Adrenaline directly is the right next step? Start with Are We a Good Fit, or join the next Adrenaline Info Call to get your questions answered live.
Or start with the framework itself: Talking Points, Adam’s free weekly newsletter for advisors, breaks down thinking like this most Monday mornings.