Pursuing affluent investors, winning their business and building the practice of your dreams is, needless to say, a challenging goal. But as many successful financial advisors know, it is a goal you can achieve. The right practice framework is essential to reaching success in the financial advisory industry, and the most important aspects of this framework fit into seven categories, as outlined below.

To realize why a practice management framework is so important, first consider the landscape. There are approximately 765,000 registered financial advisors in the United States. About 400,000 of them work with individuals. If these 400,000 advisors are chasing 2.7 million wealthy households—those with more than $1 million in investable assets—simple math shows that there are fewer than seven such wealthy households per advisor.

It is little wonder, then, that just 16% of financial advisors say they are "very satisfied" with their current level of success. That said, there is good news: Many advisors have been able to take more than their share of the affluent investor market and significantly grow their incomes by transforming their practices.

Why are these advisors able to boost their productivity, build great businesses, do a great job for their clients and enjoy a quality of life they dreamed of, while so many others never seem to reach that point?

Unfortunately, there is no single magic-bullet solution. The key, though, is that they are highly organized about their businesses and deliberate in the decisions they make about them.

They do not stumble into things, but instead use a formal system for building their practices and maintaining their success. This philosophy of being successful on purpose is crucial to their achievements and supports everything they do.

FRAMEWORK BASICS

The most successful advisors have organized their businesses and all the decisions they make about them into seven key areas:

* Attracting affluent private clients. In many ways, career success is a numbers game. To succeed on purpose as a financial advisor, you must work with fewer—and wealthier—clients. Focus your business by identifying and targeting a specific market niche. That means understanding who your ideal clients are—that is, the ones you are in the best position to serve profitably—and attracting a stream of them to your doorstep.

You can do that largely by interviewing centers of influence in your chosen target marget and using marketing techniques that show that you are the expert your niche needs most. With fewer, wealthier clients, top advisors are able to establish intimate client relationships and deliver better service. And as a result, they are trusted with more assets to manage, and generate more referrals for additional wealthy clients in their target niche.

* Strengthening client relationships. The old saying that "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care" is absolutely true in our business. By working closely with their clients and implementing an approach that emphasizes collaboration, top advisors show clients how much they care about them as people, not just investors.

By strengthening your client relationships, you build the foundation for a wealth management business that will be in alignment both with what your clients want as well as with what you can profitably provide, all while achieving the lifestyle you desire.

* Capturing assets and acquiring clients. Because investments produce the bulk of most advisors' revenue, you need to be systematic in your efforts to generate a stream of prequalified prospects and capture more assets from your existing clients. Most advisors do not do this enough—when, in fact, research shows that 84.6% of satisfied affluent clients would be happy to provide referrals.

The business is there for the asking; you just have to ask for it on a regular and consistent basis. Also, since so many outstanding advisors owe much of their success to referrals from other professional advisors, such as attorneys and accountants, you will want to find and work with other professionals as well.

* Managing the practice as a business. You may not have thought that you were signing up to be an entrepreneur when you entered the advisory industry. But that's exactly what you are—whether you own your own firm or not. You owe it to all your stakeholders—including your clients—to build not just a good practice and a good job, but also a great and deftly managed business.

One important difference between having a great business and having a great job is whether the business is sustainable without you. That is why top wealth managers build businesses that can hum along—even grow and expand—when they're not there.