Manage Your Money with Mind Maps

Manage Your Money with Mind Maps So you’ve been mind mapping for a while now. You’ve completely organized your personal life. You have maps for every trip you take, every project you undergo, and each brainstorming session. Probably much much more! Now what? Let’s take this picture and turn it upside down and inside out. To see what happens! Think of everything you do in life as either “front stage” or “back stage.” Consider the entertainment industry with a mega rockstar on stage say Lady Gaga and her supporting cast numbering in the hundreds back stage. Imagine you are in the audience enjoying Lady Gaga sing “Bad Romance” in her latest bold outfit. All of a sudden, she stops in the middle of her song, the back stage curtain raises, and she begins introducing us to her support personnel. After a few minutes of this, you are more than a little perturbed. You didn’t come to see how it is made! You came to listen to awesome music and feast on fashionista Lady Gaga strutting her showstopper stuff! For a moment, envision a world where you and I are totally focused on our clients and customers. Our goal is to provide a top-notch, fully integrated great experience each and every time we interact with them. They live in a complex, frustrating, confusing world vulnerable to a daily distasteful diet of potentially bad decisions and choices. They hunger for simplicity, clarity, and freedom of choice. In comes you, mind mapping extraordinaire. What and how do you solve their daily dilemma? When our firm started using mind maps five years ago, we purposely did not initially focus on the back stage, the back office. Instead, we focused on the front stage: Specifically helping our clients understand their very complex financial lives. We devised a one-page master  mind map with 15 branches. Each branch represents a major branch of our clients financial lives: cash flow, taxes, estates, investments, employment benefits, real estate, etc. Each mind map is customized to clients specific individual circumstances. Imagine the estate branch, with several additional branch connections to their wills and trusts taking up a small part of the page, but clearly representing hundreds of pages of these documents. The same goes for every other branch. Spreadsheets, reports, statements, tax returns and legal documents, formerly a stupefying and overflowing old file drawer of documents, now organized and reduced to just one page! Our clients now have a one-page roadmap. The only common denominator is major branch names, their specific roadmap summaries of all areas of their financial lives are totally different. This is a very big WOW! And that is exactly what they say â€" WOW! By concentrating on our clients, instead of us, we have been able to offer them a unique experience of clearly understanding their roadmap. This understanding and clarity is 10 times more powerful than our back stage maps. Mind maps are an absolutely amazing tool for the front stage not just behind the curtains! Consider creating a front stage mind map the next time you are providing solutions, products or services for your clients or customers. Truly, they will experience a quantum transformation from confusion to clarity. In our experience, the front stage mind map is the single most powerful application of this great software tool. Please visit us at Protinus if you would like to see some examples of how we apply this in the financial services industry. In particular, watch the recorded webinar. About half way through, we walk through several front stage mind maps as applied to the financial services industry. Gary Klaben heads Protinus, an intellectual property firm that helps financial advisors deliver deep support to their clients. He is also president of Coyle Asset Management, a financial consulting and investment advisory services company. Get started with mind mapping Sign up for MindMeister Sign up for MindMeister