Imagine your biggest sale ever changes their mind within the free-look period, and suddenly the commission you have earned must be repaid immediately, but you have already committed the funds.

Imagine your company announces, unexpectedly, that it is withdrawing from the career agency system and will only work with independent advisors.

Imagine a government regulator decides that the way you get paid should be made illegal, and you find that the career and income stream you have carefully built is at risk.

Imagine that you have built a profitable practice selling a specific insurance product to a defined market segment only to have the carrier you use withdraw that product from the market, and you are unable to locate a suitable alternative.

Imagine you have built a practice that has required you to invest heavily and staff up to a level beyond your imagination only to lose a major client, or two or three, and now you are faced with the immediate need to scale back, downsize and retool that which you have built.

Are you ready? Are you prepared?

Each of these situations may happen to you if you remain in this profession. Over the arc of a career in insurance and financial services, these examples and others, which you cannot predict, will suddenly materialize, and you will be forced with a major career decision.

You may ask how it is that I know this to be true. Well, over a career of nearly 42 years, each of these and others have happened to me. I survived, I’m still here, and I’m with you today to share with you some thoughts that no one has probably ever told you from this stage.

Disruption in your professional career is as likely as the disruption you and I counsel our clients to prepare for.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a conference of insurance and financial service company executives. No agents, no field management, just executives — CEOs, CAOs, CMOs, chief actuaries, chief underwriters and medical directors — you get the picture.

During a coffee break, I was sitting with a small group of executives when I heard one of them mutter that if she hears “just one more speech about disruption, I might just scream.”

I smiled, as did the others at the table, because disruption is what we all hear a great deal about these days. And at this conference, disruption seemed to be the major theme. Most often disruption is in the form of technology innovation or services enabled by technology and artificial intelligence. If we could roll back the clock 30 or 40 years and remember the disruption caused in the manufacturing industry when robots were first introduced, we might get a sense of how profound change would be on factory workers whose livelihood was dependent on an assembly line. Did they see it coming? I don’t think so. Disruption also takes the form of unexpected competition coming from new directions. The internet is the greatest platform for price and feature transparency ever imagined. How many in this room purchase anything substantial without first completing a quick comparison online? All of us do this.

The executive’s exclamation about disruption started me thinking. Disruption is just another word for “transition,” and transition is something we, as professional advisors, specialize in. Think about it for a minute, and you only need to think about it for just a minute. We counsel families on the importance of adequate insurance, and we counsel them on procuring the right kinds of insurance. Why? Because we know, and they need to know, that transition is inevitable for all of us. Death is inevitable; it’s the final transition. Serious illness is mostly inevitable; disablement is highly likely. Job loss, financial setbacks, tragedy in our families and with our friends and colleagues — trauma and catastrophe are all part of the human condition.

Insurance and financial planning are the tools that allow us to peer into the future and plan for and help clients lay off some of the risks they face. If we do the job right, we help them plan for the unexpected, just like we might make a disaster plan with our children — you know, in case of fire, each will escape through a predetermined exit path and meet up in a specific place.

We also counsel clients who are business owners to treat their business as if they were living things. Businesses survive when people do. Businesses go through transitions just like families. In fact, many business owners think of their employees and colleagues much like family. Companies experience growth and expansion, loss and contraction, retirement and death of key persons, addition and subtraction of co-shareholders and partners. A business faces peril just as a family does. If it survives, ultimately, like a family, it will leave a legacy. It will pass along that which it has amassed, that which it has built.

Like it or not, each of us is a business; each of us is running our own small company. If your goal is to remain relevant as a professional, we need to discuss the common characteristics of a business that survives and thrives under almost any circumstance. In the next few minutes, I’ll share with you four key concepts I believe every professional advisor needs to adopt to prepare for the unpreparable.

Take your own advice

Your business cannot survive if you don’t. Make certain the advice you give others is being followed by you. Create a personal financial plan and follow it; create an estate plan and document it with a will or trust. Buy insurance, the right kind in the right amounts. Tell your family what will happen if you get sick, if you are injured or if you die. Create the plan so that they will have a path to walk if the worst that can happen does happen.

Have a current business plan for your business

It doesn’t matter if you are a solo practitioner or part of a large team. It doesn’t matter if you have a large staff or if you are the one ordering the supplies and scheduling the client meetings. Write a plan. Where will you practice; who will you work with; what will you assist them with? Are you a generalist or a specialist? How will you measure your progress and achievements? What resources will you need to acquire or create? You should know today where you are headed and be able to look back five years from now and say, “I got where I am because I knew where I was going every step of the way.”

Conduct an annual SWOT analysis

Every business has strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). Be brave and identify yours. What are you particularly good at? What will your current clients say are your best characteristics? Where can you improve, and what can you do to make your business stronger? Where are the emerging opportunities, and what can you see coming that no one else can see? Remember that the companies who are first to market enjoy a competitive advantage and generally greater profits over those that follow. And, finally, know where the possible threats are. Identify and assign a probability analysis and create a contingency plan for each significant threat. Know what you will do when the time comes and sleep better at night knowing you have thought it through in advance so that you can put it aside and focus on your business at hand.

Establish financial discipline about your business

Treat commission income not as your personal income but as the gross income of your business. It should be the top line on your income statement. Build cash reserve and pay yourself only after satisfying the business overhead. If you don’t have business overhead, get some! If you aren’t investing in yourself, what does that say about your commitment to your future? Invest in your business to create leverage so that you have the space to achieve your goals and can enjoy the ride. If you spend all day every day gathering berries to eat, you won’t have the time to plant the seeds. Business success occurs when leadership takes time to plan. Financial prudence and common business practice allow a financial professional to speak with assurance with clients and prospects and to model good behavior to our peers, companies and communities. A professional advisory practice must be able to pivot with changing circumstances. In my professional arc, I can identify five major transitions to my practice that required a new skill set, a new way of staffing and a different revenue model. Eventually, we may wish to sell or retire. What will we have to leave behind? Will we hand off our client base to another team we have mentored? Or will our clients just become names in the company orphan files, relegated to people they do not know or trust for guidance? Is the business profitable, and can we even sell it? Do our distribution contracts allow it? Anyone investing 30, 40 or 50 years as a financial professional must know what they want from their professional investment. We must all know the long game, not just this month’s or this year’s sales goals. What is it I want? Is this just a lifestyle business or something with legs that others want to emulate and be a part of?

Transition planning is the key to thinking in the future tense. Moving from a salesperson mentality to a business owner mindset is the first step in building a practice with legs, one that can and will adapt to changing circumstances. My wish for each of you here today is that you will get a glimpse of the secret understood by most Top of the Table advisors. It is wonderful to be a skilled salesperson, and you can have a tremendous life, but real wealth and sustainability expand the art of the sale to include building a transition-ready practice that will survive even the most daunting challenges.

Mark J. Hanna, CLU, ChFC, is a 31-year MDRT member with three Court of the Table and 20 Top of the Table honors. He served as MDRT President in 2017 and as Chair of Top of the Table in 2007. He is a Royal Order Excalibur Knight of the MDRT Foundation and a member of its Inner Circle Society.