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Inside Wealth/Stack

What advisors must do before hiring their next service associate

Posted by on 17 June 2021
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For the first time in 2021, Inside Wealth/Stack is joining forces with Inside ETFs to create an event experience like no other for our future-thinking advisor and investor community. The team behind the events have also launched and Inside Wealth/Stack Advisory Board, and here we hear from Penny Phillips, President & Co-Founder, Journey Strategic Wealth and part of the board shaping the direction of the event.

Journey_Strategic_Wealth_logoI often talk to frustrated advisors who are seeking counsel on how to address capacity issues in their practices. Their instinct, in most cases, is to quickly bring on additional service or ops team members.

“We need to bring someone on FAST,” they tell me. “Where should I post the job description to ensure we can start interviewing by next week?”

The assumption is that bringing on another ops or client service associate will alleviate the pain points that are being expressed by other team members and/or clients:

  • Top client reviews slipping through-the-cracks.
  • Service items getting missed.
  • Client portfolio alerts going unnoticed.
  • Limited capacity for marketing and business development activities.
  • Constant feeling of being overwhelmed and playing catch up.

In my work with hundreds, if not thousands of advisory teams, I have found that most “capacity issues” can be solved by setting and refining processes and better leveraging technology.

That is not to say that advisors should not actively grow their teams. They should. But they should only do so after carefully auditing the practices’ processes and assessing whether their current teams are operating as efficiently as possible.

Failing to do so before hiring, will lead to an overstaffed team, lack of clarity on who is doing what and continued feelings of “being overwhelmed.”

Consider the following questions before making your next service hire:

Are your current team members clear on what they are trying to achieve in their roles?

It seems like a simple question but often, team members are aware of the tasks they need to complete each day, but don’t have a solid understanding of what their overarching purpose on the team is.

Each member of your team should be able to articulate three things at any given time:

  • Their objectives or what they aim to achieve in their role on an ongoing basis (e.g. Creating capacity for senior advisors, efficiently managing workflow, etc.)
  • Their key results or what metrics they will be using to track whether they’re succeeding at achieving objectives (e.g., NIGOs continue to reduce each quarter, 24-hour response time to clients, additional time on senior advisor’s calendar, etc.)

You would be surprised how quickly workflow and productivity changes when outcomes and objectives are clear and documented.

Are expectations clearly set with clients, at onboarding, about your standard of service and care?

If the answer is no, then perhaps its time to revisit your client service models and refine your process for onboarding clients, holding reviews, responding to service requests, and engaging them throughout the year.

Relaying this information to clients in the onboarding meeting is a key component to ensuring the standards “get put into practice” and that you stay accountable to them. During the onboarding meeting you should provide the client with the following information in a checklist format:

  • How often they will be meeting with you for reviews and when (e.g., Every 6 months on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday at 9, 11 or 1pm). Those meetings should be prescheduled and set as recurring invites in your calendar.
  • Who they should reach out to the on team for questions about service, online access, their accounts, their plans, scheduling, etc.
  • Where to find important information about their accounts and how to log in to the client portal or internal systems.
  • How often they will hear from and your team including frequency of client events, marketing emails, etc.
  • When they can expect to receive a response to any inquiries that email to shared emails like the service@ or operations@ emails.

Are you leveraging the full capabilities of your tech stack?

There are thousands of programs and apps designed to create efficiencies for financial advisory organizations; from digital scheduling tools to internal team communication systems (e.g., Slack), to portfolio rebalancing and management tools, to client portals and CRM workflows.

In this day and age, there is not a whole lot that advisors – or their team members – should be doing manually, especially as it relates to managing portfolios and assigning tasks to team members.

Designate someone on your team as your chief technology auditor and empower them to review your tech tools and update the team semi-annually on their findings.

Are there more exceptions than there are standards related to how you work with clients?

Although each client is unique, its important to identify the primary client profiles or personas that exist within your business. Create a summary of each of these client profiles and then identify a standard way of thinking around how to approach these clients’ needs; the way in which you approach money management for them, the way review meetings are run, what documents, tools and resources are brought into each meeting, and the way the plans are updated each year.

Institutionalizing your approach to planning and servicing the segments of clients you serve will ensure that everyone is on the same page about the flow of work and the outcomes you are striving for.

As you reflect on the above questions, consider how you could use this blog to spark a series of conversations with your current team members. Co-creating systems with your team and deciding together when and how to make the next hire, will go along way in keeping everyone engaged and on the same page.

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