Advisors wear many hats in the course of business – investor, relationship manager, HR, marketer, and whatever else growing your firm requires. The key to creating an efficient firm is not in simply working harder. Efficiency is a matter of focused priorities.

1. Budget Your Time Like Your Money

Financial planners know their way around a budget. Money needs to go to the most important priorities first, and the future is a priority. If you’re looking to grow your business, you need to prioritize, even when it pulls against tasks that feel urgent but are less important.

 

You need flexibility to work on your business, not just in your business. Here are a few rhythms that should be a part of your business development diet.

 

1. Don’t brainstorm alone – involve your team. They’ll be critical for making space on your daily planner.
2. Join a community of advisors that you can collaborate with. We meet quarterly to discuss challenges and opportunities our advisors are facing. We dissect challenges and share solutions.

 

These rhythms are better than simple plans because they help you stick to your development. If you can free space on your task list and allocate time for intentional business development, your priorities will follow suit. Efficiency will become a natural result.

 

2. Get Razor Sharp on Your Focus

Few things stall your growth like wasted energy. That’s why as you prioritize making your business more efficient, it pays to start with clarifying your goals. We recommend you start with questions like:

 

1. What 5 clients do we wish we could clone? How do we focus on them?
2. How can we create an exceptional onboarding experience?
3. Where are we wasting our team’s time on specific tasks? What tech could help?
4. Does our team have a clear vision? Are they aligned and working together?

 

Priorities like these fall to you as a leader to search out solutions. When you have your focus right, you can apply concentrated energy to fixing them. In every place you get more focused, less effort is wasted. Less waste equals more efficiency.

 

3. Know What to In-house and What to Outsource

As you focus your effort, this is a key question to ask. It’s no surprise that plans can fail for lack of enough bandwidth or consistency. That’s why it takes an honest assessment of the people you have in place to execute your vision.

 

Sometimes, you are facing existing challenges like a lack of consistency or quality. Other times, you see potential challenges like a lack of redundancy – if a key staffer left, would you be back to square 1?

 

There are certain tasks that advisors personally prefer to keep in house, but it’s worth exploring what’s available to outsource. Here are a few examples:

Outsourced Investment Management (TAMP)

Placing trades, onboarding new clients, and managing portfolios can be heavily time consuming. That’s why advisors may consider a TAMP like ours that allows you a high degree of control over your clients’ investments without requiring a high degree of time to manage them. With access to our team’s investment team, you can scale your investment management in both quantity and complexity.

 

RIA Outsourced Back Office Support

There are many tasks advisors manage that are technical, vital, and repeatable. Among these are tasks like:

 

• Advisory Fee Billing
• Client Report Creation and Delivery
• E-signature Maintenance for New Accounts
• Trade Order Execution

 

Your operations depend on tasks like these being executed reliably and promptly. Having access to a virtual back office like ours allows you to entrust these operations to a team of well-trained professionals who can introduce new efficiencies to your firm.

 

4. Guard What Matters Most

Like the budget we talked about in #1, planning out your priorities is not a set-and-forget task. Keep the most important things at the top of your list. There may be stretches where you find yourself in the weeds of your business too often. Work steadily to guard the time you’ve budgeted to work on your business.

 

The best way to do this is to immerse your business in a community that keeps encouraging you forward. At WealthPlan, we are committed to building this community for advisors. To see more about how we do this, visit our community events page.

 

As a part of WealthPlan, our advisors get to engage in Peer-2-Peer collaborative forums where we work together to solve problems and provide solutions for each other. We also bring in industry experts who provide exclusive workshops on key areas of advisors’ businesses.