You as a financial advisor may share in a common problem many advisors face. It sounds something like this: In order to scale your business, you need to find a way to scale your workforce efficiently.

And in today’s labor market, that challenge is only growing. Advisors need experienced, reliable team members. Experience brings expertise to spark your growth. Reliability allows you to keep building on what you’ve established. Today, we’re talking about finding efficient alternatives to traditional hiring for financial advisors. We’ll be exploring the key advantages and limitations of outsourcing specialized needs.

The Challenge of Building an Efficient Team

It’s safe to say that managing an effective team is under the umbrella of, “If it were easy, everyone would do it.” Every advisor wants a team that empowers them to grow faster. Very few enjoy this on a daily basis. Why is that?

1. Resource-Consuming Searching, Onboarding, and Managing

One of the main challenges is attempting to find team members who have short learning curves. Especially in the area of investment management, it can be difficult to find employees you can trust with your clients’ investments. The stakes for your business (and your clients) are too high to skimp on quality. The last thing a growth-focused advisor wants is a long, time and resource-intensive onboarding cycle, but that’s often what advisors face.

2. Facing Team Turnover at Critical Moments

Beyond the challenges of onboarding and maintaining qualified team members, the labor force is seeing all-time highs in turnover. Few challenges deflate your vision for growth like your key players leaving at critical times.

3. Navigating the Cost of Hiring to Scale

Also, as a final note, there is the ever present challenge of cost when it comes to scaling. You’re not just looking to hire a warm body – the financial responsibility you carry in paying your employees puts pressure on you to get the value you need out of them. Hiring is necessary in one way or another, but it always costs something.

Is It Time to Make Your Back Office Into Someone Else’s Front Office?

As a quick preface, it’s worthwhile to mention that some advisors prefer or even require full time roles. Each scenario and firm is unique, and it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s up to each advisor to identify the ideal fit for their needs.

We’re a big fan of the phrase, “Find ways to make your back office into someone else’s front office.” It means to take the time-consuming, specialized operations that support your client-facing delivery and entrust them to partners who specialize in those operations. There are many ways advisors can do this encompassing everything from marketing to investment management. When you have a specific need, it’s worth asking around to see what partners can help you fill those specialized roles on the back end.

As far as your business model is concerned, matching the right need to the right partner can better position your business to enjoy stability and efficiency as you pursue new growth.

Benefits to Outsourcing Your Specialized Support Roles

Let’s take the three main challenges we listed above when it comes to finding, onboarding, and maintaining key roles for your business. The advantages of engaging a strong 3rd party partner may offer stability and leverage to help you grow faster.

1. Shortening Learning Curves, Less Lingering Distractions

Every advisor wrestles with the risk of a slow learning curve when hiring a new team member to operate their investment operations. It takes time to teach a new recruit your processes, and the longer the learning curve, the more it distracts your team from their other responsibilities.

As an alternative, when you leverage a partner like WealthPlan Group LLC, you are plugging into a team of industry-tested veterans. They know the weight of the role and the need for immediate, smooth integration. They know how the position operates, and we can adapt faster to your specific practice. It’s also worth noting that a strong, specialized partner will have had more time and opportunity to tweak their own workflows and will likely introduce more efficient processes into your business!

2. Mitigate the Frequency and Impact of Turnover

Redundancy in your team is a must-have to sustain your business growth. It’s not just enough to have a strong player in the right position, you need to have a plan for continuity. It’s as simple as asking the question, “What impact will it have on my business if _____ leaves with 2 weeks notice?” It’s why every advisor dreads the day you have the “I’m moving on” conversation.

A team-based, specialized partner like WealthPlan Group LLC helps to mitigate the impact personnel change can have on your business. It means that our built-out bandwidth gives us a foundation of stronger redundancy to carry the ongoing weight of minimizing turnover’s impact, not you. It’s access to talent at scale, helping you overcome the growth-restricting challenges that independent advisors normally face.

3. Extract More Value For Your Investment as You Scale

For the scale-minded advisor, early progress can feel harder due to lack of resources. From expertise to technology to client experience, everything costs something.

Small independence is inefficient and growth can be hard to come by.

To compete with more established practices in your space, you need to find a way to access resources at a larger scale without a premium price tag or limiting your autonomy as a business. WealthPlan Group LLC lets you keep your autonomy while adding immediate scale around you. Our relationships give you economies-of-scale and access to institutional pricing. It’s far more than “checking a box” when it comes to your operational needs. You’re gaining access to resources and expertise without the premium of an excellent in-house employee.

Is It Time to Find a Partner Who You Can Leverage to Grow?

In every season of business, you learn to build differently. The goal is that with every step you take, you pursue growth more efficiently – you identify strategies that shorten the distance between you and where you want to be.

If you haven’t experienced the freedom of having a scaleable, specialized team supporting your operations, you might be surprised at how accessible that kind of support has become. Your business is built around core functions that support the vision you have for your clients. Our business is built around providing you stability and excellence to execute that vision.

To see a full list of the ways we support advisors through our two RIA’s, click the menu item “What We Do”.

If you’d like to learn more about what it looks like to work with WealthPlan Group, we invite you to contact us, and we’ll start the conversation.

 

 

 

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which Investment(s) may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor prior to investing. Information is based on sources believed to be reliable, however, their accuracy or completeness cannot be guaranteed. Statements of forecast and trends are for informational purposes and are not guaranteed to occur in the future. There is also no assurance that any investment strategy will assure success or protect against loss.

Investment Advisory services are offered through WealthPlan Investment Management, LLC (“WPIM”). WPIM and WealthPlan Partners (“WPP”) are both registered investment advisors and subsidiaries of WealthPlan Group, LLC.