While Advisors will agree and tell you they are constantly looking to grow their practice—that doesn’t necessarily mean or even imply they are looking to onboard new clients. In fact, there are plenty of advisors that are not looking to bring on new clients, but rather are looking to continue working with their existing clients and growing by means of servicing clients to the best of their ability.
What’s limiting advisors to service clients the best they possibly can ultimately boil down to their capacity. Capacity is, by far, the number one challenge faced by even elite financial advisory firms and advisors. Below are what I often refer to as the six critical areas of capacity that advisors can and must overcome should they want to unlock their true potential and scale their practice efficiently.
Advisors are Looking for the Right Type of Clients
Most of the firms and financial advisors I often work with are often trying to dramatically grow their business. Sure, acquiring a few more ideal clients is something that they’d like to achieve, but only high net worth, high revenue clients, and not hundreds of new clients every year.
What is the number one challenge elite financial advisors face? Capacity is the number one challenge for most elite financial advisors and their teams. Imagine if you can get another 200 to 400 hours in a calendar year, what that might do for your business or your lifestyle in 2021?
How Exactly Do You Build and Manage Capacity?
There are six fundamental areas of capacity that will help ultimately help you improve your practice and become an elite financial advisor. The six areas, which we’ll go into more detail below, are as follows:
- Segmentation
- Technology
- Practice Management Processes
- People
- Delegation
- Time Management
Capacity Area 1: Segmentation
What I’ve found to be true for most, if not all, elite advisors is that they segment their business on an annual basis compared to the average advisor who segments their business every few years. In addition, elite advisors typically have two segments, not three or four, or in some cases even more—elite advisors segment based on ideal families and everyone else.
Elite advisors are not just focused on finding ideal clients—they’re focused on finding ideal families which generate ideal revenue for their business. They know where they want to spend their time, who they want to spend it with, and most importantly, they know who they want to spend less time with.
Believe me, I know all too well the notion of wanting to spend time with everyone, however, there isn’t enough time in the day to follow through with such a commitment—elite advisors are aware of this, thanks to segmentation, and make sure they are able to deliver on providing a great service and great value for their clients.
Capacity Area 2: Technology
Technology does a far better and more efficient job at doing repetitive tasks than people can. Elite advisors know that with the right technology in place to solve workflow and process obstacles, the sky is the limit.
From back office and compliance tools to portfolio management, secure document management, document retention systems, and CRMs, there are several notable considerations that elite advisors are frequently assessing to continue moving the needle forward in their practice.
Check out our technology checklist to see where you can leverage technology to augment your practice. your time by using technology.
Capacity Area 3: Practice Management Processes
Practice management is about three things: Process, process, process.
Elite financial advisors are aware they need three clearly defined and written processes that they can articulate. Process one is the ideal client acquisition. The second process is the ideal client service. The third process is all the other processes that you need to manage your business and your practice effectively.
When you have these three processes in order and are able to easily articulate them, the path ahead to becoming an elite advisor will be much clearer and more efficient.
Capacity Area 4: People
The majority of elite teams are working well past their capacity and fully know they need to hire more people on their team to fill critical roles, including administrative. Yet, hiring and training people is a time-consuming process and time is something that most teams do not simply have. This poses to be quite a dilemma for teams.
However, investing in the right people across your organization to fill the critical front, middle, and back-office support roles almost always yields a return on investment.
Capacity Area 5: Delegation
You can delegate everything in financial services except prospecting. The more you delegate to your team and the more processes you have, the more you’ll be able to spend time with your ideal client’s ideal families and ideal prospects. You can also spend more time with your ideal centers of influence. With elite teams, we go through a delegation checklist and see where we can delegate and save the advisor a tremendous amount of time by putting processes into place.
Capacity Area 6: Time Management
Your goal this year and every year for that matter should be to find, or rather “create”, extra time for yourself. Exactly how you end up doing it is entirely up to you, but I’d recommend starting with owning your calendar and managing it on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The reality of it is that the majority of us have bad time management habits, and owning/taking control of your calendar is one of the easiest ways to curb bad habits and be well on your way to being incredibly efficient with how you’re spending your time and who you’re spending it with.
In the never-ending struggle of important versus urgent, urgent usually wins, unless you stick to your calendar. I encourage you to segment your business, think about implementing technology, training or adding staff, delegating and letting go, and being really strict with your calendar.
Elite advisors usually take an average of 8 or more weeks off every year as a direct result of narrowing in on and doubling down on the six areas we covered above.
Building More Capacity With FutureVault
The right technology in place does more than address capacity area #2 — it helps firms and their advisors build more capacity by addressing all six fundamental areas of capacity, enabling advisors to effectively scale their practice by providing an immediate ROI, leading to significant time and cost savings, and helping advisors deliver more value to their (ideal) clients.
FutureVault has made a name for itself as a market leader in secure digital vault and document exchange solutions purposely built to help firms and their advisors build more capacity in their practice.
