Five smarter ways to free up financial planner capacity

Your employed advisers are most probably all saying the same thing: “I’m flat out. I don’t have capacity to take on more clients.”

It’s tempting to default to the obvious solution: hire another adviser. But more bodies isn’t always the answer. Often, it just papers over the cracks of processes that could be more efficient.

Before you bring in more people, try these 5 fixes first.

They’re faster, cheaper, and a more effective way to build a better business.

1️⃣ Audit their diary

At Melo, we’ve done this with dozens of firms and it works a treat!

Get advisers to explain to you what’s in their diary. When you get into the details, rather than seeing clients all day long, they’re:

• Doing research (paraplanners job!)
• Re-writing reports in “their tone of voice”
• Sitting in internal meetings they don’t need to be in

Ask yourself: What percentage of their week is spent with clients? (i.e. the part that only they can do?) You’ll usually find capacity hiding in plain sight.

2️⃣ Make annual review meetings more effective

Do all annual reviews need to a 90-minute face-to-face meeting? Nope!

Most clients prefer video calls, and in reality this is the way advisers like to work too!

Try this:

• Ask clients if they’d like a teams/zoom call to save them coming in
• Send annual review packs out to clients before meetings
• Spend time answering questions, not presenting the report

More adviser time…instantly.

3️⃣ Get them off anything that’s not client facing

In business, everyone should do the things that only they can do. For financial planners, that is seeing clients.

Everything else? Give it to someone else.

Your job is to protect your financial planner’s energy and focus.

Things to take off them:

• Booking client meetings
• Taking incoming client calls (someone could triage them)
• Research
• Report writing
• Processing transactions
• Speaking to providers
• Sending letters of authority

Their value is in building and maintaining client relationships. If they’re not doing that, you’re not getting your money’s worth.

4️⃣ Make the process the same for everyone.

“X adviser likes it this way, but Y prefers it that way” said most administrators everywhere.

If every adviser has their own “system,” you’re burning time.

Standardise:

• What gets done
• How it gets done
• Who does it

Position with your advisers that this will free up hours across the whole team and ultimately benefit them and their clients.

5️⃣ Review your client bank.

Too many firms are carrying unprofitable clients.

• Audit your clients to understand the real cost to serve them. You can work out, for example, that it costs you £1,500 to service a client annually. This is called a cost to serve analysis.
• Any clients who pay you less than this don’t make business sense.
• You can also segment your clients.
• Check out from relationships where there is no longer a good fit.
• Use your adviser time on those clients who pay the bills.

NB: Your advisers will find this hard. Some will worry about letting people go because they care about them. That is a good thing. Other’s might find it hard to see past the loss of income this means. It is all about explaining the long-term benefit to them and making sure their remuneration incentives the right behaviours.

The bottom line?

Hiring another adviser might be part of the solution for your business.

But it should never be the first move.

Want an independent opinion on where you’re losing time or money? You know where we are!

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