The growth of a business is cause for celebration. For a financial organization, bringing on more clients means an opportunity to provide more people with stellar service. It also means the opportunity to onboard more talented advisors to grow the firm’s reputation and reach among investors.
While growth is exciting, it’s not without its headaches.
One of the primary issues financial institutions have to deal with when growth skyrockets is how to find and retain the right advisors to support their expanded client base.
What do we mean by the “right advisors?” We’re talking about the people who care about your firm and your clients as much as your firm’s leaders do.
At Skience, one of the most important tasks our consulting team does is to work with firms and make sure you’re targeting the right advisors, creating the kind of advisor experience you want, and finding ways to predict and prevent attrition of your existing advisor team.
The goals of our consulting team are threefold:
- Save you time, so you can focus on areas you enjoy
- Keep your team happy so that they can perform at their best
- Minimize turnover so your firm can evolve into a growth machine
Today, we want to look at the process our consultants walk through with the leaders of financial firms to help them better automate processes that take up too much time, create a great advisor experience, and keep attrition rates low.
Leveraging Automation
Advisors today are leveraging tech in better and better ways. However, many firms still find their top talent bogged down with the same repeated processes and inefficiencies day in and day out.
Our consultants will help you identify the major pain points in your firm that can be automated, such as loss of information, manual data entry processes, duplicate data, and inefficient processes that waste time. When your systems are disjointed, with information spread all over the place that may or may not be accurate or up-to-date, the result is a frustrated team that is continually searching for the right information.
We work with you to build repeatable, automated processes to ensure the right information gets where it needs to be every time.
To be clear, we don’t come in with the same formula for every firm we work with. Your firm is unique, and so are your processes. We work together with you for anywhere from two to six months to develop the right solution.
Our process involves five steps:
- Discovery – What are your pain points? What wrinkles can be smoothed out with automation?
- Design – Our team works with you to design a system that will solve your problems.
- Sprint – Our team of developers builds the system to your specifications.
- Test – We test everything to make sure it does what it’s supposed to do.
- Launch – Turn it on and watch the friction disappear from your processes!
When your lead data is clean, your advisors can work faster, and your entire firm can grow better. It’s an all-around win.
Optimizing Your Advisor Experience
One of the most common questions we get from the firms we work with is “What’s working for other firms?”
We have helped hundreds of firms across the country optimize their processes, and we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.
The top wealth management firms don’t all look the same, but they do share one thing in common: They care about the advisor experience. All too often, advisors are successful despite their systems, but at these firms, they make sure their systems are focused on boosting advisor success.
By providing your advisors with the most efficient process possible, you are handing them the keys to success. You are letting them know you believe in them, care about them, and trust them.
Recruiting and Keeping the Best Advisors
It’s a competitive market. Advisors have a lot of firms vying for their attention. By and large, the firms that give them the best experience, insights, technology, and a better view of their customers—are the firms with the best recruitment and retention rates.
Don’t get us wrong: salary matters, but the job itself matters even more.
When you recruit new advisors, we make it easy to convert accounts over to your systems so you can plug them into the same automation and efficiency all your other advisors are using.
Your transition workflows can make or break an advisor’s long-term success working in your organization. Just like the first 90 days are critical to client relationships, the first 90 for your advisors can similarly impact their perception of your organization.
Our consulting team can help you construct an advisor transition process that fits your firm’s needs and makes it easy for your advisors to bring over their clients from a previous firm.
Our consulting team helps your firm maximize your ability to recruit advisors and scale growth with the right processes and improvements to operational work. Get in touch with our consulting team today to discuss your needs and grow your business with confidence.