Search results for: <br/>Author: Angie Herbers

Jumpstarting Growth With The Strategy, Management, Innovation (SMI) Business Planning Model

March 8, 2021 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

To run a healthy business, firm owners need to have a good handle on what aspects of their business are actually working well, and where key parts of the business may be trending negatively, in order to implement improvements to whatever is most critically in need of change. But if business owners don’t have a clear handle on the data and Key Performance Indicators that drive the business forward, making decisions about which areas of the business to improve can become unwittingly arbitrary and unfocused. As a result, good strategic planning isn’t just about trying to create the ideal “One Page Business Plan”… more directly, it’s about advisory firm owners figuring out which are the right things to change, to ensure that the decisions they make really do impact the business in the most positive way.

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – discusses the Key Performance Indicators to track, and the key questions to ask that focus on three principal business planning phases: Strategy, Management, and Innovation (SMI). By examining each of these key areas in sequence, firm owners can develop workable strategies to tackle the most relevant problems that may be impeding business growth.

The phases of the SMI process begin by examining Strategy, which involves identifying the most relevant – and measurable – problems of the firm and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure the efficacy of the Solution to be implemented. The Strategy phase involves choosing a Solution that will fix or mitigate the selected problem, the Tactics to use to implement the Solution, and the expected Trend of how the KPIs should move to monitor the efficacy of the Solution. (A key point, as many firms implement solutions without a framework to track whether they’re actually working to achieve the desired results!)

When assessing their firm’s Management, financial advisors often consider what is most urgent and important in the present moment, but it’s crucial to also recognize the important-but-not-urgent that may be holding them back from really solving the firm’s challenges, including and especially identifying any broken systems in the company’s infrastructure. By addressing issues that detract from a well-run Management system, the firm will be able to effectively focus on the other phases of the business planning process.

Using Innovation to improve the business begins with identifying the firm’s competitive Advantage in client service, generating Ideas to win with the firm’s main Advantage (as in practice, most advisory firm innovation is about doubling down on what the firm already does well, not creating something entirely fantastical and new!), and then selecting one – and only one – idea to implement. For some ideas that are more complex or potentially expensive, the firm may also need to conduct some degree of market research to choose a Delivery process to execute their ideas most effectively.

Once the firm has reviewed their SMI elements, the next step is to take the information gathered from the process to develop the right goals for the business. Goals for each phase of SMI can be identified and monitored, and once those goals are accomplished, the firm can then revisit the process to reassess their SMI areas to identify further areas of focus.

Ultimately, the key point is that business planning with the SMI model can help financial advisors choose the right problems to target and strategies to implement in order to improve their firms, by guiding them through a systematic process to outline objectives for where they are now, where they are trying to go, and how they are different. And by identifying the most salient problems and establishing the right goals for the firm, advisors can facilitate efficient growth and ensure that their client service continues to operate at a high level!

Employee Benefits And Perks That Actually Help To Retain Advisory Firm Employees

November 30, 2020 07:03 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

The financial advice business is a service business, and a service business is a people business. Which means the ability to attract and retain people to work in the business, and keep them happy and engaged with that work becomes increasingly essential as an advisory business grows and scales. And keeping employees happy is a function of not only having meaningful work to do, but also compensating them appropriately for that work. In recent years, this has led to an ever-growing number of “perks” that firms offer employees to keep them happy, from retirement benefits to health insurance, to education reimbursement to student loan support, and gym memberships, and employer-provided meals. But in the end, employers can’t just pile on a never-ending stream of employee benefits and perks in the hopes that it will help employees to retain; at some point, the question becomes: what are the best “perks” and employee benefits that really, actually help to retain employees?

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – discusses her four principles that she has determined are most effective at supporting employee happiness. Known as the “P4 Principles”, they include a combination of Preparation (helping all team members achieve success), Pay (designing satisfying compensation and incentive packages for employees), Perks (offering lifestyle benefits that motivate employees and help them balance their work and personal life), and Productivity (providing the tech tools that allow employees to do their work in the first place). Importantly, though, “P4 Firms” that implement all four P4 principles successfully have shown that offering the right Perks to employees is the most impactful of the four P4 Principles in achieving lower turnover, higher growth, and more successful employees.

Research conducted by Herbers & Co revealed several perks offered by companies that were most effective in increasing employee happiness. Two perks, above all others, that are important for all financial advisory firms to offer to their employees are health insurance and retirement plans (even if the company is unable to contribute on behalf of their employees). Not only are these two perks necessary for financial advisory firms to attract (and retain) top talent, but they are also important to offer employees access to these benefits simply for company morale, especially when the firm teaches its clients that purchasing health insurance and saving for retirement are essential practices for a healthy financial future (which can quickly make employees wonder why they’re not receiving those benefits, too!).

In addition to the essential employee perks of health insurance and access to an employer retirement plan, financial advisory firms can offer a menu of additional optional perks to motivate their employees and help them better manage (and enjoy) their professional and personal lives. In fact, Herbers' research indicates that while there is a wide range of potential perks and benefits that firms might consider offering, including flex time, unrestricted vacation, bereavement time off, family leave, time off for volunteer work, paying for continuing education, time off for continuing or further non-work-related education, group discounts, and sabbatical time off, companies need not offer all (eleven) types of perks; instead, offering at least six of these options (chosen from any of the top eleven) was sufficient to maximize employee happiness (by allowing enough options that all employees could appreciate and benefit from at least some of the available perks).

Furthermore, employees who are given a range of these perks (and the autonomy to choose amongst them) tend to feel that their employer trusts them to balance their lives with doing a good job which further motivates them to manage themselves (and each other). In fact, despite fears from many employers that too many – or too flexible – perks may lead to abuse, in practice, firms with strong positive work cultures typically find that employees still feel accountable to each other… and consequently generally do not abuse the privileges the perks afford (e.g., if offered unlimited vacation time, P4 Firm employees still end out taking only what they really need). In fact, P4 Firm employees were found to take less vacation (14.5 days per year) when compared to non-P4 Firm employees (who took an average of 19 days per year), despite having more flexibility and often “unlimited” vacation access!

Ultimately, the key point is that financial advisory firms that focus on a P4 culture by implementing good Preparation, Pay, Perks, and Productivity practices, with an emphasis on providing the right Perks for their employees to support their happiness, will generally have great employees with high morale and the motivation to manage the company responsibly and effectively, which can help the company grow into a truly great business!

Designing (Better) Compensation Models That Motivate Employees And Support Advisory Firm Culture

November 9, 2020 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

Human beings respond to incentives, and as a result, compensation is one of the most influential drivers of employee motivation and is often used by employers as a way to guide their team’s behaviors. For example, some employers design their compensation structures to reward employees for experience gained and/or length of service provided to the company, or by adjusting an employee’s pay to compensate for certain benefits (e.g., paying extra to cover health insurance costs when the company has no group insurance plan, or by reducing pay to compensate for retirement plan contributions the company makes on behalf of the employee). Very frequently, though, employers overlook the fact that it is not actually the money itself that influences their employees but, rather, it is what the money offers to or makes possible for the employee that matters most. And it’s those emotional connections to money that ultimately must be tapped effectively in order for compensation incentives to actually create the desired business outcomes.

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – identifies the common mistakes that many financial advisory firms make in developing their compensation models, and also discusses four key drivers behind the money that actually motivate employees. And that by understanding the different types of compensation that address the needs of specific motivational drivers, advisory firms can design better compensation models that will not only save time, but will also enhance the firm’s culture!

There are four common mistakes that advisory firms tend to make when creating their compensation structures. The first is designing an incentive structure without a clear focus – or with a focus on too many objectives – as many firm owners try to tie too many metrics to compensation (e.g., revenue, and profit, and client service) rather than on prioritizing one main objective with a clear focus (and a better chance of meeting that objective) for all. A second mistake is using compensation as a way to adjust for benefits; either increasing pay to make up for benefits the company does not offer (e.g., higher pay for no health insurance… but then what happens if the firm adds health insurance later?) or reducing pay to compensate for benefits the company does offer (e.g., reduced pay in exchange for employer contributions to an employee’s retirement plan… that the employer was probably going to make anyway for their own benefit!?). A third mistake that firm owners make is offering partnership rights as a form of compensation (i.e., not paying partners a salary for their active role in the business, and letting net partnership distributions be the primary or sole compensation), as the income a partner receives for ownership and what an employee receives for work in the business reflect two very different functions. And the last common mistake is neglecting to update the compensation structure over time, which should be reviewed and updated often to respond to the behaviors that the firm wants to influence (as the needs and demands of the business itself do tend to evolve over time as well).

When it comes to the actual drivers that make employees want to earn compensation, there are four basic feelings that serve as central motivators, and certain types of compensation offered can generally serve to satisfy these feelings for employees: 1) control (regular base salaries that employees can rely on receiving for the role they play in the company), 2) advancement (incentive-based pay that gives employees a sense that what they do is helping them advance through the ranks), 3) assurance (benefits offered to convey that employers care about their employees and are taking measures to provide care for them), and 4) achievement (compensation tied to a career-track plan). And for employees to develop trust in their employers, they need to have at least some of these feelings satisfied by the compensation they receive for the work that they do.

Ultimately, the key point is that if employers take the time to analyze their teams’ compensation needs, and decide which of the four motivational drivers are most important to their employees (and it may be the case that all four are important to a firm), firm owners can better understand which compensation structures would be most beneficial to implement, and why. And when effective compensation structures are in place that satisfy employees’ motivational needs, the result often produces more streamlined employee management… not to mention inevitably enhancing the firm’s culture and overall morale, as well!

Better Advisor Marketing Without Relying On More Tactics Or More Rainmakers: Optimizing Like An Engineer With The ART Method

September 28, 2020 07:03 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Marketing

When it comes to marketing strategies for financial advisors who want to grow their firms, there are generally two commonly used approaches. Optimistic “glass-half-full” strategists often decide to invest in a(n ever-widening) variety of marketing tactics in the hopes of attracting more and more new clients, whereas more Pessimistic “glass-half-empty” strategists may often feel that suboptimal business development efforts hold them back from potential growth and will spend their marketing resources on hiring, training, and restructuring their teams to correct the problem with more and better rainmaker advisors. However, these approaches are not generally the most logical way to grow firms, as adding new marketing tactics can be expensive and doesn’t always equate to more clients, and relying on the efficacy of rainmaker advisors is risky (as finding and keeping great rainmaker talent is often very difficult).

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – explains how a more efficient approach to marketing for growth is to view the process as an “Engineer”, where the firm focuses on one marketing tool proven to work in the past, hones that specific tactic, and then maintains and continuously optimizes the process that supports that tactic over the long run. For Engineer strategists, the advisor marketing process can be broken down into three “ART” phases: Audit, Run, and Tune.

In the Audit phase, advisors and their firms evaluate their current inventory of marketing tools and identify the characteristics of the firm’s typical (and hopefully ideal) client – in a photographic ‘client picture board’. Pictures are important to illustrate the advisor’s ideal client, because the exercise can only be successful if the advisor has a deep enough understanding of their clientele to find the ‘right’ pictures to begin with. Thus, the Audit stage is instrumental in helping advisors to picture their clients clearly, which in turn clarifies how best to connect and speak to those prospects and turn them into the new clients they most want to attract.

In the Run phase, the firm identifies one marketing tactic that will serve to connect (and to keep connecting) with the target client identified and ‘pictured’ in the Audit phase. The focus is on establishing a meaningful rapport with the particular type of target prospects pursuing one specific channel where the firm can best reach out to their audience (e.g., podcasting on a topic that the firm’s clients would be particularly interested in). Which, notably, means that this is not the stage to update the firm’s design elements such as the website or logo. Instead, the important point in the Run phase is simply to focus on one strategy, and prepare to refine that one strategy to be even better… not to layer multiple marketing tactics that spread the firm’s attention too thinly to Tune any one in particular.

In turn, in the Tune phase, advisors review their now-primary marketing strategy, and assess what is working (and what isn’t) by gathering key data to make relevant adjustments along the way. Specifically, lead flow data measuring how many people (who weren’t referred by an existing client) actually contacted the firm to schedule an appointment, is the key statistic that can give insight about how effective the marketing strategy is at connecting with its target audience. Tuning a strategy is often simply a matter of expanding the scope of expertise offered through the strategy (e.g., for a strategy that relies on podcasting, perhaps the scope of topics can include stock options instead of just estate planning), as well as improving how the strategy connects to its target people in a sustainable and consistent manner.

Ultimately, the key point is that advisors who want to grow their firms through marketing efforts don’t need to invest in an array of marketing tactics, nor do they need to restructure their teams to rely on a rainmaker to do it for them. Rather, the more efficient way to successfully market an advisory firm is to focus on the ART of the marketing process – Auditing the firm’s existing marketing efforts to identify and hone one effective tactic to use, Running the marketing strategy identified over a long period of time, and continually Tuning the process to become a successful and sustainable strategy. Going deeper into one specific, carefully chosen strategy, and optimizing it, before choosing to add new marketing tactics into the mix, will likely prove to be a much more effective and efficient process in growing the advisor’s firm… and will serve to connect more meaningfully with its clients!

Creating A Six-Week Onboarding Program To Train New Advisory Firm Employees

September 14, 2020 07:04 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

Financial advisory firms can find themselves struggling to grow their businesses for a wide range of reasons. While some firms have difficulty developing a seamless client service experience, others may find business development strategies difficult to implement (or scale across additional new advisors) to increase their client base, and others yet may feel their executive leadership team is unable to connect with the firm as a whole. Regardless of where the difficulty lies, though, the root problem for most firms struggling with growth often lies in the lack of a well-developed training program.

For many busy firms seeking growth, investing time in establishing an effective training program is not often a top priority, and it can be difficult to even find the time to develop training protocols. However, a well-defined training program is critical not only for providing employees with a solid foundation of specific procedural requirements on how to run a firm that can grow, but also in establishing a unified firm culture that provides the vision required by employees to attract the right clients to the firm and to develop an implicit understanding of the expectations for servicing those clients. And the good news is that a good training program doesn’t have to be built all at once; instead, it can be developed iteratively, often in conjunction with fleshing out an advisory firm’s Operations Manual of processes and procedures.

Through an extensive study of employee training programs across many fast-growing financial advisory firms that were expanding their reach across the country, Herbers & Co. identified certain key characteristics that were consistent across successful training programs. From the research, they optimized an effective six-week program that can be adapted by firms to create a defined and repeatable training program for their new employees.

The weekly focus of the six-week onboarding training program for new employees is as follows:

Week 1. Understanding the company profile and its technology systems;

Week 2. Roles and responsibilities of employees across the firm and administrative procedures;

Week 3. Total client experience;

Week 4. Marketing and the prospective client process;

Week 5. Understanding the Client meeting process and client communications; and

Week 6. Compliance.

The easiest way for a firm to build a training program based on the six-week program is to develop an Operations Manual that encompasses all of the firm’s protocols and values on which training will be based. For firms that don’t already have an Operations Manual in place, it can in turn also be created one topic at a time, and over the span of several months. In fact, firms that aim to address each of the areas outlined in the weekly training topics may need up to 9 – 12 months to establish their training programs (though of course, it will still be updated over time to reflect how the firm’s processes evolve).

In today’s work environment, given our current pandemic state, it is important for remote training to be an available option for new employees. Strategies for an effective remote training program include timing the training sessions in short bursts, mixing in self-paced instructional videos, and assigning ‘homework’ exercises to be completed in between training sessions. Once the instruction and assignments have been completed, the trainer should review the assignment and offer feedback to the new employee.

Ultimately, the key point is that firms who want long-term, sustainable growth of their business need to have a well-developed training program in place. A consistent and thorough training program will ensure that all employees have a clear understanding of the firm culture and its goals, as well as being able to execute within the systems the firm uses. And while establishing a good training program can be a long-term process that may require a significant investment in time and resources, the end result will be a well-trained firm that not only knows how to operate consistently and in accordance with the firm’s culture and values to promote growth, but also is able to delegate training to more employees across the firm, which in turn frees up firm leadership from much of the training responsibilities so that their focus can be on developing and implementing growth strategies!

Developing Employee Career Tracks As An Alternative To Performance Reviews For Better Team Improvement

July 27, 2020 07:06 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Practice Management

In the early days of the financial advice industry, an advisor’s career track was relatively straightforward. Either they met their insurance policy or investment product sales quota to qualify their contract, or they found some other way to make a living. However, amid the ongoing shift towards the recurring revenue AUM model, and the concomitant rising need for ongoing client advice and servicing, various new roles within firms began to emerge, including client service associates, paraplanners, and (not-responsible-for-business-development) lead advisors.

Along the way, advisory firms generally followed a traditional “performance review” model for determining why and when this new crop of employee advisor roles would progress (or not) on to the next level. Yet in practice, most of corporate America has shifted away from this traditional performance review approach, and towards leadership-based programs to develop and retain talent… while many advisory firms remain mired in the now-outdated management-heavy performance model.

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – explains why advisory firms still favor the performance model (they’re in the advice business after all, and tend to tell employees what they should be doing instead of providing training, development, and leadership), and how those firms can instead create a stronger culture and ensure that employees are collectively striving towards the same end-goal with a different approach to employee management.

The key distinction is that there is a fine line between telling an employee what they should be doing (and how), and influencing them to go in a direction that helps advance everyone involved. And a first step towards aligning expectations with a more influencing-oriented approach is by developing well-defined career tracks that show (rather than tell) firm employees the path that’s ahead of them… so they know where they’re expected to go (and can see what it takes to get there)!

In the process, though, it’s key to avoid creating a one-size-fits-all, linear path that ignores employees’ strengths and training. Instead, advisory firm owners should recognize at least four baseline career tracks that emerge in a prototypical independent advisory firm. Each track may cater to a particular employee’s strengths and goals, including Financial Planning (for big-picture, strategic thinkers), Advisory (for relationship-driven individuals that like to make things happen), Investment Management (for aspiring CFAs who like research), and Client Services And Operations (for organizers who love to serve others).

Ultimately, implementing a variety of career tracks will provide employees clear paths to travel along as they progress through the firm (and give managers a roadmap they can use to proactively lead their teams rather than reactively telling them how to improve their performance). But first, the leadership team must also have the right mindset, expectations, and plan in place. Once that’s done, and career tracks are established, advisory firms can foster continuous communication and develop talent far more efficiently, by showing them where they can go and letting them step up to the desired challenge and opportunity.

Optimizing Operational Experience To Influence Growth

June 22, 2020 07:06 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Practice Management

Growing and improving a financial advisory business is a continuous and iterative process, and in general, firm owners tend to first look for new and better ways to attract and retain clients when taking the next developmental step. However, in order to really capitalize on those efforts, advisors should first ensure that they are also consistently optimizing the operational aspects of their businesses as well.

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – explains how Operational Experience (OX) is a crucial element in all business processes as it is the mechanism that ensures consistent delivery of service. It consists of the back office activities that outline business processes and, for each step of every process, identifies every action that needs to be followed, who is responsible, how long it should take, and any technology requirements. In order to define a firm’s OX, two categories of key processes must be considered: those that involve client processes, and those that involve employee processes. Whereas client processes involve marketing, sales, and the actual client experience, employee processes involve the steps needed to recruit, onboard, and train employees.

The effectiveness of key processes can be measured by various performance indicators, such as those that examine metrics that are most impactful to revenue and profits. These can include factors such as client referral rate, close-ratio, and gross profit margin. As such, process frameworks should be developed in alignment with the overall business goals, ultimately to enhance financial performance, using three key steps: focusing, aligning, and optimizing.

Identifying focus is the first stage of developing an OX framework, and it should be targeted on the reason for making improvements to the process (e.g., to expand the number and rate of client referrals). Next, the framework should be fleshed out with areas that need improvement so that they better align with the focus (e.g., annual meeting reviews are not being conducted consistently by different advisors across the firm, and some clients have expressed that they are upset by the unequal treatment). The final stage is the optimization stage, in which repairs are made to the broken processes identified in the alignment stage (e.g., a three-phase process for conducting annual client meetings is developed to systematize the client meeting experience, which all advisors will be required to follow).

Ultimately, the key point is that having a strong operational experience is the basis on which to build efficient client experience, marketing, and employee processes that will facilitate the successful growth of a firm. Because by establishing a sound, functional operational experience, a firm will be able to develop processes that will facilitate efficient marketing efforts and exceptional client service provided by a team of employees who excel at and enjoy their jobs.

Increasing Client Referrals By Scaling Your Internal Marketing Brand

June 15, 2020 07:03 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Marketing

Established financial advisors who aim to accelerate the growth of their firms often look to increase their marketing efforts to attract more prospects and bring in additional new clients. In practice, this is often done by taking the main components of a firm’s brand – value, verbal messaging, and visual design – and refining, in particular, the firm’s visual design, with a new website and new marketing materials designed to instill new and faster growth. Yet, in reality, the biggest driver of accelerated growth is often to improve verbal messaging first… and upon doing so, many advisory firms discover that it’s even more appealing to leverage that new messaging as internal marketing to generate more referrals from existing clients instead!

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – talks about the core components of a brand, and why these components are important to drive firm growth. As while the value of a firm lies in its services offered, the client experience as a whole, and how the firm delivers on both, many advisory firms make the mistake of investing too early and heavily in visual design upon recognizing the value they provide, without first working out the verbal messaging which defines and communicates their own identity and values. The end result of this disconnect between the value and the messaging about it is lackluster lead flow; accordingly, the visual design should actually be defined by the verbal messaging and will be most impactful when it can serve to communicate the firm’s values and convey its identity. Which is only possible when the firm’s verbal messaging has been clearly defined in the first place.

The two primary modes of marketing communication are internal and external. All new firms must start out with external marketing efforts to grow their client base in the first place – in other words, they need to target strangers, website visitors, and prospects to simply convey that the firm exists and to identify the services available. In addition to prioritizing the main components of a firm’s brand, understanding the firm’s different audiences and knowing how to effectively communicate with each are paramount to effective external marketing to increase lead generation.

However, for existing firms, especially those with well-established client bases, internal marketing can be a much more valuable marketing approach, if done correctly. Internal marketing targets existing clients exclusively, providing not only updates about the firm’s growth and progress, but also reminders of the firm’s value through educational content and the ongoing provision of outstanding client service. In fact, ideally, internal marketing strategies should provide exclusive marketing value and messaging that is only available to existing clients. If done right, internal marketing can leverage clients themselves as promoters who generate referrals for the firm. Because with the right branding, client service experience, and exclusive internal marketing outreach efforts, clients will be enthusiastic about telling other people they know about the firm and will eventually become the firm’s own best marketers!

Ultimately, the key point is that firms who are just starting out will need to rely on external marketing efforts to cultivate clients in the first place, but firms with a well-established client base can leverage their own clients as effective promoters of the firm by using an internal marketing strategy that targets clients exclusively. However, this is only effective if the firm has invested in creating a well-defined brand with verbal messaging that clearly conveys their identity and values (which is then communicated consistently with internal scripts for client review meetings), developing employees as part of the brand, and specializing their marketing communications… all available only to existing clients who may then refer the advisory firm (even more often than they did before!).

Elevating Client Service To Actually Drive Growth Through Client Referrals

April 27, 2020 07:03 am 4 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

Financial advisors who want to grow their firms faster can examine a wide range of advisor marketing strategies and sales tactics. But the reality is that if an advisory firm is struggling to grow, often the problem isn’t actually a matter of better marketing; instead, it’s about developing a better client service process. Because while the most significant value proposition of a real financial advisor is ultimately to help their clients live better lives, having a consistently remarkable client service process is what allows a financial advisor to successfully elicit the positive feelings experienced by their clients, which are essential in establishing lasting trust and driving the referrals necessary to bring about growth. And simply put, the fact that an advisory firm has high retention of existing clients doesn’t mean its client service process is good enough to bring new client growth as well.

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – explains how the Client Service Process is actually the key to growth, and how it consists of not only the client service experience itself, but also the Operations Experience – the behind-the-scenes activities that clients may or may not see directly, but that they can certainly feel the effects of through every interaction they have with the firm. And in order to create an exceptional client service process based on cultivating trust, there are four components that must be mastered, in the following order: 1) Understanding, 2) Control, 3) Discipline, and 4) Stability.

The first stage of trust is Understanding, and involves the advisor not just having a solid grasp on what the firm does and who it works with, but also a deep connection to and alignment with the firm’s motivation, of why it does what it does and chooses to work with the clients it has. Next comes Control, in which financial advisors decide what services they will (and will not) provide for clients, with the confidence that those services align with the firm’s (and their own) motivation and purpose. In this stage, advisors also help clients realize that they, too, have a level of control in choosing to follow the advice they are given (or not), and this autonomy serves to deepen further the trust being cultivated between client and advisor. The next stage is Discipline, in which advisors and their staff need to continually uphold all the details, big and small, of the client service process promised to clients, which, over time, create the “living client” who trusts the firm culture and process so intrinsically that they essentially mirror the actions and feelings of the firm at all times. The last stage involved in cultivating trust is Stability. For the advisor, stability represents a solid belief that, whatever transition the business may face, it will maintain the integrity it needs to continue to grow. Similarly, the client has full faith that, whatever transitions they themselves face in their lives, their advisors will provide the stability to always guide them through the experience.

Ultimately, the key point is that the client service process is the primary area where advisors should focus in order to grow their firms. And while other components like marketing, sales, and human capital are all very important, they will not mean much if the client service process is faulty. Because it is the client service process, which includes both the client service experience and the firm’s operations experience, that is most crucial in establishing positive emotions between the client and advisor, on which long-term trust and a strong, lasting client-advisor relationship are built.

Hard Choices: Making Key Business Decisions To Preserve Culture In Times Of Crisis

April 13, 2020 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, many financial advisory firm owners are facing tremendous uncertainty about the future of their businesses. And even those business owners who have planned ahead for cyclical downturns may still have to make hard choices about how best to navigate the current turmoil and ensure the long-term survival of the business.

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – walks advisors through six steps of crisis management that they can use to cope with the unique crisis we are facing today. Because the truth is that even for experienced advisors who have been through market turmoil in the past, each crisis is different (posing unique challenges to firms at different stages in their growth), and in practice, the biggest risk to an effective crisis management response is one of “false equivalencies”, in which an advisory firm owner makes the assumption that the current crisis can be dealt with in the same manner as the last. In fact, while financial advisors may plan for aspirational growth, few businesses actually do the planning necessary to ensure they can maintain the stability of their business in the event a severe crisis turns into a protracted one.

Accordingly, there are certain steps an advisor can take to ensure their crisis management strategy is specifically tailored to the current situation at hand, and the risks that loom in the event that it does not recover quickly. The first step is an assessment of the specific crisis that needs to be addressed right now (which, in today’s environment, is the health pandemic crisis more so than it is the financial crisis) so that the advisor can focus their efforts on the right problem. This is followed by step #2, consisting of a SWOT analysis to identify the specific threats to their firm and its culture (without which, employees will leave after the pandemic passes, and just plunge the business into another crisis!) and how those threats might best be addressed. The third step is about continuity planning, and why flexible compensation and partnership pay structures are critical to maintaining resilience in times of extreme uncertainty. Next, engage in financial stress tests for the business, recognizing that stress tests that examine stability, focusing on capital allocation and cash flow instead of growth rates and profit margin, are more relevant than aspirational or functional stress tests during times of crisis. From there, it’s time to engage in strategic planning about what firms will do to fix (and prevent) the specific problems many firms are probably facing in today’s tumultuous environment. And the last step is implementation, in which strategies are implemented with a focus on the firm’s culture, clients, and long-term organizational stability.

Ultimately, the key point is that financial advisors, like many other business owners facing hard choices in light of the current crisis situation, can take a course of action to respond to their situation, and if the right choices are made with the intent to protect the culture of the business (as well as the employees entrenched in that culture) over everything else, chances are that the business will survive this crisis, and will be positioned to grow even stronger and better equipped to face the next crisis. But the starting point is to be ready and willing to make the hard choices necessary to ensure the business survives and has the opportunity to thrive in the long run!