There is no single recipe to ensure success when building and scaling your investment advisory business, but you can find financial advisor advice and tips for scaling strewn about the internet from everyone from top industry experts to Stanford professors. While scaling excellence is essential for any advisory business, it doesn’t always come easily, and a lot of factors can influence your success. However, one regularly-mentioned, key factor is the importance of time management. Successfully scaling an advisory business requires firms to examine and refine their processes and systems to establish how to make the best use of their time.
Adjusting Time Management for Scaling Opportunities
Ideally, to scale, an advisor should increase the efficiency of time spent servicing existing clients and increase the amount of time spent on gaining new clients. Part art and part science, your time management strategy may take some time to perfect – you will need to test and iterate, consult and analyze. Throughout the process of adjusting your amounts of time spent with current clients and acquiring new clients, continue to focus on building and maintaining valuable relationships.
Increasing Efficiency While Adding Value
Effectively scaling an advisory business involves maximizing the value and efficiency of time spent with current clients. The best way to do this is to reduce the amount of time spent on portfolio management and operations. Because it’s easier to sell to people that already know and respect you and your offerings, you can begin by identifying opportunity gaps across your existing client base and adding true value to existing services. There are a few ways you can make this process easier across your financial advisory business.
Take Advantage of Technology
There are many tools available that allow advisors to manage multiple clients at once, simultaneously reducing risks, and increasing your firm’s service bandwidth. Each technology platform has it strengths and weaknesses though, so it is important to select technology that not only handles current advisory business needs, but also addresses where you want to be in the future.
Integrate Technology Systems
A lot of financial advisors’ time is spent (and wasted) on managing data or using spreadsheets. But, by utilizing high-quality integration opportunities, you can reduce the time spent on portfolio management, investment management, and trading processes. Technologies like Blaze Portfolio’s Atom Align integrate with top portfolio accounting and reporting systems, and custodians and trading providers to save time.
Optimize Your Technology Workflows
To get the most out of your software, it requires organized workflows and enough resources available to optimize the implementation of those workflows. Investment advisor technologies must be able to handle the needs of a diverse client base with the ability to adapt to new clients, too. Providers must continue to add functionality and complexity to their products. In addition to utilizing these tools, hiring a tech-savvy operations team is extremely valuable in this technology-rich environment.
Scaling with Efficient, Repeatable Processes
Utilizing technology and integrating and optimizing your technology workflows are some of the best tips for scaling your investment advisory business because of time that can be repurposed for new client acquisition. Additionally, creating a consistently valuable client experience with processes that are repeatable and scalable for both existing and future clients, will make the process of growing your business much easier.