The fundamental constraint that every financial advisor eventually faces is that there are only so many hours in the day and week, and therefore only so many clients that can be served, before you hit a wall. At that moment, you reach the maximum capacity of a financial advisory practice, and have to make a decision about whether you will stay that size – with what may be a very good income – or grow into a business, a true business, that goes beyond your individual capacity to serve clients as a financial advisor.
In this week’s #OfficeHours with @MichaelKitces, my Tuesday 1PM EST broadcast via Periscope, we discuss the dynamics of transitioning from a practice to a business, and the challenges you may encounter along the way, including building a team, letting go of client responsibilities, and most significantly… changing your mindset!
The first change you need to acknowledge is that when making the transition from a practice to a business, you, personally, can no longer spend your time primarily servicing clients. This is partially due to the wall you will naturally hit from trying to service too many clients, but even more importantly, you need to recognize that if you spend all of your time working in the business, you won’t have any time to work on the business. You may still keep a small set of clients – if for no other reason than to remember what’s it’s like to sit across from the client and hear their needs and concerns – but the first step in the transition for most advisors is bringing on an associate advisor who can gradually take over client relationships and work with all new clients going forward. And as you add more clients, you’ll simply add more advisors (who aren’t you!).
The second thing to recognize is that if you’re going to be doing all that hiring over time (from advisors to operations and back-office staff) as the business grows, you’re going to need to really focus on developing your people (instead of acquiring new clients). In fact, since the financial advisory business is a service business, finding and developing people will arguably become your number one job as you make the transition from a practice to a business.
But the biggest challenge to transitioning from a practice to a business is that you’re also going to have to completely change your mindset. Because you may have started out as a financial advisor giving advice, but going forward you are no longer trying to do financial planning… you’re trying to build a business that does financial planning. This will mean an endless set of changes as your business grows and your role changes to reflect the new challenges you face, as well as real financial sacrifices as you hire staff and try to find economies of scale as the firm grows.
Ultimately, the path to being a business owner is not for every advisor. Many are quite happy to continue doing the client work as a solo advisor – and that’s okay! – but for those who do wish to build their practice into something bigger than themselves, it will require a complete mindset shift to vision a business that truly goes beyond your individual ability to serve clients and instead is all about getting other great financial advisors to serve the clients in your business!
source https://www.kitces.com/blog/transitioning-financial-advisor-practice-to-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=transitioning-financial-advisor-practice-to-business
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