In today’s evolving financial services industry, a successful advisory practice is predicated on so much more than wealth planning. You need technical expertise, marketing and client service skills, and the ability to create repeatable processes that work efficiently.
This is where your support staff comes in. The most productive advisory practices are intentional about designating roles and responsibilities that empower staff to own their areas of the business, enabling them to contribute in a meaningful way. They build their teams in a way that directly aligns with their business goals.
When you build a skilled and resourceful team who you can trust to do their jobs well, it gives you the capacity to do what you do best—take care of your clients—without worrying about every other facet of the business.
Deciding To Invest In Staff Development
Standardized onboarding, followed by ongoing education and development, benefits a practice in numerous ways. To name a few, staff development:
• Builds employees’ knowledge, skills and productivity
• Increases their confidence
• Boosts engagement—increasing levels of commitment and contribution
• Introduces new opportunities, processes and efficiencies to your practice
• Improves staff retention
Our internal research backs this up. At Raymond James, we see a 70% increase in retention among associates who complete our standardized onboarding program, compared to those who did not. This is likely attributable to the fact that participants report feeling more competent in their role, and that their future has been invested in.
This only compounds with ongoing development. In a recent Raymond James survey, over 90% of participants affirmed that ongoing development enhances their skills and confidence, equipping and inspiring them to take action that translates into opportunities for the business.
Identifying Development Opportunities
How do you help your associates choose the areas they will own and then build the skills and knowledge they need to achieve proficiency? It’s a three-step process:
1. Define your overall business goals.
2. Align your team’s roles and responsibilities with those goals.
3. Equip staff with the education and tools they need.
Say, for example, one of your goals is to bring new clients into the practice. Choose one or two team members to be responsible for your outbound marketing efforts such as running events, keeping your website up to date, or posting on social media. Then, give them the resources to do it well. That might mean enrolling them in an education program, sending them to a conference, or even just helping them carve out the time to learn.
Whether your goal is to grow the practice, streamline the business, or enrich the client experience, when you’ve equipped your employees to succeed at their jobs and they know what to strive for, you’ll see their contributions take off.
Delivering On Education
Many large advisory firms offer standardized education and development programs. If yours is one of them, it can be highly beneficial to take advantage of those offerings. If not, you have other options.
Have team members document their processes in detail and create a collection of standard operating procedures. Then, have training plans to get the right people equipped. This maps back to the aforementioned “define, align, equip” process.
Whether it’s taking a class, attending industry conferences or on-the-job training, you can also encourage your staff to upskill with self-guided education.
Putting It Into Practice
We’ve all been there: You go to a conference and come back with a million ideas. But then you put that notebook on a shelf and get back to work, and soon you’ve reverted to old practices.
If your team members are investing their time in education and development, it’s important to make sure that they—and your practice—are realizing the benefits. One way to do so is to keep a development mindset ingrained in your team culture.
When employees engage in development programs, try to ask lots of questions. Then, keep the conversation going. Implement systems and touchpoints that help everyone stay on track toward your practice goals, even if it’s a quarterly check-in. A little intentionality can go a long way. Getting your team together can encourage the sharing of new skills and ideas. If you want to plan ahead, develop an evergreen agenda to create space for important conversation topics: What have we learned that can make us more efficient? How do we go about implementing this? What’s something we learned that we might have a need for in the future?
Finally, never underestimate the power of rewarding and celebrating your team’s performance, whether it’s with positive feedback, a bonus or nominating them for an award. Reinforce that their contributions are valued.
It’s no secret that education and development require a time commitment and the best advisory teams are, of course, very busy. But it’s especially important in a high-volume practice to invest in your team to perform more efficiently. Think about it like any other investment. An hour spent learning how to optimize a process could save your practice dozens of hours or more over time that can be spent enriching the business in other ways.
When you gain confidence in your team’s ability to keep the business running, you create time for yourself to hone your own financial planning skillset, opening up the door to scale your business.
Kristine Zambito is the director of branch admin programs for Raymond James.