Don't Overlook This: How RIAs Can Leverage Productization to Scale

By Charesse Spiller

As a financial advisor, you have built your practice around one-on-one services, tailoring your approach to each client’s unique needs. While this might seem like the gold standard in client care, it’s important to recognize the limitations—especially when it comes to scaling your business.

Productizing your services offers a way to maintain high-quality client care while also creating a more scalable and efficient business model. This approach involves packaging your expertise into standardized, repeatable processes that can be delivered consistently to all clients.

In doing so, you maintain control over your practice, ensuring your expertise drives the client experience rather than letting each client dictate how you run your business. This shift can significantly enhance both your firm's profitability and its long-term value.

The Challenges Without Productization

Advisors face a number of challenges when they focus on services that are high-touch and there are no set processes in place. Productized services are often considered “bespoke”—and highly customized or boutique firms consider them to be less valuable. However, this simply isn’t the case. By productizing services, your firm stands to increase efficiency, standardize quality of service, and more. 

Without productized services, your firm may face several challenges:

• Lack of Structure: Managing a multi-advisor firm without standardized processes can lead to inconsistencies in client care and inefficiencies in operations.
• Client Management Difficulties: It becomes challenging to keep track of where each client is in their financial planning process, leading to potential oversights or delays.
• Hiring Challenges: Understanding why your firm is at capacity and how much time is being spent on each function is difficult without clear processes, making it hard to hire effectively.
• Founder Burnout: Founders often find themselves stuck working in the business rather than on it because they can't delegate tasks effectively to their team.

The Benefits of Productization

Luckily, productized services can help you to overcome these challenges and grow your firm in a scalable way. With a productized service model, you can overcome these challenges and unlock several key benefits for your RIA:

• Clarity for Clients: Clients have a clear understanding of what they’re getting, which enhances their confidence in your firm’s value.
• Operational Efficiency: Your team can easily understand and follow standardized processes, leading to greater efficiency and consistency in service delivery.
• Scalability: With a repeatable process in place, your business becomes more scalable, allowing for growth without sacrificing quality.
• Consistency in Client Care: Productization sets a standard for client care that ensures every client receives the same high level of service, regardless of who they work with in your firm.

What Does It Mean to Productize Your Service?

There are a lot of misconceptions in the financial advice industry around what it means to productize your services, with the idea often being villainized as the “end” of boutique or high-touch offerings. This couldn’t be further from the truth!

Productizing your service essentially means turning your expertise into a standardized offering that can be consistently delivered to clients. This involves three key steps: productizing, standardizing, and systematizing.

1. Productize: This is where you take your specialized knowledge or service and package it into a clear, marketable product. Instead of offering a vague promise of “financial planning,” you create specific packages—like a signature one-time plan offering, a bundled comprehensive package, or a service specifically for a certain client demographic (industry-specific employees, business owners, etc.)—each with defined outcomes. This makes it easier for potential clients to understand exactly what they’re getting and why it’s valuable.
2. Standardize: Once you have your service packages, the next step is to standardize the process. This means developing a set of procedures and guidelines that ensure each client receives the same level of service, regardless of which team member is delivering services to your clients. Standardization reduces variability in the client experience and ensures your high standards are consistently met.
3. Systematize: The final step is to systematize the delivery of these services. This involves creating workflows, checklists, and automation where possible. Systematization makes your processes more efficient and scalable, freeing up your time to focus on more strategic aspects of your business. It also makes it easier to onboard new team members, as they can quickly learn and adhere to the established processes.

A 10-Point Checklist to Productize, Standardize, and Systematize Your RIA Services

Ready to get started creating a productized, standard service model for your firm to run efficiently and scale? 

This checklist provides you with 10 actionable steps to help you productize, standardize, and systematize your services. Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your current processes, this guide will help you build a more robust and scalable RIA firm.

How to Productize

1. Create Packages for Your Offerings: Define the scope of each service, specify included planning services, and identify the ideal client avatar and benefits for each package.

2. Evaluate and Set Pricing: Research your current pricing tiers and competitors, and consult a compliance expert to ensure your pricing is both reasonable for clients and sustainable for your firm.

How to Standardize

3. Define Your Client Segmentation: Create meaningful client segments by considering meeting frequency, servicing team involvement, and implementation styles, ensuring your services are tailored effectively.

4. Standardize Your Servicing Team – Internal and Outsourced: Consider a mix of in-house and outsourced providers to deliver services, and understand the resources needed to provide the best client experience.

5. Create a Client Service Calendar for Each Segment: Develop a service calendar for each client segment, assign tasks to team members, and include key meetings, account servicing, and operations tasks.

6. Implement Scalable Touchpoints: Introduce scalable touchpoints such as newsletters, client events, and webinars to maintain client relationships as your firm grows.

How to Systematize

7. Create Workflows and Automations: Start small by creating workflows for critical tasks, then gradually expand to systematize all tasks on your client service calendar.

8. Create Templates for Your Core Advice and Expertise Deliverables: Decide how you will deliver your expertise, whether through PDFs, interactive meetings, or other mediums, and ensure it aligns with client preferences.

9. Create Templates for All Client-Facing Deliverables: Develop standardized templates for every stage of the client journey, from sales and onboarding to review meetings, ensuring a consistent client experience.

10. Power Your CRM: Maximize your CRM’s capabilities by integrating it with other tools, leveraging pre-built workflows, and customizing them to fit your processes.

Are You Ready to Build the Systems That Will Drive Your RIA’s Future Success?

As you consider productizing your RIA’s service model, remember many firms have already mastered this transition—it’s doable even if change is intimidating!

Companies like the Kinder Institute of Life Planning and Values-Based Financial Planning by Bill Bachrach offer frameworks that have been successfully adopted by countless firms over the past several years. While these frameworks provide a solid foundation, the most successful firms go a step further—they customize these approaches to reflect their unique values, expertise, and client base. This personalization is what sets them apart.

Running a service-based business means working with people, and people are complex. This article is written to help you scale your business to help more people while still maintaining that crucial human connection. Behind every strong service-based business is a solid team that connects with clients while the business operates like a well-oiled machine. Keep this in mind as you consider how to implement these strategies.

When taking action, consider the following:

• Customization is Key: Use established frameworks but make them your own. Tailor them to reflect your firm's strengths and values.
• Focus on Systems and Human Connection: Effective systems allow your team to focus on building meaningful relationships with clients while ensuring smooth operations.
• Start Small and Scale Wisely: Implement these strategies gradually. Begin with small steps, build on successes, and continuously refine your processes.

As John Maxwell wisely said, “Systems help us to move forward, to go as far as we possibly can. They enable us to work faster, smarter, and more strategically.” The key is to make these systems a part of your routine—not just a one-time effort but an ingrained part of your business’ DNA.

If you have any questions or need more personalized guidance, the Level Best team is here to help. We specialize in partnering with firms like yours to create custom solutions that ensure your business is not just surviving but thriving. Let’s work together to take your firm to the next level.

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Charesse Spiller, founder of Level Best and FinOps Co-op®, helps financial firms streamline operations, scale seamlessly, and enhance client experiences through process optimization, tech integration, and team empowerment.

image credit: Adobe Stock Images