New Challenges, New Staff Roles

By Bob Veres

Most of you know that as advisory firms grow, they have to navigate a peculiarly tricky process of turning a few generalist jobs into (in some cases) many more specialized ones. The job descriptions become narrower in scope but hopefully the people who are wearing fewer hats are able to be more proactive and comprehensive about addressing their part of the bigger puzzle.

Five or six years ago, when I was writing the advisory firm of the future white paper, I predicted the new challenges in the marketplace would lead to entirely new, never-before-seen staff positions, which would (I thought) create a focus on activities which 1) had become increasingly complicated due to the profession’s evolution, and 2) tended in easier times to linger on the far end of the founder’s desk.

For example? A recent panel discussion addressed one of the biggest shifts in the advisor marketplace: the (rather urgent) need to create an office environment that will attract, develop, and retain talent. This was never really a front-burner issue back in the day when an advisory firm would post a job description and then duck so nobody was injured by the flood of resumes that came in. Today, there’s a lot more competition, where crucial operations and advisor staff are looking for (and finding) greener pastures, and where every job candidate you talk with already has five, eight, 10, or more offers.

And sure enough, the panelists were working with larger firms in new, never-before-seen positions that focused on these issues: Kate Kammes, chief talent officer at JMG Financial Group in Downers Grove, Ill., and Laurie Flenner, director of Engagement and Talent Development at Aspiriant (headquartered in Los Angeles). In my various interviews with them, and attending their session, I’ve seen the outlines of a new set of talent development best practices that involves self-guided career development, a constant diet of in-house and external training, much more sophisticated recruiting, and evaluating prospective hires (the training actually starts before the hiring), plus more effective onboarding processes, long-term mentoring, and two-way feedback mechanisms that lead to more improvements and innovations in staff development.

Another example: The profession is starting to evolve, with more interesting, more engaging client experiences that accompany the delivery of planning advice—which is the surest way to turn clients into referral sources. But advisors are constantly exhorted to run their firms more efficiently, which can mean, if that becomes the primary focus, less time and attention lavished on clients. In the past, the founder was the person who stood up and defended the inevitable inefficiencies of a great client experience but who will protect and evolve the client experience as firms get larger?

We now have a few full-time specialists who are tending the client experience at their firms, including Sandi Bragar, Aspirant’s chief client officer, and Chris Galeski, director of growth and advice at Morton Wealth in Calabasas, Calif.

They’re very different. Sandi is tasked with making sure Aspiriant advisors are each pursuing deep specialist knowledge in different planning areas, and ensuring when client challenges are uncovered, an advisor with the relevant specialist knowledge is called in. She has also organized a team approach among portfolio administrators, client service specialists, and advisors, which, she believes, allows the advisor to focus on, in addition to advice, a more nebulous goal she calls “intimacy.”

Chris, meanwhile, is pioneering an entirely unique client service model where, instead of quarterly or annual scheduled meetings, each advisor spontaneously reaches out to clients in a friendly way and asks how they’re doing and what they have going on. This is not as spontaneous as it sounds; every week, the firm’s advisors meet and look over a spreadsheet that tracks these seemingly random points of contact, with assigned goals relating to frequency and also measuring how productive the conversation was about connecting with the clients’ ever-shifting priorities and upcoming activities.

Another relatively new challenge is marketing. Back in the day, the founding advisor could bring in clients by cultivating relationships in the local community. Now, with the advent of Zoom client meetings, people seeking an advisor are increasingly looking outside the local market—basically, every advisor is now competing with every other one, everywhere. 

At the same time, the referral process has gotten complicated. Once upon a time, a client would tell a friend or neighbor about your firm, and the friend or neighbor would call you. Now the friend or neighbor will check you out on the web, and in the process discover there are thousands of other advisors to choose from.

All of the solutions to this shift in marketing dynamics are complicated. Your web presence needs to be at least (if not more) compelling than all those other advisors the prospect is checking out, with video messaging, client success stories, blogs, and (gulp) client testimonials. Outreach is now a matter of navigating the complexities of digital marketing and search engine optimization, which means, among other things, mastering the analytical software to evaluate the ever-evolving metrics of clicks and web visits, and knowing how to target the right audience with social media advertising. Remind me again: which CFP^® exam course taught you how to do these things?

The inevitable consequence is a new director of marketing role, a staff person who has mastered all these new marketing complexities. At present, only larger firms have hired a full-time person—some examples I’ve featured are Brittany Abbate at Choreo Advisors, Daniella Chuckran and Cammie Doder at Aspiriant, Michelle Winkles at Mission Wealth in Santa Maria, Calif., and Sean Shrewsbury at GenWealth Financial Advisors in Conway, Ark.

As a recent panel discussion made clear, “marketing officer” is a revenue-producing role; that is, growth and profits can be directly attributed to their efforts on behalf of their firms. We are gradually evolving out of the days when Fee-Only advisory firms neglected marketing because everybody was too focused on client service. Having a staff position who organizes (and edits) all of the advisors’ blog posts, the firm’s social profile, and web environment means getting the attention of the marketplace always has somebody’s full attention.

The great thing about larger firms creating these new staff positions is that the profession is being infused with people whose full-time job involves creating best practices in these relatively new areas of advisory firm focus. These individuals being profiled in my own publication, at conferences, and at other venues will inform the community and raise standards across the board.

And for smaller firms that can’t (yet) afford to hire these roles, we are going to see the evolution of outsource opportunities in each of these areas. Outsourced marketing is already widely available, and I’ve just written about a new just-in-time recruiting service that has emerged in the last few months. The Ensemble Practice has built a robust outsourced leadership training program for staff advisors. I’m going to predict (boldly, now that one of my other predictions has come true) that we’ll see an increasingly vibrant marketplace of new services the entire Fee-Only community can tap into as we meet the new evolutionary challenges facing the profession.

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Bob Veres is a 40-year commentator on the advisor profession who publishes a monthly consulting/information service called Inside Information (www.bobveres.com). If you think he’s totally full of the stuff that hits the fan, give him a piece of your mind at: bob@bobveres.com.  

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