Independent financial advisors often wear multiple hats—business owner, back-office support, administrator, marketer, et cetera. While this can be a point of pride that advisors can juggle so many things, it also means that they’re not given the time to really work on client service or their business.
There is no better time than now to double down on client service. After all, advisors may be experiencing what they think is client satisfaction but, as research shows, that may only be the market’s strong performance. The 2024 JD Power U.S. Full-Service Satisfaction Survey showed a correlation between investor satisfaction and market performance, which proves clients can be fickle, particularly if their portfolio isn’t rising.
In that same survey, JD Power also found that 36% of millennials who have more than $1 million in investable assets will potentially leave their advisory firm within the next year. That’s in part because 70% of these investors are already using a secondary investment firm. In these cases, whether advisors know it or not, they’ve been actively competing for their clients' business this whole time.
As the Great Wealth Transfer begins to occur, advisors must create processes that ensure a streamlined, seamless client experience that delights. As an industry, we’ll only get one shot at doing this massive movement of assets correctly, and no one wants to be on the wrong side of that equation.
Fears of fleeing clients aren’t the only reason advisors should think about which services they retain in-house. It should also be a matter of what they can do well enough. Most advisors don’t have a marketing background or an in-depth knowledge of client relationship management workflows. And that’s fine. But there does come a point in a firm’s life cycle when it no longer makes sense for an advisor to be the firm’s back-office support, transition specialist and serving clients. It takes good business sense and courage to admit when you can’t do everything, but when advisors do this, it can pay off in dividends.
Take, for instance, an advisor who has lackluster transition management skills. This presents an opportunity to hire an agency or use the fractional services of a specialist so the firm benefits from an optimal transition and the advisor who otherwise would have been tied up trudging through this work is helping clients instead.
There’s a greater dearth of talented professionals able to assist advisors than in the past decade. The latest McKinsey American Opportunity Survey found that 36% of its participants identify themselves as “independent workers,” otherwise known as “freelancers” or “fractional employees.” This presents a major opportunity for advisors to enrich their firms with others’ talents.
At the end of the day, an increasing number of on-the-fence clients plus only 24 hours in a day equals the opportune time to maximize time and skill to the benefit of the end client.