5 Benefits of Teaming For My Financial Advising Career

Enjoying your career, check.

Working with some great clients, check.

Established financial advising practice, check.

Now, where do you go from here? Are you wondering if your practice has the potential to exponentially grow? If so, what can you do to get it there?

Here at Consolidated Planning, we understand that you want more in your career and we believe that no goal is too big. Throughout an advisor’s career with us, we continually provide support and resources to help move their needle forward, helping to achieve those goals.

Moving the needle forward in your career might mean adding teaming to your practice. But not just any team, the right team. Before you can determine if teaming is right for you, or not, you need to ultimately decide if you’re able to make adjustments and let go of some control with your existing, and future book of clients.

What Is Teaming In The Financial Planning Industry?

Teaming for you as a financial advisor means working with one or more advisors to offer more to your clients. More robust services, specialties, and an overall experience. Teaming can be accomplished through formal partnerships, joint ventures, or loose affiliations between individual advisors.

Forming a team or joining an established team as an experienced advisor is not a sign of weakness but a sign that you’re ready for more.

5 Benefits of Teaming As An Experienced Financial Advisor

Adding teaming to your financial advising practice can open doors that you didn’t even realize were there.

You’re likely considering teaming for your financial advising practice for two reasons, you’re lacking a skill set, and/or you’re at capacity with your clients or workload.

So, how can teaming benefit your established practice?

#1 Diversified Skills And Expertise

Rather than dwelling on the areas you don’t excel in, find those skills in a counterpart. Just like you have your unique ability, so does everyone else.

Teaming can bring together varying skill sets and levels of expertise, allowing you to offer a wider range of services, more in-depth information, and ultimately better solutions for your clients.

As you get in the flow of your practice over the years, it’s normal to feel stagnant in your approach and offerings. With teaming, you and your clients will reap the benefits of different perspectives and experiences, to better identify risks and opportunities that may have been overlooked.

#2 Enhanced Client Experience

Speaking of clients, gone are the days of offering a subpar client experience. With countless financial advising firms to choose from, offering an enhanced client experience is one way to keep your hard-earned clients, your clients.

With teaming, you can dedicate more time or personnel to focus on improving the quality of service and interactions between you and your clients. Consistent communication and touchpoints can make all the difference in ensuring your clients feel connected in the process and confident in the trajectory of their financial wellness. A better client experience helps you build your practice in many ways.

• Building trust and credibility
• Enhancing brand reputation
• Attracting more clients
• Driving business growth

#3 Increased Client Capacity

Delivering an enhanced client experience can lead to an increase in your client base. As an individual advisor, it’s only natural that you may reach the capacity at which you can no longer accept new clients.

Yes, that means you might find yourself turning away business.

Teaming gives you the opportunity to increase your client capacity. Adding more clients to your portfolio can help you grow your practice more efficiently.

If you know teaming isn’t the right fit for you at the moment, rest assured we have solutions for you. All advisors at Consolidated Planning will have access to internal teams that alleviate some of your non-revenue-generating activities, allowing you to be in front of your clients and prospects as much as possible.

#4 Shared Resources

The possibility of resources available to you as a financial advisor is limitless. By adding teaming to your practice, you will have shared resources, either through other team members existing resources or an increase in income to establish new resources for continued growth.

These areas may include:

• Referrals: through your team’s centers of influence, natural markets, and target markets, you will have the opportunity for increased referrals.

Yep, your circle for quality leads just got that much bigger.

• Assistants: having dedicated personnel to focus on your non-revenue-generating activities drastically frees up your time to focus on your clients and prospects. While some firms may offer some level of support in these areas, you may find yourself needing your own assistant. Through shared or pooled resources, having an assistant can be more than possible with teaming.

• Marketing Efforts: as a financial advisor, it isn’t enough to lean just on luck or referrals alone. Marketing yourself and your practice is a must. A must. On average, advisors spend about $16,000 annually on marketing, according to Broadridge’s third-annual financial advisor marketing survey. What are you spending on marketing?

If your answer is relatively nothing, teaming can help you get started or put more of an emphasis on the importance of marketing. These areas may include:

• Website
• Social Media
• Content Creation
• Email campaigns
• Analytics

At Consolidated Planning, we offer our financial advisors support in identifying target market(s), utilizing an assistant through our Virtual Assistant Program, and customized marketing and business plans with our Marketing Administration And Practice Management Solutions (MAPS) team.

Shared resources can help you reduce your costs while increasing efficiency.

#5 Less Burnout

Becoming more efficient means feeling less burnout. You might already know this feeling well, especially in your financial advising career. There are so many moving parts, and even with resources to help you solely focus on building relationships, there is a lot of work to be done.

Teaming helps you to disperse responsibilities and workload fairly which may help to alleviate added stress and burnout for all team members.

If the workload is not dispersed fairly among team members, this is where issues may arise.

Possible Disadvantages of Teaming

Wherever there are advantages, we may encounter some disadvantages. When two people or groups are coming together, there are bound to be issues that arise.

#1 Competition

The financial advising industry is a very competitive environment. This need to compete may transfer over to your team as well. While competition is unavoidable, competition in a teaming scenario can lead to conflict and tension. Ultimately, conflict and tension can lead to a less collaborative and supportive environment.

Remember, the reason you’re considering teaming is to further build on your need for a collaborative and supportive environment.

#2 Dependence on Others

Typically as a financial advisor, you grow accustomed to relying solely on yourself to build your practice. With teaming in place, you may find that your work is more interdependent on the members of the team.

This dependence on others may lead to an unequal contribution of duties, either due to laziness or a lack of organization. Milton Friedman said it best, “when everybody owns something, nobody owns it.”

Each member of your team must own something.

The dependency on teaming requires a shift in your ways of thinking, which makes teaming not suitable for every personality.

However, with the right team, these disadvantages can largely be avoided. At Consolidated Planning, we take the process of teaming very seriously, as each firm you’re evaluating should.

How To Get Started With Teaming As An Experienced Advisor At Consolidated Planning

Avoiding the downfalls of teaming is why we spend so much time helping advisors find and build their teams. The right teams.

Creating the right team structure should take into account some key areas that will affect both your practice and the longevity of a successful team. The exercises to form your team will be completed before anything is finalized to ensure a successful match.

• Core Values: Identifying some core values that you want your team members to embody, such as, dedication, compassion, trust, dependability, and integrity, to name a few, can help guide your reason for forming a team and the goals you hope to achieve together.
• Clearly Defined Roles & Responsibilities: Determining each member’s role related to marketing, sales, and servicing will be mapped out. This exercise ensures that every T will be crossed in all aspects of the sales cycle, from prospecting through becoming a client, and beyond.
• The Sales Process: Since you will be operating as a team, your sales process should reflect that. What does that look like? Each account should follow the same process, from meeting agendas to onboarding new clients. Having continuity in these areas further defines the expectations of the team.
• Client Segmentation & Client Service Model: Segmenting your clients by tiers is a helpful guide to determine your client servicing model. This model will act as a guide for any differences in services and delivery. Tiers also make it easier to assign client accounts to team members. For example, tier 1 clients, or A clients, are typically those who you will spend the majority of your time with, whereas tier 3 clients, or C clients, might not require many touch points and are happy to work with your counterpart.
• Client Ownership: Create policies as it relates to team members departing from the team. Any change to the team, lack of performance, differences, disability, death, and retirement should all be considered for their ownership with the team.
• Compensation: Before you can settle on compensation, it’s a good idea to clarify each team member’s status within the team. A team is typically made up of team leaders, team associates, joint-work associates, and staff. Status clarity will help shape your team compensation model and give you the opportunity to align activities and objectives.

Regardless of the firm you’re working with, deciding to add teaming to your practice is a huge undertaking and shouldn’t be taken lightly. You’ll thank yourself later for doing your due diligence upfront when it comes to building your team.

Will Teaming Help Me Build A More Successful Financial Advising Practice?

While the process of putting a team into place can seem overwhelming, it’s worth the effort to find the best advisors for your team. The good news is, we are continually onboarding new financial advisors that fit our culture and have the desire to work on a team.

Whether you are ready to offer more to your clients or are in need of more support, teaming might be a good fit for you. Teaming allows you to be more productive, offer your clients greater diversity of thought and provide highly responsive services, ideally leading to more referrals and more hands to service and nurture these clients.

To learn more about joining a team at Consolidated Planning, reach out to our recruiters to begin the discussion.

 

 

 

2023-150933 Exp. 2/2025