How Do Financial Advisors Overcome Growth Plateau?

You’re a financial advisor with a few years of experience under your belt. You’ve found success in this business, but the growth you experienced early in your career has slowed. Life isn’t bad, but you know you’re capable of more. The problem is you’re alone and can’t quite figure out how to break through to the next level.

Consolidated Planning helps experienced advisors transform their practice to break through the dreaded growth plateau. We’ve spent more than four decades developing planning focused financial advisors. With our experience over that time, we’ve written a playbook to help experienced advisors triple their income within five years. 

This article will share the key elements financial advisors need to break through their plateau and start growing again. By the end of the article, you’ll have an action plan for growth that you can implement in your practice today.

 

Financial Advisors Practice A Growth Mindset

In this business, mindset is critical. Your mindset is a qualitative factor that is difficult to measure, but there are key attributes that growing advisors embody.

You must have the right vision for your practice if you want to grow. You don’t have to know how to achieve that vision, Consolidated Planning can help with that, but you must realize what is possible and want something more than you are capable of today. 

Your vision for the future should stretch you and require new capabilities to be learned. This realization must lead to new ways of thinking and doing in your practice. Otherwise, the same old thinking will lead to the same old results.

 

Financial Advisors Set Meaningful Goals

In addition to qualitative factors like mindset and vision, growing financial advisors set goals that are easily measured by quantitative factors. These goals should be meaningful and relevant to you, not some arbitrary number set by a sales manager’s quota.

In order to set meaningful goals, you must step into the future to find clarity in your vision. It’s critical that you know both where you are going and why you are going there. We can tailor a playbook to match any of your goals, but if you aren’t fully committed with purpose, you won’t find success.

Your commitment drives your success to start growing again.

 

4 Tips To Help Financial Advisors Start Growing Again

Growing financial advisors know that the same old thinking yields the same old results. Therefore, you must be committed to evolving as an advisor to achieve your vision. 

There are four key characteristics of a financial advisor in growth mode.

 

Tip #1: Find More Affluent Clients Through Target Markets

Becoming the trusted advisor to a target market or niche is an essential part of accelerating your practice growth. An established target market allows you to tailor your marketing and services to speak directly to your ideal prospects and deliver a greater value due to your expertise.

As you build your reputation as the go-to person in your target market, you’ll find that you are able to work with larger clients and capture more walletshare than you did as a jack of all trades. Your specialization will lead to more satisfied clients and more referrals to your ideal prospects.

 

Tip #2: Refine Your Client Service Model

All advisors should have an established client service model. As your practice grows, it’s important to update your service model to reflect your growth. A well developed client service model benefits you and your clients in two ways. 

First, it creates a framework for a consistent client experience with clear expectations. Often this leads to proactively planning for clients versus reactively responding to client requests. This difference positively impacts both the way your clients feel about your and the efficiency of your client service.

Second, a client service model should define clear minimums for clients to work with you. This is often referred to as segmenting your book of business. By establishing minimums and service tiers based on minimum client threshold, you ensure that your best clients are receiving your best service while not wasting your time with clients that aren’t a good fit. 

Outsourcing (or even offloading) the servicing of clients who don’t fit within your service model frees up time for you to work with new clients that are a good fit. Your time is at a premium, a client service model can help you put your time to its highest and best use.

 

Tip #3: Focus On Financial Planning Not Financial Products

Most financial advisors have a relatively narrow focus on a particular product and come from either an insurance or investment background. This bias is reflected in their practice and the overwhelming majority of their revenue can be traced back to one product.

We’ve found that clients desperately want one trusted advisor to coordinate their financial picture. Adding full financial planning services allows you to become that trusted advisor to your clients and adds additional revenue streams. 

 

Tip #4: Build A Team To Support Your Practice Vision

You have a unique ability as a financial advisor that has been developed over the course of your career. This unique ability is something you are great at doing and also enjoy doing. If you reflect on your career, you’ll likely find that the times in your career when you experienced the most growth were the times when you operated predominantly within your unique abilities.

Growing advisors know that focusing on their unique ability will lead to success. However, your practice requires skills outside of your unique ability to function at an optimal level. 

So what should you do? 

You should build a team around you to compliment your skills and handle any tasks not within your wheelhouse. At Consolidated Planning, we created internal teams to support your planning, marketing, and administrative challenges to allow you easily build a team that brings your practice vision to reality.

 

Will You Break Through Your Financial Growth Plateau?

It’s common for a tenured financial advisor to experience a growth plateau at some point in their career. The skills that you learned and developed at the beginning of your career brought you to your current level of success but a new playbook may be needed to take you further.

Relaunching your practice into growth mode is easier with a partner who’s been there before. To learn more about growing your practice, reach out to our team to revive a custom practice building playbook with a road map for your growth.

 

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