Support In Your First Year As A Financial Advisor

What do I want my career to look like?

What kind of advisor do I want to be?

How will I learn the industry?

How will I find clients?

How will I know what to do with my clients once I get them?

Once you’ve landed on financial advising for your career choice it’s normal to have seemingly endless questions for what your first year will look like as an advisor.

Here at Consolidated Planning, we will help you navigate your first year and beyond with proven workflows and processes in place for your success. With dozens of advisors who have been where you stand now, we understand the uncertainty that comes along with leaving the job you feel comfortable at for the unknown of a career in financial advising.

Knowing that you want to be a financial advisor is just half the battle. Here we will help you understand how to lean into the necessary support in building your practice, how that can help you avoid failure, and if Consolidated Planning is the right place for you to start your practice or not.

 

How Will You Learn To Be A Financial Advisor?

There are two characteristics necessary to be a successful financial advisor – the ability to convey complex information in a simple way and the desire to build relationships.

Everything else can and will be learned.

So, how exactly will you learn to be a financial advisor to your clients? 

 

#1 MENTORSHIP

We want to be very clear about something, there will be good days, great days, and really bad days as a financial advisor.

The good news is, a mentor can coach you through it all.

Something you’ll want to evaluate is how each firm’s mentorship program is structured. A few questions you can ask are:

• Is your mentor your boss?
• Is your mentor matched specifically for you?
• To what extent will you have access to your mentor?

The answers to these questions matter when it comes to the right mentor for the outlook of your career. For example, if your mentor’s performance is dependent upon your productivity, they may only be focused on what you are, or aren’t producing.

As an advisor at Consolidated Planning, you will learn that having a mentor is an invaluable resource to you, especially in those early days as they often have accomplished what’s before you.

Being coachable is essential here. 

Believe it or not, your mentor, and other advisors at Consolidated Planning want to see you succeed. Your mentor wants to help you avoid common mistakes that new financial advisors make and mistakes even they made at the start of their career.

 

#2 TRAINING

For an impactful start to your financial advising career, you will reap the benefits of training that focuses on compound learning. With this kind of learning, each aspect builds on the other, helping each area of knowledge grow at a faster rate. 

Every training at Consolidated Planning is intentional and will help build you as an advisor, not just focus on products. Some trainings include:

• Take Off: This initial learning path is focused on our planning process and truly helps you “take off” as an advisor. This year-long training will bring full awareness around our processes, helping you to have the confidence necessary to deliver the very best to your clients.
• Consolidated Planning University (CPU): This training takes place about every 60 days and is focused on the basics of what we do and how we do it.
• Learning and Action Academies: These academies cover marketing, prospecting, and planning, starting with the learning academy to teach and the action academy for implementation.
• Living Balance Sheet® Foundations (LBS): This is a tool you will frequently use as an advisor at Consolidated Planning. During this multi-day learning event, you will learn the Living Balance Sheet, focus on our beliefs around planning, and dive deep into the activities needed for a successful career.

 

#3 SUPPORT RESOURCES

It’s no surprise that you will need all the support you can get when you’re learning any new industry.  A career in financial advising is no different.

With a proven process and a proven path, successful advisors at Consolidated Planning learn to trust the process and lean into the resources designed to help build a thriving practice. This doesn’t mean you won’t be putting in long hours in the beginning stages of building your practice. Because you will.

These support resources will help get you to where you need to go but you still need to show up every day for yourself and your clients.

So, what will these resources do for you?

They will help you bring a contact from a prospect to a happy client. You just need to know what you want to achieve, what you need to achieve, and who will help get you there. This is what we like to call working for yourself but not by yourself.

 

MARKETING ADMINISTRATION AND PRACTICE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

A marketing and business plan is essential when starting your own business, so why would your financial planning practice be any different?

But these are both full time careers and you’re not sure where to start.

• What kind of marketing do you need? 
• What type of content needs to be created? 
• How do you market yourself to be different from all the other advisors? 
• Who do you market your services to?

With these questions in mind, you and the Marketing Administration And Practice Management Solutions (MAPS) team at Consolidated Planning will customize your approach to marketing yourself and your practice in a few ways.

• Identifying your target market: this is the ‘who’ part of your marketing that will help differentiate you. Who do you know? What are you interested in? What networks are you already part of?
• Creating your 90-day marketing plan: your marketing and business plan will be framed around your who, your target market(s). What resonates with this audience? What do they find valuable that you can provide?
• Finding efficiencies for your practice: shifting from employee to employer requires adequately managing your time. What can you delegate? How can your business and marketing plan help you set quality appointments?

Not only will the MAPS team help set you up for success in your first year, but they will teach you how to continue maximizing your efforts in the right places.

Marketing will help you attract quality prospects but what follows is what will help you make them clients.

 

 

THE ADVISOR PERFORMANCE GROUP

So, you’ve determined a strong prospect for your practice. Now what? 

• How do you approach the next step?
• How do you know what solution is best for your prospect? 
• How do you get from point A to point B with least resistance?

Deep breaths.

The Advisor Performance Group (APG) knows the answers to your burning questions. 

APG exists for the purpose of supporting advisors in any facet that has to do with taking your prospects through our planning process and turning them into clients. This support includes:

• Weekly meetings to review The Living Balance Sheet® — how it works, how you will use it and how your client will use it.
• Preparation for client meetings — from developing meeting narratives, potential objections, and any illustrations, APG works with you to best prepare for all client deliverables for a successful meeting.

Every one of your clients deserves the right strategy for their goals and APG helps you bring that to fruition.

 

THE NEW BUSINESS HUB

Once you have landed on the right solution for your client, you’re ready to get started on the paperwork.

…paperwork?

You didn’t become a financial advisor to spend your time on non-revenue generating activities, like sitting behind your desk buried in paperwork. And if you did, being a financial advisor probably isn’t the right career path for you after all.

Processing paperwork is where The New Business Hub (NBH) comes in.

This team averages 30 cases a week and are equipped with the experience to more accurately enter the necessary information on behalf of you and your client. With the desired solutions for your client, the NBH team onboards and processes new business paperwork, including life and disability applications and investment solutions. Here’s why this is helpful:

• You won’t have to spend time learning the ins and outs of processing paperwork
• You will spend less time on non-revenue generating activities and more time building your practice
• Less mistakes will be made when it comes to entering client data
• Paperwork will be done in a timely manner for your clients

Utilizing the New Business Hub helps you build a consultative financial planning practice from day one. With so much to learn in your early days, this is just another resource that allows you to put your energy and focus on relationship building.Z

 

Will You Be Successful Starting Your Financial Advising Career With Consolidated Planning?

As an advisor at Consolidated Planning  you will ask who, not how.

Who can help you avoid failure in your first year? Your mentor.

Who can help you with marketing? The Marketing Administration And Practice Management Solutions team.

Who can help you with client deliverables? The Advisor Performance Group.

Who can help you process paperwork? The New Business Hub.

But your success is ultimately dependent upon you and your activity level. The time you are given back to focus on revenue-generating activities and your unique ability must be spent wisely – in front of your clients and prospects.

If you are ready to put in the work and build your financial advising practice, with success as you define it, reach out to our recruiters to learn more about your next steps.

 

 

2023-152427 Exp. 3/2025