Running your own firm as a registered investment advisor (RIA) may require you to take on several job titles. Other than handling the responsibilities of an advisor, you may have to be your own secretary, accountant, event manager, marketing manager, and so on. While it means everything will be done the way you want it to be, it can become overwhelming quickly.
Financial advisory services is a relationship business. The most important thing for an advisor is their clients. Directly meeting with your clients is essential in nurturing the relationship, fostering understanding, and building trust. However, when important tasks are being overlooked and the actual advising part is being done less, your solution is outsourcing. Outsourcing allows you to hire outside help to off-load tasks such as dealing with compliance concerns, various administrative tasks, preparing critical reports, research material, etc, allowing you to focus more on high-value tasks and nurturing your relationship with your client.
Why Outsourcing Can Be The Best Solution
Data shows that 57% of firms use outsourcing in order to focus on their core business. Outsourcing is a commonly used practice in which businesses hire a third party to perform tasks or services traditionally carried out by in-house employees.
Helps Increase Efficiency
Outsourcing comes with numerous benefits. When you decide to hand over back-office tasks to another person, you are allowing yourself to have more time to spend on high-value tasks that require your attention specifically. This includes spending more time with clients as well as focusing on essential duties such as analyzing investment options, determining risk tolerance, or planning financial strategies.
Cost-Effective Strategy to Increase Revenue
While one may think outsourcing tasks may mean additional expenses added to the budget, in reality, it will help increase your revenue. When you choose to delegate tasks to outside help, your work efficiency will increase and you can handle more clients and deal with them faster while providing a better client experience.
Generally, when starting your own firm, you may have budget restrictions to consider. Hiring a third-party staff member costs significantly less money compared to an in-house employee. Outsourcing usually means paying by the hour or on a per-project basis. As an added bonus, Unlike a regular in-house employee, you are not expected to cover any additional expenses for the third-party employee such as health insurance, paid leaves, bonuses, severance pay, etc.
What Tasks Can You Outsource?
Managing Administrative Tasks
One of the easiest tasks you can hand over to your assistant is administrative tasks such as attending to calls and emails. Life is hectic for anyone whether you are a client, advisor, or in any other profession. Repeatedly making calls to arrange meetings or makeup appointments can eat up a lot of your hours in a week as well as be highly frustrating. Most of the time you will never be able to reach a person on your first attempt, especially during working hours, and some matters are best dealt with through a direct call rather than a text message or email.
A financial advisor is flooded with the tasks of emailing clients and compliance regulatory authorities back and forth daily. Not only can your assistant respond to emails on your behalf, but they also can help prioritize non-urgent emails and inform you of those that require your immediate attention. While you focus on preparing for the actual meeting-with-the-client part, your assistant can schedule meetings and follow up with clients.
Making Travel Arrangements and Managing Your Itinerary
As a financial advisor, you may be required to travel sometimes. Even if you haven't expanded across city or state lines, you will be expected to travel between various agencies and departments within your city. However, if you handle clients across borders, your travel plans may include much more than traveling to your local bank.
Booking tickets, making hotel reservations, confirming flights, handling visa arrangements, and preparing an itinerary can be a nuisance task for a financial advisor whose sole focus should be his clients and their portfolios. However outsourcing these tasks can ensure that not only is your day meticulously planned and your itinerary fool-proof, but you are spending most of your time handling core tasks for your clients.
Helping With The Client Onboarding Process
Making a good first impression in the onboarding stage of a client is the most crucial point of your long-term relationship with them as an advisor. It is necessary that all “t's” are crossed and every “i” is dotted if you want to lay the foundation for a trustworthy and reliable relationship. Handling the whole onboarding process from start to finish can be risky.
The time and effort required to give your client a satisfactory onboarding experience can be challenging and requires you to manage a lot of administrative tasks before the actual “advising” part begins. Consider the following list:
- Exchange of contact information between client and advisor
- Making a confirmation call about the first meeting
- Preparing a questionnaire, contract, and a list of deliverables
- Preparing meeting agenda and recording minutes of a meeting
- Sending a welcome email
- Vetting, copying, and storing documents
- Acquiring signatures on documents
- Following up and receiving feedback
- Updating client data on CRM
Notice how none of these tasks deal with the actual handling or advising of the client? It is these sorts of tasks that are best handed over to a third party to manage.
Website And Social Media Management
Every business requires an online presence nowadays and managing social media and a business website is time-consuming. Marketing for your firm is essential as the competition is tough in the financial industry. A financial advisor must grab on to every opportunity to acquire leads and prospects and that means making a presence on all popular social media platforms and maintaining a professional and smooth-running business website.
However, creating posts and designing and maintaining a website requires you to have a certain know-how about social media and web design. Therefore, once you’ve made up your mind about outsourcing some tasks, you might want to also consider hiring help that possesses a certain set of skills such as in social media management or web development. The benefits here may be two-fold: not only will you save time but will also have the guidance of someone who knows how to “sell” your business online.
Help Develop Marketing Techniques
By hiring someone who has the experience to create and manage social media posts, respond to comments, and address the queries and concerns of followers, you can save a huge amount of time and energy, all the while marketing your business in a cost-effective manner.
Using social media platforms and analyzing your website performance is a great way to get to know your audience better. A web developer can tell you the exact audience demographic you are attracting on your social media accounts or the frequently asked questions you may be receiving on your website. Is your majority audience an older group looking for advice on retirement planning? Or are you attracting a younger demographic hoping for advice on making investment plans in order to reach their future financial goals? Is your female audience mostly inquiring about low-risk investment strategies?
A professional web developer can help you track website traffic and discover what is attracting leads and potential clients the most as well as help you figure out your weak marketing spots. You can tweak your marketing techniques by learning from those who are excelling in the financial industry or the ones who have made some mistakes. Have your help research what your competition is doing and what marketing methods are or are not working for them and update your marketing strategies accordingly.
In Conclusion
If you are managing your business on your own, wearing everyone’s hat can eventually come to impact your quality of service and an exceptional financial advisor never compromises on quality. When juggling so many tasks on your own, you may end up not performing the task you are most skilled at-managing clients and their portfolios.
Spending hours handling menial tasks may leave only a limited time for you to meet with your clients and certain tasks may be overlooked. If your business is showing these signs, consider outsourcing tasks to a third party to save time and increase efficiency. Good luck!
