Adding young blood to talent pool has added value for clients and helps future-proof the business, says top financial advisor
For any veteran financial advisor, the process of building a practice is something between an art and a science.
As many books as there are on practice management, networking, entrepreneurship, and everything else, the reality is every advisory business is unique, and owner-advisors will inevitably have to make detours and course corrections on their growth journey.
That’s what Rob McClelland, senior financial advisor of The McClelland Financial Group at Assante Capital Management Ltd, had to do earlier this year upon taking inventory at his practice.
“We had four advisors on the team: myself and three others,” McClelland says. “I realized that I hadn't focused enough on growing the advisory team.”
McClelland is in his 60s, while his business partner is 54. While the other two advisors are younger, he wants to ensure his practice has a future and his clients will be left in capable hands.
With that in mind, he decided to deepen his bench with three associate advisors. The McClelland Financial Group has been an eight-person advisory team for six months so far – and the change is paying dividends.
“Those associate advisors are in charge of getting ready for each client meeting, sitting in on all of the client meetings, and then doing the meeting summaries,” McClelland says. “It's basically freed up the senior advisors: they don't have to prep as much; they don't have to close the meeting as much; and they get to be more involved in the client meeting itself.”
The benefit to clients goes beyond increased engagement at meetings. “Redundancy” is often regarded as a dirty word, but McClelland says having two advisory team members that understand every client’s situation has been invaluable from a continuity planning perspective.
“If an advisor is sick or out of the office, there's someone else on the team that completely understands that client's goals, financial plan, and portfolio,” he says. Each associate is assigned to one of the senior advisors, and McClelland works with all three of them to expedite their training.
Letting junior advisors attend client meetings and do the grunt work for seasoned wealth professionals, McClelland adds, accelerates their on-the-job learning process.
“Normally with an associate or junior advisor, you’d give them some of your smaller clients to work with, and they would gradually get up to speed,” he says. “By sitting in meetings with a senior advisor, they're getting exposed to everything from day one; they're learning what it's like to work with a $4-million company, and all the challenges that go into that. Their education is just skyrocketing very quickly, so it's working well.”
Beyond having additional people, McClelland is also participating in the wave of the future by experimenting with artificial intelligence at his practice. For Zoom meetings, he says they’re employing tools to record and generate transcripts of conversations.
“It's good, but it's not at the stage where you could send it to a client as a summary of the meeting,” he says. “Cleaning up the transcript is often as time-consuming as our original process of creating meeting memos. We use parts of it to enhance our meeting memos, but it's not something you can just fire off to the client after the meeting.”
The strides in AI technology since last year have certainly captured the imagination, with potential wealth tech applications running the gamut from financial planning to portfolio management, data analytics, fraud detection, and more. At his practice, McClelland is encouraging team members to explore the possibilities of weaving AI into their workflows.
“I'm having every team member try and incorporate AI into what they're doing, whether it's in client service, or marketing, or communications,” he says. “It's new for everybody. There's a lot of great stuff with it, but it's far from perfect.”
