Practice management consultant on why he asks advisors to find him 200 hours
Grant Hicks gets worried when his clients start spending too much time on admin. The president of Advisor Practice Management works directly with financial advisors and, in doing so, sees the draw of the operations side. He notes that as advisors grow their businesses, their workloads tend to shift. Where they had previously spent 80% of their time on clients, and 20% on admin, that balance often slides towards a 60/40.
Grant refers to the phenomenon as management drift, which occurs naturally as businesses grow. Advisors, he says, can be prone to this drift because they often function as entrepreneurs and founders of their businesses, and take on additional administrative duties rather than delegating.
“What advisors need to find out is, how much time are they spending on the management side and how much time are they spending on the client side,” Hicks says. “That’s the functional piece you start off with and when you want to win time back from the management side to go to the client side, you need to find someone on your team who will free up 200 hours for you every year.”
Hicks encourages advisors to look, first and foremost, at their administrative assistants by reframing them as the office “tech implementer.” Technology can make or break a modern practice, and while an efficiently integrated tech stack can help drive efficiencies, having to manage updates, new changes, and new tools can cause more management drift. Delegating those tech responsibilities can mean smoother implementation and adoption.
As an advisor grows and scales their business, Hicks believes that more delegation will be needed. He notes that an advisor will be quick to bring on a junior associate, but will rarely upgrade their management team to ensure sustainable growth. He believes that as teams grow they need someone to take on a Chief Operating Officer role dealing with HR issues and decisions while keeping the lights on — proverbially and literally.
Hicks explains that this kind of management drift can occur without an advisor ever noticing. Building and growing a business takes a huge degree of focus, which can lead to a degree of tunnel vision, where an advisor is so focused on the day to day that they can’t see more structural changes that have occurred gradually. Nowhere in that process, Hicks says, were advisors taught to delegate and widen their perspectives. That work requires a greater degree of intentionality on the part of the advisor.
Once an advisor realizes they need to delegate, they need to work out who can help them best. That can be difficult as the skillsets an advisor might need most are the same skills have no existing familiarity with. Assessing whether a possible tech implementer or COO has the skills you need can be a tough process. Hicks, however, believes that advisors’ skills in analysis and relationship-building they use with clients that can help when they’re hiring for support staff.
Even if an advisor has found the right person, they still have to make them want to come and stay in their practice. We’re in a tight labour market and business owners in Canada are feeling the need for staff. Hicks says that a clear career path is crucial to that attraction and retention question. He believes that advisors should build out current and future org charts. They can then show a new hire where they would fit in future growth plans and how they might grow within the practice. We also live in a new era of employment, where flexibility and remote work should be options available to staff.
Hicks also notes that additional pieces of professionalization, like an employee onboarding process, training program, and handbook can help make a new hire all the more successful.
The end goal of this delegation, hiring, and restructuring has to be client relationships, Hicks says. In his experience, a few key decisions can reset the balance of an advisor’s time and free them up to focus on growth.
“When advisor free up that time, you can see the relief on their face,” Hicks says. “They say ‘oh thank goodness, I don’t have to do all this anymore.’ They had been caught up in it because they felt it was their responsibility, but they just needed someone to tell them to delegate.”
