Why advisory practices should look at their physical office space in a rapidly evolving industry
Our team is greeting the new year from a new office. After twenty years in a heritage century home turned office on Yonge St. in Thornhill, and the better part of a year spent searching for our new space, we’ve decided to invest meaningfully in our physical space. The decision came about for many reasons, from a rent hike to the impact of subway boring machines running under our old office, but fundamentally we saw an opportunity to modernize our physical office space in line with how we’ve modernized our practice.
Even though zoom calls take up more of an advisor’s calendar than they ever did before the pandemic, we’ve doubled down on our offices. We did so to build a stronger more cohesive team, to power our growth — especially among younger clients, and to meet some of the physical demands that a more digital world places on advisors. I would encourage other practice leaders to take the time this year to reassess their own physical spaces and think about how they might arrange things to build their own futures.
Our decision to move came around the end of 2023 at a team planning session. As much as we enjoyed the character of our heritage home office, our team was growing and the 2,500 square feet of truncated spaces spread over two floors wasn’t proving to be enough. The office was almost a physical embodiment of how this business used to run: lots of walls and corridors with very little open space for collaboration.
Finding that open space wasn’t necessarily easy. You might have heard that the office real estate market is in a bit of a slump. While that might mean there are deals to be found, we saw a lot of dead and dying older spaces in our hunt. We wanted a building that felt new, lively, and attractive to come to. We found that space, finally, at Highway 7 and the 404 in Markham, just ten minutes’ drive from our old office space. We took over 5,000 square feet of the top floor in Spring of 2024 and got to work laying out the space.
We designed our office based on the trends we saw in our practice and the industry as a whole. Before COVID, about eighty per cent of our meetings were in office. Since the pandemic we’ve worked to bring more clients in, but the majority of meetings still take place over zoom. However, we’ve noted that in-person meetings tend to last longer and bring in significantly more money than a remote call. We designed the new office to better meet our clients where they are and to encourage them to meet us here.
We tooled up our zoom rooms. At our old office we had two tiny zoom booths, where only one advisor could fit to talk with clients. We’ve seen, though, that the nature of service has changed and most zoom calls are now held with at least one advisor and one associate. In our new space we’ve built zoom rooms that can accommodate up to three people together on one call. They’ve got well-placed high definition cameras, logos in the background, and all the tools required to display professionalism and poise over a video call.
To help bring clients into the office and facilitate better conversations we constructed five new meeting rooms. One is larger to accommodate full family meetings as the intergenerational wealth transfer gets fully underway. Two are standard sized and the final two offer something a bit different. Designed as ‘casual rooms’ these spaces have couches and armchairs for a more relaxed atmosphere. They’re still equipped with TV screens for presentations, but they welcome a more easy-going and extended conversation where our clients can share more of their hopes, dreams, and desires with us.
Client outreach goes beyond zoom calls and in-person meetings, though. In today’s environment an advisory practice needs to be a content shop, which is why we added a content studio to our office. We now have a dedicated space to record and edit our YouTube videos, podcasts, and other media, keeping up with what’s expected of modern practices’ marketing efforts.
Perhaps the most important thing our new office gives the practice is a sense of togetherness. Our advisors now all sit in a bullpen, opening up space for collaboration when they’re not in meetings. Our marketing, compliance, and service teams are all within a few steps of each other. In the old office, we grew so much that we didn’t have a space large enough to have our whole team sitting together for a Monday morning meeting. We had to hold those meetings over zoom, despite all of us being in the office. Now the single largest space in our new office is our team meeting room, where we can come together to share ideas and celebrate success.
For all the noise about remote work and the end of physical offices, we’ve seen firsthand how important the office is to an advisory practice. We built our new office to meet the demands of modern clients, to empower our growing team, and to set our practice up for the future. As other practice leaders look ahead, I’d suggest they look closely at the walls around them.
Rob McClelland is a Senior Financial Advisor with Assante Capital Management Ltd. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of Assante Capital Management Ltd. Please contact him at (905) 771 - 5200 or visit http://www.tmfg.ca/ to discuss your particular circumstances prior to acting on the information above. Assante Capital Management Ltd. is a Member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund and the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization.
