| 14 March 2008
When you decide to make progress in your firm, you create new tasks and responsibilities. Here's how to outsource those as well.
Resource: www.bobveres.com - I'm one of the coaches.
As you can see from the previous article, planners can benefit from a coach who has more of a hands-on style, who can bring detailed practice management information into the discussion. But what if you want service that is even more hands-on- -somebody who will not only help you figure out what you want to accomplish, but also help with the implementation? What if you want to outsource some of those new tasks you just created for yourself?
Meet two of a new breed of hands-on coaches for advisory firms: Laurie Gripshover ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) in Blue Bell, PA, and Ginny Hudgens of Back Offi ce Advisor (www.backoffi cea dvisor.com) in Baton Rouge, LA. Both have backgrounds in fi nancial planning, both are big-picture thinkers and skilled implementers, and both think that the very best coaching and consulting involves getting your hands dirty. “Many consultants just write a plan and hand it to the advisor to implement,” says Hudgens. “You know that never works.”
Once the coaching work has defi ned what needs to happen next, the hands-on coaches change hats and become the person who does things that you would never staff up for. “When you decide to add a newprocedure, “ says Gripshover, “there isn’t anybody whose job description is to look around and make sure it’s implemented and being done in a consistent way.”
Nor is anybody tasked with looking ahead--least of all the company principal, who often handles the face-to-face client work. “I read a quote about how we can overestimate what we can accomplish in a day, and underestimate what can be accomplished in a week, a month or a year,” says Gripshover. “Advisors make up their to-do list, and it has 35 things on it. But ask them their quarterly goals, and they look at you blankly. THAT’S what you should think about fi rst. Then think about what you have to do today.”
Hudgens starts by asking for a bit of long-range thinking. “I require all my clients to create a strategic plan,” she says. “To help them get started, I’ll send them a series of questions about their personal and business goals, what they want their fi rm to look like in the future, and what challenges they might be facing.” With the longterm goal in mind, she’ll back into specificaction items that have to be accomplished this month or this quarter.
In one example the younger planners at a growing fi rm were restless, and their productivity was not as good as the quality of the young hires might imply. The fi rst solution, says Hudgens, was to change the way the company principal deals with these planners when they come to him for information. “Instead of dismissing them and saying, I’ll just do it myself,” she says, we’re helping him turn these into teaching experiences.”
Meanwhile, Hudgens is creating group classroom experiences on everything from software to the company’s vision, to what knowledge and skills are needed to be a good senior advisor.
This addresses other issues. “Right now, this company has a lot of inconsistent procedures,” Hudgens reports. “One person might be using Junxure this way, another that way, and senior people just not doing it at all. The effect is that they’re only using about 20% of its capabilities.” So Hudgens assigned the junior planners to write a procedures manual, outlining and putting into words what they do on a daily basis.
Gripshover is also developing a living procedures manual for a planning fi rm, plus a Word fi le folder that includes all the company’s form letters. “Before, everybody had their own way of doing things,” says Gripshover. “Having the form letters and procedures all in one place really streamlined things. We have the form, we already know it is there, and we have a description for how it is done.”
Meanwhile, she recently attended the Junxure boot campin Orlando, and is guiding one firm through the process of going paperless. “What a lot of planning fi rms don’t realize,” Gripshover adds, “is that the expenditure on software needs to be matched by expenditures on training, or else the program ends up being an electronic rolodex. Now I’m bringing them up to speed on some of the time-saving advantages of having information pushed out to them, versus them having to dig around for it. Each quarter we set new targets for things to be automated. I actually go in and do it for them, and handle the training.”
Some of the most difficult practice management issues involve handling staff effectively, rooting out those who cause problems that the company principal may be too busy to notice. However, even good, productive employees can create challenges that require the founder’s attention. “We had a situation where a woman gave one-year notice that she was going to retire--which was a blessing and a curse. How do you say goodbye to somebody for a year?” says Gripshover. “She wanted to work full-time, and then stop.”
Gripshover found a more workable solution. “Six months after the person gave notice,” she says, “we started a job search for this very hard-to-replace position, and got an individual selected three months prior to the end of her time. Then we reduced the number of hours she was working.” The two overlapped each other for six weeks, and now the retiring employee comes in one day a week and stays under the threshold for her Social Security. “She still continues on as a part-time employee,” says Gripshover. “She is phased out but still available, still engaged with the high-touch clients. It worked out beautifully.”
The main goal of staff management is to fi nd ways that the company principals can delegate more of the chores on their desk so they can concentrate on what they do well. “If they’re not in front of clients,” says Gripshover, “then their time isn’t being well-used. Hopefully, we can free them up to participate in group activities, go to conferences, and work with clients more. If they’re too busy chasing offi ce stuff to work with their clients, then we’ve already lost the game.”
Adds Hudgens: “I try to help them realize that most of the things they’re doing are not a good use of their time. But they have such a hard time giving up control of it, that we have to take it in baby steps, take a little bit of the control away and try to move it up as fast or slow as they can handle it.”
Gripshover believes that there is a close relationship between succession planning and delegation issues. In both cases, you’re creating an orderly transition of duties from the principal to the staff. “Right now,” she says, “we’re working with a senior advisor whose retirement date is fi ve years down the road. We’ll start out by identifying, what is that fi fth year going to look like? The fourth year? Third? Second? Then: what are we going to do now? You have to begin with the end in mind and back into it,” she says. “If they’ve made the decision to phase out, how can they do that on a day-to-day basis? Are they going to start feeling excluded? Is there an emotional impact on a leader who is not there anymore, or maybe who is not effective any more, but IS there in the offi ce?”
Marketing gets special attention from the hands-on coaches, though they tend to take very different approaches. Hudgens is doing the followup work to get a company’s letterhead and business cards re-designed with consistent graphics and logos. When the company decided to get permission from fi ve clients to use them as references, she contacted them and obtained their approval.
Gripshover, meanwhile, has just completed the renovation of an advisor web site, bringing in a professional photographer to take new pictures, having them posted, encouraging junior partners to write white papers that can be put up on the site. She also helped redesign the package that is sent out to prospects who query the fi rm. “Now it has language that speaks to the needs of the client,” she says. “Instead of: this is who we are; it answers questions a client might have.”
As part of the process, she went to the company principals and asked them to identify the key questions that clients were asking them over and over again, and put those questions--and, of course, answers--in the materials and on the web site. Now Gripshover is in the process of helping the advisory staff develop actual client success stories--with the names changed to protect their privacy--that address some of those questions.
Hudgens also recommends that her clients have at least two CPA alliances and two estate planning alliances. “One CPA alliance would be geared to your lower-level clients, the easier tax returns,” she says, “and one for your higher-income more-complicated clients. And then an estate planning attorney on the legal side.”
She says that most advisors cultivate these relationships ineffectively, regarding the CPA as a kind of Santa Claus who gives out referrals like gifts. “We invite advisory fi rms to look at these relationships from their clients’ perspective,” she says. “They need to look for the very best people first, and ask them: How are you going to work with our clients? We’re the quarterback in the relationship; we need you to keep in touch with us as to what’s going on with the client. When you take that direction,” she says, “ you tend to get much higherquality referrals, because they really understand what you’re about and looking for. And of course you get better advice and service for your clients.”
What about client referrals? These, Hudgens believes, are best cultivated by setting up client advisory boards. “I don’t recommend just having one,” she says. She cites the example of an advisory fi rm she worked with that happened to have a strong client base working with a local energy company. “The company was retiring a lot of people through attrition and early retirement,” says Hudgens. “They had another niche with the Tennessee Valley Authority. So each had its own advisory board, whose members would tell us what was important to people like them, and about the people they knew in the company who were getting ready to retire.”
When you hire a hands-on coach, you're outsourcing the work of staying on top of changes--both the changes that you want to make in the offi ce, and new developments in software and practice management that the company can emulate or needs to respond to. Then the coach takes on the work that is never in the job descriptions of the staff.
These boards typically start with two or three couples and then expand to eight or nine, adding two or three each year, and asking everybody to serve staggered three year terms.
Of course, the board members want and expect feedback on their input, but who has the time to do that? So, initially, at least, the task falls to the hands-on coach until a procedure can be established and the work can become part of a staffer’s job description. “I would take notes at the early sessions,” says Hudgens, “and put those notes together and compose them into an e-mail saying thank you so much for coming, here are the thoughts we discussed; we are going to discuss them further at a strategic planning meeting coming up. Then, after the strategic planning meeting,” she adds, “I would follow up and tell them what we were going to implement, and how.”
Both Hudgens and Gripshover have other things they do for their clients, but I think you get the picture. Fundamentally, when you hire a hands-on coach, you’re outsourcing the work of staying on top of changes--both the changes you want to make in the offi ce, and new developments in software and practice management that the company can emulate or needs to respond to. Then Hudgens and Gripshover take on the additional responsibilities of handling all these things that need updating, refreshing, and changing--work that is never in the job descriptions of the staff people whose main job is to work with clients.
“As quickly as the world is moving and changing,” says Gripshover, “it would be nearly impossible--especially in a small to medium sized organization- -to employ a staff member to adequately monitor this vital, non-fi nancial planning antennae work. Monitoring change is a job that is never done,” she adds. “Financial advisors and their staff have a job to do. Even when an advisor recognizes a problem in the offi ce, it’s the ‘getting it done’ part that eludes them.”
“Life is just too short for advisors to work that hard and not truly enjoy it,” adds Hudgens. “I try to put the fun back in it for them.”
