Benefit of more support staff outweigh costs
The benefit of bringing on more back-office staff has far outweighed the costs and allows financial advisers to bring in more business and increase client meetings, according to an adviser.
HH Wealth director and financial adviser, Chris Holme, said he recently brought in more back-office staff as he hit capacity and could not bring on any more clients.
Currently, he was the sole adviser and had a full-time customer service officer (CSO), a part-time intern, and an outsourced paraplanner. Holme said would be bringing on another adviser and looked to have a full-time paraplanner and another CSO.
“I want to be able to focus more on bringing on new clients and I kind of waited a bit to hire more staff because of the cost. But the actual benefits far outweigh the costs and we've been able to bring on more business because of it,” he said.
“The support I needed were for ad hoc tasks, making sure everything was loaded up on a file, on Xplan, and onto the compliance software, as well as all the other administrative tasks that take a while.”
Holme said he initially tried to use a virtual assistance (VA) support software as it was a lower cost option but found there was a language barrier given the complexity of the tasks.
“It just made more sense for us to bring on a couple of full-time staff to be able to do that. They can sit here in the office or they can work from home and there’s no kind of language barrier. The knowledge is higher and so the tasks just get completed a bit quicker and things are more efficient,” he said.
“I think a lot of people are using VA and it's actually worked really well. But we've just had a lot more wins with actual with staff employed directly in the business.”
Holme said client meetings took around 40% of his work and that he wanted to move that up to 80% and would need more support staff to get there.
“I need them to make sure that all administrative tasks are taken care of and that all I'm doing is client facing, file noting, and strategy – which are obviously the best bits of advice,” he said.
When asked whether servicing 200 to 300 clients with the right tech stack was doable, Holme said he would question the quality of advice if a single adviser could service that number of clients.
“That sounds that sounds quite like that there would be a fair amount of robo-advice and so I would suggest that the fee would be pretty low per client,” he said.
“I'd be questioning what sort of service they're offering to be able to make it profitable because I daresay you won't be doing much client facing if you've got 300 clients.”
Recommended for you
The FSCP has announced its latest verdict, suspending an adviser’s registration for failing to comply with his obligations when providing advice to three clients.
Having sold Madison to Infocus earlier this year, Clime has now set up a new financial advice licensee with eight advisers.
With licensees such as Insignia looking to AI for advice efficiencies, they are being urged to write clear AI policies as soon as possible to prevent a “Wild West” of providers being used by their practices.
Iress has revealed the number of clients per adviser that top advice firms serve, as well as how many client meetings they conduct each week.
