At FPA Retreat, 7 Steps to Success by Investing in Your Advisory Firm

Building a brand, including investments in your client service operations and, notably, hiring a good writer to help articulate your brand regardless of the media you use to communicate the brand. The  goal is to involve all members of the firm to consider themselves your brand champions, making all employees rain-makers.

Learning corporate financial management, including building a customized P&L for the firm that uses the” owner’s need” for compensation as a required line item. This is a natural outgrowth of step one, where the owner decides how much compensation is needed to live comfortably and also how much to invest in the firm’s culture.

Managing on growth, since manipulating profit is much easier than manipulating growth, the best firms focus and compensate employees on growth, not on profits. But the owner, hearkening back to step one, must set clear growth goals and communicate them to all employees.

Segmenting your services, not in the traditional way of determining your ‘A, B or C’ clients, but giving clients a choice on what services they would like from you, from basic investment management to more holistic financial advice, and then charging accordingly for those services.

Growing with people, since she has found that the most successful firms create good employees rather than necessarily hiring the most qualified or experienced employees. The best firms teach those new hires to be good employees, pay a fair wage with bonuses based on firm growth, focus on performance, but also invest in hardware and software that increases performance.