You started your business so you could spend more time with your clients, but as your business has grown, you have found yourself spending more and more time managing your team.
It’s a common pitfall of growing your business. At a certain point, you spend more time managing your team than you do serving your clients.
If you’re wondering whether you’re still a financial advisor, or if you’ve become a manager of other financial advisors, we have some signs you should look out for.
You Spend More Time Meeting with Your Staff Than Doing the Work You Love
The first thing you need to look at when determining your role in your business is how much time you devote to each task.
If you spend most of your time meeting with clients and managing their assets for them, you are a financial advisor with some managerial duties.
But the more your business grows, the more time you’re likely to spend hiring, training, and keeping up to date with your staff to make sure everything’s running smoothly.
If the amount of time you spend managing your staff comes to overshadow the amount of time you spend doing the work of a financial advisor, then you have officially become the manager of a financial services firm.
You Have to Hire Your Replacement
When you start your own business, you tend to find yourself spending more time running the business than doing what you love: serving your clients.
In theory, the more your business grows, the more time you should be able to spend with your clients as you’re able to hire staff to handle the more mundane parts of your business: bookkeeping, admin, marketing, etc.
But the truth is there’s a sweet spot.
There’s a certain point at which you can have the staff to cover the things you don’t want to deal with in your business while you get to meet with clients and manage their financial assets.
But once you start to grow your business beyond that point, your team starts to intrude upon your schedule, rather than free it up. That’s when you find yourself spending so much time managing your team that you no longer have time to participate in the parts of your business that make you happiest.
To be clear, hiring people to work with clients is not always a bad thing. If you’re still spending most of your time working with your clients, and you need help managing your enormous client load, that’s a good thing.
But if you need to hire team members to work with your clients because you’re spending more time with your team than with your clients, that’s when you need to take a good, hard look at the kind of business you want, and whether you’re on track to get it.
Your Clients Are More Familiar with Your Staff Than They Are with You
It’s a wonderful thing when you can hand off a client to an employee and feel confident they’re in good hands. It’s a sign, not only that you trust your staff, but that your clients trust them as well.
But there’s a tipping point when your clients expect to work with your staff rather than with you. It’s a sign they’ve become more accustomed to – and more comfortable with – working with them.
On one level it’s gratifying.
But on another level, it can make you feel like you’re a stranger in your own business. After all, you started your own firm so you could spend more time helping your clients, so why aren’t you working with them?
When your clients start to ask for your staff when they call, rather than expecting to talk to you, it’s a sign you might need to make some changes in your business.
Do You Want to Be a Manager?
Let’s be clear. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to spend more of your time managing your business than helping your clients.
But if you’re frustrated by the switch from client work to managerial work, we want you to know that there is a better way.
One of the reasons we partner with independent financial services firms is so we can take the administrative and managerial tasks off their plate while they focus on doing the best work they can for their clients.
So, if you’re tired of managing your team and want to spend more time managing your clients’ financial assets, join us. We’d love to have you.
