Why your practice needs to retain your client-facing advisers and how to get advisers to stay for the long term.

As an advice practice, you invest in establishing long-term trusted relationships with clients. In the same way, you need to build enduring relationships with your client-facing advisers. The future viability of your practice depends on it.

There’s a debate over who ‘owns’ the client, is it the practice or the adviser? Nina Witenden, Director of A Perfect Plan, has personally managed more than two hundred advisers and has set up client and adviser processes for more than a dozen dealer groups. She says that “while legally the dealer group and/or the practice owns the client, what’s more important is who the client believes they have a relationship with. The answer? It’s the person they ask for when they call”. 

Hiring advisors is expensive.

In raising the bar on the calibre, education and background of financial advisers the financial planning industry is increasingly attracting highly educated, ambitious and expensive people. Because the advice process has a long lead-time, it can take months for a client relationship to come to fruition, and six months before the adviser is starting to cover their costs. According to LinkedIn research, the cost of hiring can represent up to 150% of the first year salary[1]

How to retain advisers over the long term

So, once hired, you’re going to want to retain your advisers. We set out how.

1. Set up an adviser on-boarding process

Fostering the commitment of your staff is like establishing trust in a new client relationship. In both cases a strong induction process is fundamental. The advisers you employ must feel from day one that they have made the right choice in joining your practice. Similarly, you’re also looking for reassurance that the adviser is the right fit for your practice. Here’s how to best manage adviser on boarding. 

• In the same way that clear, concise and documented communication is key when establishing client relationships, you need to get your onboarding communication with your new advisers right.
• Set up agreements between the practice and the adviser about what the adviser will deliver and how the practice will support the adviser over the long-term.
• Back up verbal communication with an employment contact and robust onboarding processes.

2. Provide a personalised employee experience

Get to know your advisers’ personal goals and career objectives and clearly understand how and why they work.

• Use strengths profiling and values identification tools to inform both the adviser and the practice. Understand how each adviser uses their strengths to deliver their best work and how a manager can foster engagement, commitment and high performance. According to Gallup, strengths based training and insight can improve employee productivity by 18% and firm profitability by 23%[2].
• Take performance reviews seriously. Together with your advisers, set up clear performance objectives that define what success looks like to prevent expensive misunderstandings.
• Tap into external expertise to implement your adviser onboarding and employee experience framework.

The quickest path to success

Wrapping up, to retain your clients over the long term, you’ll need to retain your client-facing advisers. To do this successfully, foster a long term commitment between the practice and the adviser by creating an excellent employee experience. It’s about shared objectives and a dedication to building a future together that will provide the best long-term advice and service to the client. Because the stakes are high, bringing in an expert to help you set up frameworks and processes is the quickest way to achieve success.

Because the client is in the driver’s seat, practice principals need to consider the issues of client ownership and retention. When an adviser leaves a practice 30% of their clients can go with them, on average. In order to retain a client long-term, practices need to deliver both quality advice and a long-term client-adviser relationship. That’s why you need to retain your advisers.