Let’s face it…to be a leading financial advisor you need to spend the majority of your time interacting with your clients and prospects. Are you? I encourage you to take a minute and think about your average work week, which if you are like most financial advisors, ranges from 40 – 50 hours a week. How many of these hours do you spend working with your clients and prospecting? If you are spending 50% or more of your time elsewhere, you are limiting your potential.

Before we go any further, ask yourself this, “What am I spending my time on?” Not necessarily an easy question to answer. You know you are busy, but do you know where you are spending your time? There are a multitude of online tools that are free and easy to use that can help you track your time. Sign up for one and track your time for a few weeks to find the time stealers in your practice. Toggl is an excellent tool used by many freelancers and offers a 30-day free trial with a basic plan that is free.

Here you will be able to track how much time you spend in each of the following areas:

• Office Administration
• Staff Recruitment, Hiring, and Training
• HR Related Issues
• Compliance
• Portfolio Research and Management
• Back Office Operations
• Marketing
• Continuing Education
• Technology Implementation
• Para Planning
• Financial Planning

Are you spending hours trying to recruit, hire and train staff? Are you always on the phone with your home office trying to resolve back office issues? Are you burdened by compliance oversight? How many hours are you tethered to financial planning software entering data or running analysis in advance of client meetings?

Let’s assume at the very minimum your time is worth is $150 an hour. Now, compare your hourly wage to the minimum hourly cost for other job functions you are performing.

• Office Administration – $40 per hour
• Staff Recruitment, Hiring, and Training – $50 per hour
• HR Related Issues – $50 per hour
• Compliance – $40 per hour
• Portfolio Research – $50 per hour
• Portfolio Management – $60 per hour
• Back Office Operations – $20 per hour
• Marketing – $75 per hour
• Para Planning – $50 per hour
• IT Support – $80 per hour
• Financial Planning – $100 per hour

Once you have a better picture of just how much time you are spending, you can proceed with a plan to reallocate your time, existing staff’s time, and money. Sometimes the number of hours you’re spending on other tasks lean in favor of hiring a full-time staff member. Sometimes, you can reassign the tasks to an existing team member, as long as they have the expertise or are easily trained and are not already overburdened.  If either of these scenarios does not exist, the answer may lie in outsourcing.

The key to outsourcing is finding a reliable service provider, one who is an expert and can represent your practice as if they were part of your team. Many organizations specialize in one particular area, which means you might need to contract with multiple providers to get all of your needs met. A more straightforward solution is to partner with a large advisory group that offers all of the ancillary services mentioned above as a benefit of membership. Then you only have one number to call regardless of the need.

Financial Advocates provides the solutions needed for independent financial advisors to stay competitive. Learn more about our custom services and benefits of membership.