In a recent webinar, Elixir Consulting business coach Lana Clark said despite the rising costs of doing business, too many advisers were still holding onto lower value tasks themselves rather than delegating to junior staff.
“Lots of advisers we meet tell us they have struggles articulating value and yet we continue to provide advice for less than we should and we let sneaky tasks jump in that we shouldn’t be doing – all these things add up to a lot of time and money,” Ms Clark said.
“Think about how you can offload those to other people – how can you either outsource those things to people in your team or externally, or let go of some of those clients that you know you can’t service profitably? It’s one thing to know you should be doing that but it’s another to practice it.”
Ms Clark said some practice owners’ inability to delegate was also affecting junior staff who had less to do and were taking longer to progress in their roles because of the lack of learning opportunities.
“Yesterday I was having a conversation with a paraplanner that was getting frustrated with their business owner because they don’t give over work,” she said.
“They see everyone else is busy and they say ‘I’ll just put that application in myself’, but the issue is it’s not your job to do someone else’s work, it’s your job to understand when someone else is busy and resource or re-allocate in other ways so you can get on to the most productive tasks you can in your business.
“It might be business development you want to do, marketing projects – things like that are valuable rather than sifting through forms or doing tasks or writing plans. Pass them on to the person who’s the expert at it.”
Elixir national manager Alanna Bitmead said it was important advisers looked to take on more high-value work, even if it was at the expense of putting in face time with clients.
“In the last practice I worked at, advisers were reluctant to give up the client touch tasks, but when we made those changes the admin staff were happy and the advisers ended up with more time,” she said.
“It’s difficult to do but it can have huge impacts on your business.”
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With regulators and compliance teams actively looking to persecute advisers for the slightest administrative oversight, advisers are being forced to do more and more minor stuff themselves just to make sure it’s done right. Many support staff don’t understand that a seemingly minor slip up can potentially lead to massive fines, loss of business, and in theory even jail time for the adviser. It sounds crazy, it shouldn’t be that way, but unfortunately it’s true.
It is definitely frustrating! And another argument to train your team really well. As they say – better to take a little extra time to sharpen your axe (ie get and train great staff) than to keep chopping with a blunt axe (ie do it all yourself). Easier said than done at times, but worth persisting – staff need to understand the gravitas of the work they’re doing, and if they’re not up to the task, maybe it’s time for performance management?
This game is getting too hard to put up with staff you can’t trust or systems that don’t support the adviser.
Get yourself some help who can accurately fill in a form, harder said than done