Feel like there isn’t enough time? (Part 2)

Our last blog focused on helping you work out your capacity for work using a simple calculator. This time, we are taking a deeper dive into understanding how your client numbers and other factors affect your capacity.

🚘 Do you know how many spaces are in your car park?

No, not where you actually park your car when you go to work! The car park I have in mind, allows you to understand how many clients you can successfully service in your firm. Knowing this number is critical.

Put simply, the number of spaces in a firm’s car park is equal to how many clients you can take on based on the amount of capacity at your firm’s disposal, which is affected by the following key factors:

Let’s take a closer look at each of these factors.

1. Your service proposition(s)

It’s important to remember that for most firms the number of spaces in your car park is finite.

For a moment, lets assume that a car park has a capacity of 100 spaces. Of the 100 spaces, 20 spaces are Premium and are constantly monitored by security, provide car parking service, car wash and valeting daily. Another 60 spaces are guaranteed to be available to Standard members but don’t receive any of the benefits available to the Premium members. Finally, you have 20 motorbike spaces that come at a somewhat lower price to the Standard membership as they take up less space and have no additional benefits. When thinking of this model, I’m sure that none of you would allow someone to park a motorbike in the Premium spot unless its owner was prepared to pay for the Premium service. Similarly, you wouldn’t offer the Premium service to any of the Standard members, yet when it comes to financial planning, I often see these lines being blurred resulting in a ‘car park’ that holds firms back.

Having defined service proposition(s) and knowing how many clients (and the demographic of the clients you wish to service) is critical for success as it directly affects your capacity. You don’t want to put yourself in the position of providing a Premium service to your Standard membership clients as that requires far greater resource of time and staffing. In practical terms, I often hear of teams being overwhelmed with work due to ‘overservicing legacy clients’. That is clients who are paying lower fees and receiving the same level of service as those on new ‘Premium’ service propositions.

You can fill the car park spaces however you like, but if they aren’t filled with your ideal clients per service proposition, the firm will be at risk of not reaching its goals.

Once you are clear on the number of spaces per proposition, you need to have a good understanding of how much time is needed on average to service your clients per proposition. You will need this data to complete your capacity calculations per role (see our last blog for details).

2. The size of your team

It goes without saying that the more people there are on your team, the more clients you can service, and the more personalised service  you are able to offer. I’m often asked what is the optimal number of team members but I’m afraid that there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to this question. Much depends on what your service proposition includes, the complexity of the clients you are dealing with, the structure of your team, and of course your operational efficiency, which I shall discuss in the next point.

For example, if you are offering a highly bespoke service and work with very complex clients and high value cases, it might be that a team of one Adviser, one Paraplanner and one Client Relationship Manager needs to be allocated to every 70 clients, in addition to having a centralised team of Administrators. Equally, if you are delivering a subscription type service that offers a monthly group webinar related to the topic of personal finance and a 30-minute Q&A call per year, your capacity will be many times greater and you won’t need a large team to support such a business model.

When thinking about the size of the team needed and their capacity for work consider the below:

3. Your operational efficiency

As already mentioned, you need to have a good understanding of how much time is needed on average to deliver each of your service propositions and the time taken to deliver various tasks will be greatly affected by your operational efficiency. While I’d love to think that in today’s day and age, it takes a click of a button to produce a valuation for any of your clients, I know for certain that this often isn’t the case. This isn’t just down to the ‘legacy holdings’ where data isn’t freely available but often inefficient use of technology by the advisory firms. The number of firms that still rely on manual input for generation of valuations or other documents rather than a templated and automated process is still high. The more manual input, the less integration across different systems, or outdated technology the more inefficiencies there are in your process resulting in tasks taking longer. Working smarter not harder is key.

The goal is to optimise the use of technology, eliminate complexity from the way in which you operate, and maximise the automation of various tasks. Did you know that a 2 mins task undertaken 10 x per day for 228 days in a year takes 76 hrs, which equates to 10 business days per year. Now multiply this by 10 people and you could save yourself a staggering 100 business days per year by simply automating some of the lower ‘value’ yet frequently undertaken tasks e.g. acknowledgement of receipt communication. This will free up time to personalise the things that truly matter.

So here are a few questions to work through to improve your operational efficiency :

These questions form part of our free worksheet, called Process Prep Sheet, which you can download here. We introduced it when discussing creation of, or revision of your Annual Review Process, which you can read about here.

Good luck working out the capacity of your car park and the time it takes to deliver your service propositions. Here is a list of key causes of capacity issues which may help you understand what to focus your energy on next!

---

Members of our Master Practitioners Club can find these relevant resources in our library.

Videos

Templates

If you are not a member why not consider joining us now 👉 htps://rie.solutions/services/master-practitioners-club/.