There’s never been a better time to be a risk-focussed adviser.
While many investment-focussed advisers are struggling with volatile markets, risk focussed advisers have the luxury of strong revenue growth and consistent client referrals.
As your risk business grows larger, you have more existing clients to service – plus the opportunity of a consistent pipeline of new clients to meet with. But as you throw more people, systems and IT into the business to service this growing client demand, your expenses will grow at a similar rate – putting pressure on your bottom line profitability.
However, there are a number of ways to not only boost your profitability, but also improve the client experience throughout the advice process, while allowing you to achieve a better work-life balance (i.e. a life outside of your business).
Steps to boost profitability and enhance the client experience include:
- Identifying non-income producing activities within your business that you as the owner or your advisers are completing. Non-income producing activities include anything that doesn’t involve you engaging with a client or working on the strategy of the business.
- Once you’ve identified the key non-income producing activities, the next step is to identify the tasks that are taking up most of your time.
- Finally, you then need to look at which of these tasks can be outsourced to a specialist service provider outside of your business. This could be your dealer group, or an external provider.
Advisers who have taken the brave step of outsourcing non-income producing activities from their business have experienced an increase in their productivity, a reduction in their processing times and an improvement in their work-life balance. Essentially more tasks are getting done faster, and at a higher quality.
The business benefit to advisers is that they have more time to talk to clients, which may generate more revenue and deliver greater levels of service to new and existing clients.
Typically, there are a number of administrative, time-consuming tasks that an advice business can outsource very easily.
- Medical and pathology services, including PMAR retrieval – Following up clients’ medical tests and collecting PMARs from GPs can be one of the most frustrating time-wasting tasks for an advice business. But there are a number of service providers that can do all of the following up for you by booking in an after-hours home appointment with the client, plus chasing up tardy GPs for PMARs.
- Tele-interviewing & underwriting – some advisers see it as their professional obligation to ‘ask the hard medical questions’ from their clients. However, there are trained professionals who can conduct the medical questionnaire with the client over the phone, and ask the appropriate follow-up questions to cover all the necessary underwriting requirements. This service not only improves the efficiency of your business; it also acts as a great risk management tool if a claim turns bad or there is a non-disclosure issue.
- SOA generation – I still cringe when I hear stories about advisers spending up to six hours on producing an SOA, when they could have used that time to see an extra three to six prospects and generate more income. Outsourcing your SOA generation could be the single most productive business decision that you make this year – providing the correct processes and risk controls are implemented.
I’d love to hear from you about the challenges or questions you have about increasing your bottom line. Please contact me by email at: sharris@guardianadvice.com.au
Simon Harris is Executive Manager, Guardian Advice. He has previously held senior executive roles in distribution, operations, marketing and product development in some of Australia’s largest financial services organizations.
Simon has been in the financial services industry for over 13 years, and is a passionate and committed advocate of the role of financial advice in Australia.
Simon has an MBA and is a member of the FPA and AFA.
