Journal of Financial Planning: September 2024
Charesse Spiller is the founder of Level Best (www.getlevelbest.com) and creator of FinOps Co-op. She is a financial planning expert with a passion for helping firms streamline their operations and scale their businesses seamlessly. With experience working with multiple firms across the United States, Charesse draws on knowledge from four core areas: the financial planning process, client experience, technology integrations, and team delegation and empowerment. She has made it her mission to help financial planning firms proactively analyze their current processes, create new systems, and implement them.
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Is your business operation stressing you out?
Many financial advisers feel the weight of operational anxiety—the stress of running a firm with dysfunctional behind-the-scenes processes.
A broken operation is often the root cause of issues like team turnover, inability to scale, dissatisfied clients, failed tech changes, lack of succession planning, and unclear business goals. Unaddressed, these operational problems perpetuate, leaving owners burnt out.
But you can tackle operations head-on and run a streamlined, even joyful, business.
Defining Operational Excellence
Operational excellence is the ongoing pursuit of giving up the good to go for the great. It means solid leadership, an engaged team, and exceptional client service. These items are part of an ongoing structure for innovation and a collaborative team culture.
Plug in your firm’s specifics about the type of firm you want to build and the goals you have, but keep the core idea: Operational excellence requires continuous improvement over time, keeping primary goals in mind as you evolve.
Four Key Areas of Operational Excellence
Key One: Cultivate a Strong Leadership Team and a Collaborative Culture
Many firms’ operational problems stem from leadership issues: misalignment among partners prioritizing individual roles over team leadership, unresolved conflicts obstructing a shared vision, and rewarding skilled advisers over leadership abilities. However, firms can cultivate strong leadership by:
- Clearly defining roles beyond advising, like team management, mentorship, and change implementation.
- Investing in leadership development through training, coaching, empowering the CEO, and continuous learning across the team.
- Ensuring a unified vision through regular alignment meetings and third-party facilitation to push growth.
- Implementing structured feedback, evaluations, and mentorship rather than delegating without follow-up.
Key Two: Integrate Operations as a Core Function of Your Business
Business operations must be an integral daily function, not a side project heaped on to maxed-out team members’ plates.
Yet firms often need more clarity on direction, underutilize staff expertise, overwhelm the CEO with daily fires, and cling to outdated approaches—missing opportunities and underwhelming clients. Integrating operations requires utilizing fintech tools, dedicated ops meetings, optimizing roles through audits, delegating low-impact tasks, and regularly revisiting processes.
Integrating operations tasks and projects into your routine can solve many of the problems above. For example:
- Fintech resources: Knowing your existing tech stack and any support and integrations you have available can help you utilize built-in tools from vendors and maximize efficiency.
- Dedicated business management meetings: Schedule regular meetings focused solely on business management, not client work.
- Optimize staff roles: A thorough audit of all roles and responsibilities and a well-structured accountability chart can help you avoid underutilizing employees or duplicating tasks.
- Delegate and outsource: Identify low-revenue-generating activities and core business functions (like bookkeeping, marketing, etc.) and delegate these items to contractors or capable junior employees.
- Regular audits and planning: Create an internal operational calendar that includes audits of P&L, SOPs, processes, and technology.
If you feel there is never enough time for auditing and implementing ops changes for your firm, consider adopting a new client service calendar, such as surge meetings or the Entrepreneurial Operating System model, that would empower you to have dedicated seasons for ops work.
Key Three: Define and Establish the Role of the Operator at Your Firm
Sometimes, you can have a proactive leadership team and view operations as an ongoing part of your business—and still feel like you’re missing something. In this case, you may be ready to hire an operator.
Remember, none of us went into business to run operations. The role of an operator is to take that burden off your shoulders, enabling you to concentrate on what you do best—serving your clients and growing your business.
An operator can help support the business and all revenue-generating activities, ultimately paying for themselves if they’re effective. They can assist with business continuity, efficiency, and productivity and prepare a pathway for sustainable future growth.
Your operator should focus on:
- Efficiency: Schedule integration checks, conduct audits, and seek opportunities to automate tasks.
- Leadership support: Regularly meet with the leadership team, maintain process documentation, and act as the primary tech contact.
- Client service management: Monitor the client service calendar, technology, workflows, and accountability charts.
- HR: Oversee HR functions, including recruitment, internship programs, and employee onboarding.
- Compliance and risk management: Ensure adherence to industry regulations, conduct compliance audits, and manage reporting.
- Strategic projects: Lead special projects that align with the firm’s strategic goals and work closely with leadership to implement changes.
Remember, as you onboard your new operator, stay patient! Even with the right hire, it takes time for an operator to get settled into their role. They need to understand your firm’s processes, culture, and challenges. Give them the time and resources needed to acclimate and start making an impact. Rushing this process can lead to frustration and missed opportunities for improvement.
Not ready for a full-time operator?
Many firms look internally to find an employee who can flex between their existing role and the role of a part-time or fractional operator. For example, a detail-oriented junior adviser who enjoys process work may be a good fit until your firm is ready for a full-time operator.
Key Four: Standardize Your Business Processes
Scaling your financial planning process requires standardizing your processes. If you recreate the wheel every time you onboard a new client or do an annual portfolio review, you’re losing efficiency and are a bottleneck for your firm’s growth.
Firms without repeatable, standardized processes run into a variety of problems, such as inconsistent results, lack of scalability, messy operations, and team confusion and stress.
You can still have a highly personalized, high-touch financial planning practice that uses consistent, repeatable processes and workflows. Putting a system behind your work allows your team to thrive, think creatively to serve clients better, and grow without burning out.
To establish a framework for your business’s operations, take the following steps:
- Adopt a framework for financial planning: Implementing a structured approach like values-based financial planning, or George Kinder’s EVOKE process, can help you structure your service model in a repeatable way and create consistency across your team.
- Build a service calendar: A clear service calendar showcases what you do and when—helping your team know exactly where they are in the process with each client and keeping everyone on track.
- Develop workflows: Document any regular processes and implement them into your CRM. Workflows create repeatable processes that can be activated with a button click, making delegation easier.
- Create SOPs: While workflows are your task lists with deadlines, standard operating procedures are detailed how-to guides. They provide step-by-step instructions for completing key and repeating tasks.
Standardizing your firm’s processes improves delegation, increases productivity, strengthens existing client relationships, and adds more capacity for incoming clients.
Are You Ready to Unlock Operational Excellence?
Although it may seem like having a streamlined and scalable business is out of reach, it’s doable! Remember to take your time to get organized and iron out your business’s operation. This can help you ensure you get it right the first time. Before you know it, you’ll be on your way to unlocking your business’s full potential.