David J. Mullen - The Million-Dollar Financial Advisor Team: Best Practices from Top Performing Teams

Contents

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the members of the Altius Learning Team who lent their expertise, experience, and support in the writing of this bookthank you, Carl Meyer, Frank Beyer, Peter DiCenso, Alane Siem, and Bobby Theriot. I want to especially thank my partner at Altius, Jim Dullanty, for his many contributions, in particular for his work on the world-class offering chapter.

I would also like to thank the partners on the highly functioning teams that I interviewed. They were all extremely generous with their time. These top advisors openly shared their extraordinary team best practices, unselfishly giving me their time so that my readers could benefit from their knowledge and experience.

I would also like to thank Dr. Richard Orlando and Tim McManus for the invaluable insights that were most helpful in creating the leadership chapter.

Lastly, I would also like to thank the publishing team, beginning with my agent Welly Keller, and HarperCollins Leadership for believing in this book. Pam Liflander has been my editing partner, providing her expertise to make the most of my work.

If you already have a team in place, you can see at what level your team is functioning. Does your team incorporate these best practices at a low, average, or high level? If you are not incorporating these guidelines yet, you are at a low level. If you are doing some of the guidelines, rate yourself as average. If you are incorporating all of them into your existing practice, give yourself a high score.

PROFESSIONAL VALUES

Do potential team partners have common values and goals?

Do potential team members have a similar work ethic?

Do potential team members like and trust each other?

Are potential team members committed to investing back into the practice?

Are the potential team members aligned on an agreed upon wealth management process?

TEAM STRUCTURE AND FORMATION

Determine the best team structure: vertical, horizontal, holistic, alliance.

Team members align on an agreed-upon wealth management process.

Establish a formal partnership agreement with a dissolution process.

Implement an annual review process of partnership agreement and dissolution process.

Arrange phone coverage and develop scripts for answering the phone.

Set office hours.

Implement a dress code.

Decide on physical location, office space configuration, and office appearance.

Send out a client announcement introducing each team member and their roles and responsibilities.

TEAM VISION

Develop a long-term team vision.

Create a three-to-five-year business plan to implement your vision.

Develop business plan action steps, prioritize them, and assign responsibility.

Measure and communicate business plan results monthly.

Develop a formal succession plan.

Make sure all team members are aware of the succession plan.

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Determine what skills each partner brings to the team and whether those skills are being optimized.

Create an ideal team organizational chart.

Assign three to five controllable high-priority goals and activities to each team member.

Build a team so that FAs can focus on $500/hour work.

Establish clearly defined roles and responsibilities.

Organize the team and assign roles and responsibilities.

Consider adding an RM role if each FA team member has more than fifty core relationships.

Provide a written job description and goals for each team member.

Establish a controller role to measure performance.

PERFORMANCE

Develop a semiannual review template.

Do semiannual reviews with each team member.

Focus on fewer (four or five) rather than too many goals for compensation.

Set high-priority goals for each team member that define the difference between unacceptable, acceptable, and excellent levels of performance.

Take each job description and assign how performance can be measured in activities and results (if appropriate).

COMMUNICATION

Conduct weekly team meetings.

Conduct semiannual offsite strategic meetings.

Conduct daily stand-up meetings.

Create agenda templates for weekly and semiannual meetings.

Take notes at weekly meetings and distribute them to other team members.

COMPENSATION

Compensation should focus on activities and controllable results. It should be based on ratings for each performance goal.

Be generous on compensation for loyal high performers.

Team compensation range is typically between 7.5 and 15 percent of FA compensation.

Establish a bonus pool that all employees participate in if the team reaches or exceeds its goals.

Create an annual partnership compensation review meeting to update splits, pools, and succession plan.

Recognize outstanding work by individual team members.

Develop a compensation budget.

Create a team budget that includes business development expenses.

HIRING

Review team organization chart to determine duplications and needed additions.

Determine budget needed to add team members and make sure all partners are committed to that budget.

Develop an organized process for sourcing, hiring, and training new team members.

Create a ninety-day probationary period to evaluate performance and attitude.

Have partners list their non-big three ($500/hour) activities to create a new job description.

TEAM OFFERING

Provide a world-class offering and be able to articulate that offering through a value proposition.

Determine the ideal wealth management process that all FA partners are committed to implementing.

Determine how model portfolios, asset allocation, and rebalancing will be implemented, monitored, and adjusted.

Establish an investment committee.

Determine your ideal client.

MARKETING

Develop the missionary mindset among all team members.

Commit to at least an hour a day of implementing some combination of the seven acquisition strategies.

Have a team marketing meeting.

Implement a consistent, proactive client referral strategy.

Develop a professional referral network.

Implement a 10 x 10 event marketing process.

Implement the Right PlaceRight People strategy.

Commit to a niche market and develop a niche market plan.

Implement the four-part asset away strategy.

Build the teams prospect pipeline to fifty qualified candidates and follow a process for managing the pipeline.

PROCESSES

Determine ideal new team processes.

Evaluate existing processes and FA practices.

Periodically review and evaluate all team processes and improve when needed.

Assign responsibilities for a team member to develop or update each process, and a timeline for that task.

LEADERSHIP

Select a team leader.

Assign responsibilities for the team leader.

Implement the seven leadership principles into the team.

Decide compensation for the team leader.