Increasing paraplanning capacity within a business may not necessarily mean hiring more paraplanners, says financial planning business consultant Brett Davidson, MD of FPAdvance.
When I’m trying to improve capacity within a financial planning firm (i.e. to allow them to do more business) the solutions are not always obvious.
For example, if a firm is not processing work or creating reports fast enough, the obvious response might be: “We need to hire another administrator or paraplanner.” And depending on the business’ financial performance, this might seem like a bit of a stretch. Sometimes a business needs more staff but can’t see how to pay for it.
In one firm I worked with, we explored this exact dilemma. Here’s what we found:
The paraplanners in the business were doing a lot of repetitive basic work. This seemed like a waste of expensive talented people. Also, finding another paraplanner wouldn’t be easy, even if we decided that was the best course of action. So we decided it would be better to give some of the repetitive basic work to the administrators.
However, the administration team were already busy themselves.
When we looked at all of the jobs the admin team were performing, we found some tasks that caused them disruption:
• Greeting clients when they arrived for a meeting
• Making teas and coffees for clients
• Tidying up the meeting room after clients left
• Answering the phone
On their own, none of these tasks seemed like a problem, but on further investigation, it became clear that these disruptions meant the admin team had their heads in and out of their administration work. They weren’t able to focus. (There’s research to show that it can take 23 minutes to get your head back in a job after a disruption – so this is no small thing.)
So we decided to hire an apprentice who could come in to do the first three tasks, as part of learning the administrator role. With some government support, this was an extremely cost-effective way of leveraging the existing and more experienced team members and improving their productivity.
For the last task, answering the phone, we rented an outsourced receptionist service. That meant there was someone ready to answer the phone during business hours, but the admin team weren’t getting pulled in and out of their work.
My point is that sometimes the seemingly obvious ‘fixes’ are not the solution.
The same kind of analysis often comes up when business owners tell me that ‘marketing’ is their number one issue.
What they really mean is that they think they need more leads and that ‘marketing’ is the way to get them.
However, if a business is not converting enough of the leads it already gets (from my experience, 60%+ should be the target for lead conversion), or it can’t handle the workload if it did secure more clients every month, then maybe it needs to fix those issues first.
Additionally, marketing requires a huge amount of time and input from the business owners/leaders, even when they outsource to an external marketing team. So ensuring that the business has freed up that time by getting its capacity right is usually the first step.
Main image: eric-prouzet-B3UFXwcVbc4-unsplash
