As a business owner, you know the frustrations of trying to grow your business. Scaling when time and energy are limited resources can be a challenge. Luckily, honing your operations can help. There are key steps to creating an efficient operation that will help you to scale your business:
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Streamline.
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Automate.
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Hire.
Ready to learn more? Let’s dive in.
How can operations help you scale?
When you first launched your business, you had unlimited time and energy to grow. You could spend extra time with a client if needed, and you wouldn’t have had a problem with it if each client needed a slightly different version of your standard process. Unfortunately, this hyper-custom experience can make for a messy and time-consuming operation.
It’s impossible to scale a business that isn’t organized. Many advisors start to run into this problem when they hit their maximum client capacity as a solo RIA. They’re ready to grow but are still spending too much time delivering custom experiences or recreating the wheel with every new client they sign on. This leaves no room in their schedule for sales, prospecting, marketing, or the other key activities that will help them grow in the long run.
When advisors start to spend time on their operations, they find that they’re not only able to free up time for prospecting and growth, they also end up providing a better client experience. This increases client retention, client referrals, and overall advisor satisfaction. Even better, focusing on your operations can help you free up mental space and reduce your chance of burn out.
#1: Streamline
First, you need to know what you are doing in your business in order to identify inefficiencies. Start by outlining all of your current processes from prospecting to eventual client sign-on, then client close-out (depending on your business model). What tasks are being repeated? Where can you introduce uniformity and automation to make things easier?
Once you’ve figured out the weak points in your operation, focus on how to make changes that create a more efficient process. Ideally, your business should run like a machine. Streamlining your operations can help you to:
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Be more efficient.
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Think critically about how your clients respond to your processes.
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Build a business that serves your unique needs and lifestyle.
Finally, you can start to document your processes in one location to maintain consistency and train your team easily.
#2: Automate
Once you get into a rhythm, then it’s time to level up through automation. You’ve built a streamlined set of processes that work for your business. Unfortunately, even the most streamlined process still requires time and effort from you, the business owner. As you continue to take on more clients, you need to find another solution to free up more time to continue growing.
Remember: it’s critical to streamline your business before automating. We find that advisors who choose to automate first end up feeling overwhelmed by the options available, aren’t sure that things are set up correctly, and eventually fall off the bandwagon because they’re not sure if their automation is working.
Skip this setback by looking at your streamlined processes and identifying where you can replace a manual action with automation. For example, you might look to automate client meeting follow-ups or prospecting emails.
#3: Hire
This should be your last step in the scaling process. Maintaining a lean business as long as possible will help you remain profitable, even when you eventually do start hiring. Once you’ve hustled through streamlining, then automating, you’re ready to look at hiring a team member. Remember: you don’t need to hire full time at first! Test the waters by hiring part-time or a contractor to take work off your plate to free up your time. We find that effective first hires are often paraplanners or CSAs.
You can outsource work to a CSA or paraplanner and increase hours as your needs continue to grow. Plus, if you’ve already streamlined and automated your business, you can easily plug these new team members into your process without too much of a headache! Another bonus is if you completed #1 and two then you can easily plug your team into your operations.
How can you continue to improve?
We don’t want advisors to reinvent the wheel every time they outgrow a process that they previously created. Instead, look for ways to leverage your tech stack to make adjustments in an ongoing capacity. It can help to complete technology audits to see if the automations you’ve created, and the tools you use, still serve your firm.
It’s also wise to regularly survey clients and team members to see if your processes are still working for everyone. Take their feedback to heart, and focus on what your clients and team cares about the most.
Finally, if you’re still feeling like you have room to improve and aren’t sure where to start, seek professional help. Most firms don’t have someone dedicated to scaling their operation, and that’s okay. That’s where a team like Level Best can step in, help you get organized, and put systems in place to make managing your operation a breeze. Ready to learn more? Reach out! We’re here to help.
