Give your team the authority to make decisions without you, so the practice has room to grow, take over another book and become easier to sell.
Book a callI built and ran my own advisory practice for nearly 20 years. I've faced these same team, book and growth decisions with my own clients and my own business.
Your clients ask for you. Your team comes to you for too many decisions. You're still sitting in meetings someone else could run, and you barely have time to bring in new business.
"My clients want to deal with me."
Of course they do. You're the person they've built a relationship with. But how much opportunity have you given them to trust anyone else?
I know that problem because I lived it in my own practice.
Why I do this →One owner's clients already rely on the team, but every important decision still goes through the owner. Another has a capable leadership team, and clients who still only want the owner. Where we start depends on which needs attention first. Both have to work.
I advise owners of RIAs and financial advisory practices on the critical team, book and growth decisions that materially change the business. Most owners make them only a handful of times in a career, usually with a timeline attached.
The hire you're about to make. The associate clients don't rely on yet. The number two who's ready for more than you've given them.
Taking over another advisor's book, or getting your team ready for the next one. Or the other side of the table: preparing to sell your own.
The practice is at capacity. Growth has stalled and you can't put a finger on why. There's no time to prospect because the client work and the operations are on your desk.
Across all three, your clients need to trust your team. You need to trust that your practice can run without you.
The work starts where the practice depends on you most, whether that's with clients, your team or both. I work directly with you on the decision, the tradeoffs and what it takes to carry it out. I do the preparation and analysis between conversations so we can use our time together to move the decision forward.
Where the situation calls for it, I work with your team as well: who holds which responsibilities, what authority moves and to whom, and the structure put into practice with the people who carry it.
That might be one decision worked through in a single session, about 90 days working with you or with you and your team, or an advisor you keep for the decisions that keep coming. I'll recommend what the situation calls for.
You own the practice and you run it. That doesn't change. I've been on the owner's side of the desk, and that's the side I advise from.
How we'd work together →How many of your top 20 client relationships have had a meeting run from start to finish by someone other than you? The four steps I use to get clients trusting a team member, five minutes of a meeting at a time, and the top-20 worksheet to start with.
Also live: The sellable-practice checklist, 30 questions on what the next owner would actually be taking over. Get the checklist. And a 12-question quiz you score yourself: Are you ready to take over a book? Get the quiz.
Along the way I took over two advisors' books, 35 households and then just under 20, and built a team my clients trusted as much as they trusted me.
Every decision I advise on now, I made first in my own practice, with my own clients and my own team.
Read the whole story →If you own an established RIA or financial advisory practice in the US or Canada and too much still depends on you, start with a 30-minute call.
I'll learn what's in front of you and where the practice is, and we'll both know whether a longer conversation is worth having. If it is, we book it before we hang up.