Every financial advice firm around the world would love to grow their business to become one the main names in the industry.
But unfortunately, things do not always go according to plan.
In June, US-based consultancy firm Herbers & Company launched a mobile app to help financial advisers grow their businesses.
The app, available through a subscription fee, will offer a range of training programmes, tools and insights on business planning, client experience, digital innovation, operations, employee management, technology, sales, and marketing. How can a business best utilize its resources into the future? Certified technicians from a reputable company like managed it support los angeles can help you out by anticipating future problems and needs!
International Adviser spoke to Angie Herbers, founder and chief executive of Herbers & Company, about what companies need to do in the advice sector to grow.
App
Herbers said: “Across the firms that we work with, it’s generally a universal idea that growth is increasing revenue. The goal is to increase revenue and to do that you have to serve clients better, and to serve clients better you must have people.
“A lot of what the app does is start with the people. How do we train better leaders? How do we find better advisers? How do we manage in a post-pandemic time? How do we get the best productivity out of our people without running advisers into the ground?
“Mostly all growth starts with the idea of revenue, and then asking for how can we add additional advisers and build on that. Once we have those foundational components, we generally can get into sales and marketing, operations, better client experiences and better tech.
“Many firms believe that growth equals marketing, the more we market, the more will grow and grow. If you think about just all things that grow, it is not one thing, it’s a combination of a lot of different things.
“If you’re growing a flower, you plant a seed and you can’t just abandon it and not water it. It is watering, patience and fertiliser. It is all of that, and it’s knowing when the right time is to do it.
“When our company looks at growth and what is happening within an advisory firm, we’re asking ourselves, ‘what does firm need right now? What do we need to consistently build upon? This is opposed to this an all or nothing focus on marketing.”
Differences globally
The challenges facing an advice firm in the UK, US and UAE will be different.
But Herbers said that “the tools of growing a business” have still remained the same.
“The growth process is the same as it has been for centuries and centuries,” she said. “The problem is that it’s modernising so quickly. Our app aims to modernise the growth process and get it into the hands of financial advisers globally, as we see it evolve in the US.
“This isn’t necessarily true now, but the global markets in independent financial advice have run about seven years behind the US market.
“The interesting thing about the global markets is they learned faster, so the firms that we work with who are outside of the US, almost always take our advice and move, they let it in and they implement it. The US firms sometimes will resist.
“Globally what we’re seeing is there’s an opportunity for financial advisory firms across the world to learn from what we’ve learned in the US over the last 20 years and catch up. I think that’s a great place for independent advice to be.”
M&A
One of the biggest areas of growth in the UK financial advice market has been inorganic M&A activity.
So, how does Herbers and Company see acquisitions as part of a company’s strategy?
Herbers said: “We are a company that primarily works on organic growth. We are not an M&A firm. However, we track those trends behind the scenes, and we hear what our firms that we’re consulting with are thinking about and doing, and also what firms globally are doing.
“No doubt about it, firms who are mismanaged from an organic growth standpoint, often times when regulation changes, it is necessary for them to look at an inorganic growth strategy to stay ahead and compete.
“But for the firms that have focused on training their leaders, great management of talent, good growth strategies from a marketing standpoint, when costly regulation happens, there’s room to manoeuvre.
“It comes back to a leadership issue and how well have you managed your organic growth, because mismanaged organic growth often will lead to inorganic growth by necessity. More often than not, we have seen over the last 20 years that inorganic growth strategies are because of the failure of organic growth strategies.”
