How Modern Teaming Can Help You and Your Practice Flourish

It’s hard growing your practice by going it alone. Not having experts to lean on can make it difficult to offer clients more services and deliver the superior experience they crave. Increasingly, it takes a team to advance a firm’s productivity and customer service to the next level. And there’s another important but often-overlooked benefit of teaming: it frees you to focus on the parts of the business you’re good at and passionate about.  

When you think of a team, sports are likely the first thing that comes to mind. Championship teams have one thing in common: all team members are working together to achieve a common goal. But what works for one team that wins it all may not bring the title to another team. And that applies to financial advisors too, regardless of whether you’re working at an independent broker dealer (IBD), a full-service brokerage (wirehouse), or as a registered investment advisor (RIA). 

Modern Teaming is all about building flexible, dynamic, and scalable teams. It’s important to keep an open mind about the type of team that might work best for your practice—and where to source key players. Mapping out a winning team is often about thinking outside the box. It’s about emphasizing what you love about the business, what’s important to your clients, and targeting your practice’s needs.

Teams have been positioned as a path to more—more clients, more services, higher revenue per advisor, greater assets, increased productivity, better client experience, etc. 

But what if “more” isn’t always the answer? According to one Cerulli report,¹ the majority of advisors say they spend too much time serving non-ideal clients and more than 20% of their time on administrative tasks.  

What about the idea of leveraging teaming to do “less”? Teaming is a way for advisors to spend the bulk of their time working on things they find most fulfilling. Ultimately, “less” can add up to more and help you thrive.  

How’s that? If you spend more time on work you love it means spending less time on stuff you’re not crazy about. It means removing roadblocks that lead to client dissatisfaction. With work spread among team members, it reduces the risk of “scope creep,” or overburdening yourself with too many tasks. It also frees up more time to service clients.  

It’s no secret that when people do what they love, they do it better. And in the financial advisory world that can lead to better client outcomes and greater success for the firm. 

What you want to avoid is creating a team that lacks the bandwidth and diversity of specialization needed to serve your clients’ primary needs. You don’t want to take a page from a rowing team, for example. Why? Everyone on a rowing team essentially does the same thing, and that’s akin to a financial advisory practice where every individual focuses solely on financial planning. That concept of a team is not likely to help you improve the client experience or scale the business.   

The modern approach to teaming is more about constructing non-traditional teams. How the pieces fit together best depends on what service gaps you have, how narrow or broad your areas of specialty are, and whether you want to build the team in-house or go outside the organization.  

A good example of what drives different team construction is Formula 1 (F1) auto racing. Ferrari’s F1 race team can total 1,200 people. Their in-house players do everything. They design and build engines, manage the auto parts supply chain, optimize pit stops, perform driver training, do R&D, and change tires during races. There are also race strategists whose specialty is telling drivers the optimal time to pass other cars on the track. 

The Red Bull team—one of Ferrari’s main rivals—performs many of the same aspects as Ferrari. But the team has purposely chosen to form strategic partnerships with engine specialists. By working closely with engine developers and manufacturers, such as Renault, Honda, and Ford, they’re able to free up more of their time and money to beat their competition in other areas. 

And one final F1 team example, Haas—one of the newest F1 teams currently competing—has been able to enter the sport and perform well in a relatively low-cost manner through a non-traditional approach. This up-and-coming team with a headcount of under 300 employees has built success through strategic partnerships, outsourcing the build of the car, the engine, and many other aspects required to operate. 

Each team, while competing in the same space, has their own approach to achieving their goals. 

1. Borrow it. For capabilities that are not core to your practice or that can’t be built quickly, consider tapping resources from your larger organization or network as needed to fill gaps. 
2. Blend it. If it’s too costly or will take too long to ramp up a key capability, you may consider joining forces with another team that has expertise in an area you’re interested in adding to your offerings.  
3. Buy it. Consider outsourcing or looking beyond your organization to team up with external experts and/or solo contractors to quickly scale or address capabilities you currently lack.  
4. Build it. This scenario involves hiring people with specific expertise, reskilling, or re-aligning staff to manage key tasks. 

Keep in mind, there’s no reason to lock into any single approach. You can build your own teaming model that takes all four of the approaches into account. The best teaming model is one that is flexible, dynamic, and tailored to your practice and your clients’ needs. And, most importantly, one that frees up your time to do the work that you’re good at and makes you happy. 

Let’s say you’re a wealth manager looking to add retirement capabilities to your practice. You might “blend” (i.e., merge) with a retirement advisory firm whose expertise includes services such as fiduciary responsibilities, plan line up construction, legislative and regulatory guidance, and recordkeeper review. To focus on aspects of merging the newly formed team’s culture and processes, you could “borrow” investment, portfolio construction, and model construction expertise from your firm’s home office or an asset manager like T. Rowe Price. With the team in place, you can then leverage the “build it” approach to assign and upskill roles around administrative tasks and reporting. Lastly, you can “buy it” by contracting a creative agency to help market the new specialty. 

Or say you’re a solo advisor who wants to retain a high level of control and still have the ability to serve complex clients. You can “borrow” experts to help serve particular investors through relationships with a COI group and/or your professional network. This enables you to scale up when needed, while keeping overhead costs variable and retaining decision making independence. 

Those are just two examples that demonstrate the flexibility of the modern approach to teaming. 

To recap, Modern Teaming not only enhances client service and boosts growth by expanding your service offerings, but it also allows you to focus on the work you love and less on what you don’t. But remember, a team blueprint that works for another advisor may not be the right fit for you. The goal is to identify a personalized teaming concept that best fits your practice and provides the most efficient and effective ways to fill “gaps” in client needs.