The ClientWise Blog

At the beginning of the year, you and your team were fired up and ready to rock-and-roll, committed to 2016 being your firm’s best year ever. Like straight-A students on the first day of class, you had your pencils sharpened and your growth plan for the year all laid out in front of you like a course syllabus.

Now that the first quarter is over, however, are your team members as engaged in the plan as they were back in December when you inked it?

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Frequently when I speak at advisor events, I’ll ask attendees what they believe to be the greatest impediment to their firm’s future growth. More often than not, the smarter advisors in the room hone in on “a lack of capacity.” Yet, many of these very same advisors tend to be their own worst enemy in that regard – by holding on too tightly to the reins of their practice. There’s no getting around the fact that sooner or later, any growth-focused firm that’s overly dependent on its senior advisor or founder is going to have capacity issues. So, what can you do about it?

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I recently came across a terrific older article in the Harvard Business Review that articulated in very specific detail an optimal organizational structure to empower “transformational change.” The author’s underlying premise was that we need to capture some of that quick adaptability and flexibility that enabled our firms to grow rapidly from fledgling start-ups to well-entrenched practices by creating a sense of urgency and focus around a single opportunity.

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We focus so much on acquisition, portfolio management, client issues and day-to-day operations that we rarely have time to sit back and take stock of the state of our team. It’s a by-product of the fast-paced business we’re in – and anyway, does corporate culture honestly need to be all that high on your priority list? 

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