Growing Profitably: Why The Details Matter - FP Advance

Growing Profitably: Why The Details Matter

BY brett

Growing Profitably: Why The Details Matter

Wondering about how to grow and develop your business?

Recently I did two interviews with Rob Kingsbury from Adviser Business Review. Both interviews tackle the tricky issue of growing your business.

The video interview below covers three interesting areas:

  1. Building scale
  2. When to hire a practice manager
  3. Should everyone in your business be part of your marketing team?

Building Scale

Here the key issue to focus on is tight processes and controls. This is not to stifle the creativity and flair of individual advisers working in the firm, but to free them up from the ‘everything else’ so they can spend more time in front of clients and increase their personal productivity. If they’re writing their own letters and reports, or getting involved in other administration work, productivity stays low.

As a guide, normal production (i.e. the annual revenue an adviser is responsible for, which includes recurring revenue and new business revenue) is in the £100,000 – £200,000 range. Good production is in the range of £300,000 – £400,000 and excellent production is £500,000 – £600,000 per adviser.

If you (or your team) are not doing that level of production, please don’t worry. These figures are not to make you feel bad; they’re simply to let you know what is going on out in the marketplace. Most firms and advisers, when they put their mind to it, can find ways to be better organised and do more business as a result.

Knowing this is possible also changes the thinking of some entrepreneurial owners. Rather than thinking they need ten advisers (which can be a nightmare to find, retain and manage) they can see their business goals realised with maybe three advisers at these higher production levels. That is a much tighter and more profitable business.

When to hire a Practice Manager

You need to start thinking about hiring a Practice Manager when you turn over between £600,000 – £800,000 of turnover. Many are surprised to hear how low this figure is. Have a listen to the reasoning I outline in the video and see if you agree. I discuss how, for one of my clients, this has given him a huge lifestyle dividend.

Should everyone in your business be part of your marketing team?

The last issue is really controversial. I’ll let you tune into that for yourself because I don’t want to spoil the fun.

Practice management: Reining in your RIs


Below is an audio interview I did with Rob and covers two great subjects.

The first is very exciting for growing businesses. I believe that when everything clicks into place, businesses will see massive year on year growth, in the order of 30% – 50% for a couple of years. This is a massive uptick from the 10% growth which is more normal as firms sort through their issues.

There is a real life example of how getting the details right helped one firm overcome a really tricky situation with a new prospect that was a £1M + investment case. Because they had done some work with me on their selling skills and Tim Hale on their investment proposition, they turned a difficult situation into an easy conversion. Have a listen, it’s a good story.

The second issue that gets discussed is around consistency of approach across the business, getting processes right and the importance of getting the right people in the right roles.

Driving your business up the revenue scale

 Selling Skills Workshop

Tickets are selling quickly for the Selling Skills workshop on Wednesday 17th December.

We’re limiting numbers to strictly 50 delegates. Don’t leave it too late to secure your spot.

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ABOUT BRETT DAVIDSON When you work with FP Advance you work with me, Brett Davidson, directly. My motto is ‘advise better, live better’ and I practice what I preach. I’m straight talking and get to the heart of an issue quickly. There’s no beating about the bush, just a focus on helping things improve. Ask my clients – what I teach works.