How can you play to your team's strengths?

Making sure roles are clearly established within your business will lead to greater productivity, writes Brett Davidson, chief executive of FP Advance.

To really drive business performance and profitability you need to get the best from your team of people. There are two aspects to this:

• Clear client service and management structures
• Clearly defined roles and responsibilities

While the business owner may wear more than one hat in a smaller firm, role clarity has a direct impact on business profitability.

First and foremost, each client service team member (adviser, paraplanner, administrator) must know exactly what they do so they can stick to their knitting, developing a higher level of skill in their specialist area. Most advisers have good client communication skills and are best utilised solely in the role of speaking to clients and prospective clients. The minute they get involved in report writing, paperwork handling or sorting out hassles with suppliers, profitability suffers.

Paraplanners, by contrast, are specialists in preparing cashflow models and written advice for their advisers and should be used predominantly in that research and writing capacity. With excellent technical knowledge (ideally higher than the advisers they service) and strong written communication and technology skills they can produce mistake free, high quality outputs for advisers to use at the coalface with clients.

Finally, the administrators are the ‘do-ers’ who put theory into action, with a strong understanding of how to complete all types of applications correctly. They also know how best to get these applications processed efficiently with any suppliers (such as platforms, investment managers and life companies). They don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

Clearly the skills required for each role are different and different types of people are best suited to carrying them out. Creating specific job descriptions and role clarity does not mean you create a bunch of ‘jobsworths’ who can only perform one task. What it leads to is a high performance team where everyone works collectively but with specialist skills.

GB cycling has enjoyed great success over the past few years, not because it suddenly found a group of more gifted riders than anyone else in the country. It put a quality team in place to handle every aspect of performance management, which provided its riders with an opportunity to perform at their best. While everyone in the team performs a specialist role, they also meet to discuss things as a team and to add their unique perspective to the challenges the team faces in pursuit of its goals.

The same principles can be applied to your client service team (adviser, paraplanner, administrator). Although each person on the team may speak to clients at different stages of the process each person knows when they should take the lead in that interaction and when they should be deferring to another member of the team.

Playing to strengths increases client satisfaction, referral rates and overall business profitability.
Take a look at these numbers from the FP Advance Business Fitness Report:

Greater role clarity allows the business owner/owners to perform to a higher level. Rather than trying to be the jack-of-all-trades and master of none, each hat can be worn at the appropriate time. As the business grows some roles can be dropped to allow the business owner to work to their own personal strengths. For many adviser entrepreneurs this means staying firmly entrenched in the lead adviser role, rather than playing at business and people management. When the time is right, professional management can be brought into the business to take over those specific roles.

Once clear roles are established and documented two other benefits accrue:

• Each staff member is able to set clearer personal objectives for their role and themselves. The sharpened focus this brings has a direct impact on business profitability.
• The performance of each staff member can be more easily evaluated and individuals can feel responsible for, and be held accountable to, their key performance indicators.

Combining each of these aspects into effective people management means:

• The majority of staff have job descriptions and individual objectives;
• Performance reviews are conducted at least annually;
• Staff are aware of the businesses high level goals and participate in an incentive programme.

For a successful business, getting your structure and people management right certainly matters.

People Management Table 1

People Management Table 2

People Management Table 3