Voices: Valerie Porter, on Advisers Becoming Better Business People
Voices is an occasional column that allows wealth managers to address issues of interest to the advisory community. Valerie Porter is the director of the Financial Planning Association's Research and Practice Institute, as well as president of SummitView Financial in Indianapolis.</br></br>In 2012 I started working as a consultant for the Financial Planning Association. FPA was interested in creating a Research and Practice Institute to gather information about practice management for its 23,000 members. There are lots of tools and resources available online for financial planners, but little empirical data regarding how advisory firms are actually run.</br></br>A lot of advisers are great technicians, or great at planning or investments. But many struggle with the business side of their practice. So we created quarterly surveys to ask advisers about the technical aspects of practice management such as their time management and productivity. Our goal is to use the responses from quarterly surveys to identify how advisers can become better business people.</br></br>The first pilot survey was conducted in the fall of 2013. It was designed as a broad baseline study, to get a feel for what's happening in the industry overall as it relates to practice management. We'd hoped to receive 1,000 responses to this first survey, but we received 2,400, which indicated a big interest.</br></br>This inaugural study showed several performance-related gaps. Advisers agreed that effective time management is important to their business success, but that they struggle in this area. For example, most advisers don't have formal practices and systems in place to ensure for efficiency. Additionally, younger advisers and female advisers indicated that they had no access to a formal training system geared specifically toward them and that they would be interested in participating in one.