3 Important Business Drivers From Focus You Can Implement Now

Top insights: deepening client relationships, business growth, & goal-planning

Our recent Focus conference provided opportunities for attendees to reset, connect with peers, learn best practices, and discover new tools and resources. It’s a lot to take in in a short period of time. So whether you attended Focus or not, we want to ensure you can capitalize on the information presented by creating a personal action plan based on some of the key takeaways. Here are three suggestions to get you started, taken from the most popular mainstage presentations and breakout sessions, along with ideas to execute on them.

1. Clients now want in-depth advice—and the most successful advisors are delivering on it.

Today’s clients want comprehensive financial planning that goes beyond a basic financial plan. 92% of current investors want financial planning, and just 59% are actually receiving it today.¹ More importantly, 91% want estate planning (and other deep planning services), yet only 22% are getting these services through their current advisor.²

A recent study of the LPL advisor population found that the top 10% of advisors³ are delivering this type of planning, which includes college planning, tax planning, estate and legacy planning, charitable gifting, and caring for aging parents.

If you’re looking to drive more revenue and deepen existing client relationships, expanding your planning services is a proven way to do it. As highlighted at Focus, you now have a menu of resources to help you expand planning in your practice, whether you want to do it yourself or subscribe to one of our services for additional support. These include:

2. The top 10% of LPL advisors who run their own practices are working the same number of hours as the other 90%, but generating nearly triple the revenue.⁴

The most successful advisors see themselves as both business owners and financial advisors, and they’ve found ways to focus on their highest priorities. Essentially, they push down or offload tasks that don’t drive revenue, and dedicate more time to those tasks that do.

Here are ideas—shared at Focus—you can consider to eliminate, automate, or outsource tasks:

Scale your investment management. Building portfolios is likely one of your most time-consuming tasks. And while investment management alone isn’t a revenue-driver, it’s a key task you perform for clients. Delivering models to the majority of your book can be a way to scale time while still providing clients the right investment strategy for their goals. The Model Wealth Portfolios (MWP) advisory platform enables you to build your own models, choose from manager models, or use a combination of the two. It includes:

• ETF and mutual fund manager models
• SMA models
• New, direct indexing strategies
• The ability to set security restrictions in certain strategies

Together, these capabilities enable you to offer clients models (saving you hours of time) while still personalizing the approach based on each client’s needs.

Scale your client management. Creating segments and service models, and then automating them, is a great way to spend less time on operational client management tasks. You have access to a range of CRMs at LPL to help you do this, including Redtail.

Scale your practice management. You may find that by reducing your book size, you can dedicate more time to clients and prospects that better fit your business—and drive greater profitability. LPL offers Partial Book Sales, which lets you identify and submit accounts for transfer to LPL, and receive an immediate payout while ensuring a seamless client transition for ongoing advice and care. You could also choose to bring in more staff to whom you can delegate less critical tasks, or outsource work using LPL Business Solutions offerings like Admin Solutions, Marketing Solutions or Bookkeeping Services.

3. Setting goals and regularly reviewing them is key to success—and now there’s an easy way.

It’s a lot easier to reach your personal business goals if you have specific metrics you’re tracking to measure your progress. Practice Hub is a new dashboard in ClientWorks (soon to be available to all advisors) that allows you to view key business metrics, including assets under management (AUM), net-new asset (NNA) growth, and revenue. You can set goals for each of the metrics right in the dashboard, which makes it easy to see how you’re progressing. Plus, you can view benchmarks that show how you compare to your peers.

If you’d like to go deeper, you can work with CFO Solutions, which is like having a CFO in your office who has tools, insights, and problem-solving skills to help you meet your goals. Soon there will be another option – CFO Essentials (limited availability; wide release coming soon) – a lighter-touch, lower priced version of CFO Solutions that’s ideal for solo advisors or those with small-to-medium-sized practices.

Get started on your action plan

There are many ways to dive right in! Click on any of the links above to learn more about an LPL product or service. Or, schedule a consultation with one of our Business Solutions consultants to discuss the right solution to jumpstart your plan.

^1,2 High-Net-Worth Insights, a Spectrem Group Journal, Wealth Management Gaps, January 2023.
³ LPL Financial 2022 Gross Dealer Concession (GDC)
⁴ LPL Financial study: Build Your Extraordinary Business, July 2023.
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