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Strategic Planning
for Financial Advisers
Is your company planning
to fail?
The modern financial advice sector has
developed largely around the superb ability
of advisers to help clients to identify
their goals, and recognise that in order
to achieve them, strategic planning is required.
Advisers are unparalleled at explaining
this process to clients and at putting timed,
targeted strategies in place to help clients
achieve their objectives.
When planning with a client, the first
stage is to develop a clear plan of where
the client is currently and where they want
to be in respect of specific goals over
a defined timescale. They then create an
understanding that the goal can rarely be
achieved in one single leap and that an
incremental strategy, over time, will allow
the client to reach their goals without
undue pressure. This can be demonstrated
by the illustration below:
However, like the proverbial
shoemaker’s children who go barefoot,
when it comes to planning the use of technology
within their own business, advisers have
a tendency to completely ignore the strategic
planning techniques they employ for their
clients. Instead, practitioners tend to
have no clear vision of where they want
to be in the short, let alone the medium
or long term and, as a consequence, no planning
is put in place. This can be represented
by the illustration below:
By simply reacting to market
events, regulatory changes, new opportunities
and trends, advisers completely fail to
apply the principles they work so hard to
instil in their clients.
So what is the solution?
As with planning for clients,
the process has to start with a factfind,
to clearly identify:
- Where are you now?
- Where do you want to be & over what
timescale?
- What are your priorities?
- What budget and resources do you have
available to achieve your goals?
This will be influenced by
your objectives. An adviser who is looking
to develop an exit strategy will have very
different short-term objectives and goals,
which in turn will influence their priorities,
as opposed for example to an adviser who
is perhaps looking to develop a long-term
fee-charging practice.
Once the goals have been identified,
a planning strategy can be implemented to
meet them and the appropriate technology
selected to best meet the adviser’s
specific needs. Many advisers choose a technology
system on the basis of a recommendation
from a colleague, whose own objectives and
needs may differ significantly from their
own. Apply this concept to financial planning
and imagine the frustration if clients ignored
your advice, to simply buy what their neighbour
has bought.
There are many areas that
need to be considered and there is a significant
degree of cross-over, so just as with financial
planning, it is important that advice is
taken but, in the first instance, a self-assessment
factfind to clearly identify your goals
and timescales should be undertaken, which
can then form the basis of a request for
more information from technology providers.
An outline factfind, identifying relevant
areas can be obtained from Capita Financial
Software (Quay) if required.
As advisers often tell clients
“nobody plans to fail, they only fail
to plan”. How ironic then, those advisers
themselves are as guilty of this as any,
in such a vital area.
If you would like more information
on our outline factfind please contact our
Sales team on 01279 756080 or
send an email to: sales@quaysoftware.co.uk
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