Reports are positive from advisors who do it.
As financial planning becomes more comprehensive and demands from
clients grow, more financial advisors are creating virtual office
practices by outsourcing tasks-such as back-office administration,
bookkeeping, portfolio management, reporting, technology, even
compliance-they used to do themselves. The virtual concept is that you
work with a network of other vendors who are independent business
owners and don't require ongoing training. Because of their wider
experience they often can provide a much better quality of input than a
simple employee.
In effect, through a support structure of firms who will work for you,
not as employees but as outside service providers, you can create a
substantial planning practice with few or no employees. The practice is
catching on. To be sure, many advisors already are outsourcing, using
outside attorneys and accountants, for example.
The ideas of extending the practice to other planning tasks is
permeating all advisory levels today-from boutique shops up to larger
organizations. "The smaller advisor will often use outsourcing as a way
of avoiding the need of employees, while a larger organization will use
it as a means to fill in positions where they may not want to hire a
full-time person," says David J. Drucker, co-author with Joel P.
Bruckenstein of Virtual Office Tools for a High Margin Practice: How
Client-Centered Financial Advisors Can Cut Paperwork, Overhead, and
Wasted Hours. Both authors are columnists for this magazine, and
publish the monthly newsletter Virtual Office News
(www.virtualofficenews.com).
Outsourcing has many advantages. It reduces human resource costs
(salary, benefits). "You just pay for what you use," says Drucker. "You
aren't making a full-time commitment."
It allows you more time for client service. You also tend to get better
quality of input from an independent professional than from an employee
with limited experience, says Malcolm Greenhill, an advisor who
operates a virtual office practice in San Francisco and outsources
extensively.
At the same time, working with third parties, often strangers, can
present challenges, such as loss of control over a task. The ultimate
risk with outsourcing, of course, is that at some point you may
outsource the relationship with the client as well, or the vendor will
go out of business.
Drucker and others scoff at this notion: "They can't take a
relationship if they don't have client contact." Greenhill agrees,
saying, "If you don't outsource the client contact you'll never lose
the client."
Lisa A.K. Kirchenbauer, a CFP licensee and financial life planner in
Arlington, Va., outsources financial planning data input and initial
reports and functions dealing with bookkeeping, technology, compliance
and performance reporting. Kirchenbauer explains that she is trying to
outsource all the work she can at this point so she can focus on her
relationship with clients. "It's about freeing up the time to focus on
the client and my own personal goals," she says. "If I don have to have
all these employees in-house, I can save money on taxes and benefits,
and general overhead costs."
She has also begun to utilize the resources of money management firm
SEI. "I've made the change because I realized that investment
management is really more of a commodity and tangential to the overall
financial planning work I do," she says.
Among the challenges she faces are setting clear expectations and
deadlines, the time involved (which relates to cost), as well as
staying on top of what has been outsourced. "Responsiveness can be an
issue sometimes," Kirchenbauer says, "but more often it's about me not
planning ahead properly. It's hard to make last minute requests when
the person is not in-house."
She also worries about security issues-for example, information getting
into the wrong hands-and uses an encrypted Web site to exchange
information, in particular with her financial planning
resource.
Does she have concerns about losing control? "Once you make the
decision to outsource, you've already made the decision to give up some
control," says Kirchenbauer. "I've learned to surrender many things in
life so I can have the kind of business and life I want. Outsourcing is
a necessary part, but you have to learn to give up some control, be
more organized and clearly communicate your needs and expectations."
Advisor Greenhill operates a virtual office practice and outsources all
functions except those having to do with direct client contact. These
include the preliminary parts of the financial planning process,
investment management functions, administrative tasks, bookkeeping and
compliance. His office location also is virtual; he works from home and
only uses executive office suites for client meetings.
Greenhill travels extensively, spending at least six weeks a year in England. He no longer tells clients he is going away because they get the same high level of service. "My office is any Starbucks worldwide," he quips.
Most vendors he uses have secure intranets, which allow secure document uploads and downloads, and he won't work with outside parties where he hasn't approved their nondisclosure policies. Greenhill also is a believer in systems that duplicate functions. He carries a laptop everywhere and uses a BlackBerry, which came in handy last summer in England when he accidentally spilled water on his laptop. To make his virtual office truly seamless, he'd like to see widespread adoption of electronic signatures by vendors. "I still have to print documents for clients to sign," he laments.
K. Esther Szabo, a planner in Los Altos, Calif., also has used outsourcing effectively to enhance her practice, saving on hiring and real estate expenses. She had her own business until 2003 and outsourced many functions to a firm on the East Coast: compliance, portfolio management, software reconciliation and reporting, as well as duties associated with business consulting and drawing up preliminary financial plans for clients.
"Everything was done when we walked into the office at 7:30 in the morning," says Szabo, who has since merged her practice with another firm, Allied Consulting Group. They currently outsource portfolio management software reconciliation to a third party.
Though Szabo believes in the effectiveness of outsourcing indirect client support roles, she has some concerns about outsourcing elements of financial plan work. "You aren't in the same room to pick up nonverbal cues from the client to tell you how they may be responding to a particular strategy and recommendation," she says. "Your outsource client doesn't know the client as well as you do. So the recommendations they may build into the plan, while they can look good on paper, may not be the ones the client would be ready to implement."
Szabo strives to maintain good relationships with vendors. "You have to keep a good relationship because you depend on them just like you would an employee in your office, and they're taking care of your data. Anything that leaves your office and gets sent to a client is a reflection on you."
None of these planners fears losing clients because they outsource. Says Szabo: "I think there's a bigger chance of losing the client if we don't have the time and the human resource focus in our practice to give our clients the one-on-one attention they deserve. If our attention is diverted to trying to figure out ways to pay additional employees to do functions that can be outsourced effectively, the risk is that the attention isn't focused on the client. It's too scattered."
"We're in the service business. The client is not interested in the mechanics of our back-office," says Greenhill. "They're interested in having a quality interaction with their planner."