Energize Your Firm By Hiring A Top-Notch Staff

A financial advisor I met at an industry conference told me he doesn’t have employees because he abhors them.

He doesn’t like to write job-wanted ads, get them published and sort through resumes only to, in his words, waste a lot of time interviewing people and end up with staff who are lousy at their jobs and don’t stay long because he either ends up firing them or they quit.

“The heck with all of that,” he told me. Instead of spending money on payroll, insurance and other benefits and dealing with W-2s and other paperwork, he’d rather handle his firm’s behind-the-scenes work himself, even if that means having less time to devote to clients.

That’s his choice, of course, but he should remember that he didn’t get into this business to spend hours on end negotiating leases for office space, choosing photocopiers or telephone and computer systems, marketing, opening mail, dealing with compliance and regulators or a host of other mundane tasks.

You didn’t either. All of those things and more must get done if your business is to succeed. But they don’t have to be handled by you.

Think about it: As the financial advisor (or the chief advisor among many), you are the highest-paid person at your firm. Does it make sense for the highest-paid person to be engaging in activities that can be done by people who are paid far less?

The advisor I met who doesn’t like to hire has put a cap on his firm’s potential. It isn’t able to grow beyond its present size unless he hires help.
Another advisor told me, “My staff doesn’t work very hard, and that’s why I don’t like to hire.”

“What do you mean, they don’t work very hard?” I asked.

“Well, they basically work half as hard as I do,” he said.

“Then hire two,” I told him.

Successful hiring requires a careful process. It’s almost an art form. When financial advisors tell me they’ve always had “bad luck” in hiring, I usually discover they’re hiring people with the wrong skills or attitude (causing the advisor to fire them) or they aren’t paying their employees properly, they aren’t treating them well or they are failing to give them opportunities to grow in their careers, any of which can cause employees to quit.

It’s quite a dilemma: Don’t hire and you are stuck doing all the work. Hire and suffer turnover and all the hassles associated with that.