"They [employees] leverage my time, and that's what any new CFP or planner brings because it gives the senior planner more time to do more complicated tasks that a new planner might not know," Redfield says.

He adds that he uses what he calls a two-times rule to gauge whether or not a new planner has been a good hire. "If I pay them $80,000 to $100,000 a year, I have to make $200,000," he says. "I have to show them I generated that someplace else as a result of them being here. That's the leverage."

Bridging The Expectation Gap
Caleb Brown, 32, got his CFP license and entered the advisor profession 10 years ago, and in that time he's seen a number of his contemporaries leave the business. "I've seen a lot of people who could've been good financial planners who never found a good fit and dropped out of the industry," he says.

Brown gravitated toward career development, matching job candidates with advisory firm owners, and in 2009 co-founded New Planner Recruiting LLC, which specializes in placing students and career changers enrolled in CFP Board-registered programs, as well as CFP certified practitioners with less than five years' experience, with financial planning firms-mostly RIAs and small, independent advisors.

Brown says he recently received a couple dozen calls from prospective job seekers who've worked at reputable, nationally known advisory firms for one to three years and aren't happy. Their common refrain is that they're not getting growth opportunities and they want to see what else is out there. "That's very interesting to me because of the names of some of those firms," he says.

But Brown notes that it's a two-way street, and he explains to job candidates that employers take most of the risk when they hire someone. "I tell them they need to do things to reduce the firm owner's risk and to make it easier for them to say 'I want to keep you on staff and move you up the ladder.'"

Brown says most job candidates want to work at a firm where they can work under a senior advisor. They also want mentoring, a paid salary and client interaction, and they want to learn the business in order to take as much as they can off of the senior advisor's plate.

"I think it's all about an alignment of expectations," Brown notes. He says he works with clients to map out what the firm owner expects from new hires at certain time increments of, say, three months or six months or one year and beyond.

"It shows a young advisor what's laid out for them in order to get promoted and to make more money," Brown says. "That's worked out really well."

Cracking The Code
Matthew Boyce, a principal and chief financial officer at American Financial Advisors in Orlando, Fla., offers that the boomer generation who built businesses have a different mind set from those people walking into existing businesses.