There are also firms that have an investment department and an advice department where the responsibilities may be more complex and each department has its own career track.

But the point is that the “non-lead” positions can and do play a very important role in the delivery of services to clients. They should create capacity for the lead advisor (notice all the boxes the lead does not have to check) and leverage (it is quite likely that some of the non-lead advisors may even be better than the lead advisors at some of the tasks).

Inviting the service and support advisors to the client meeting is often a difficult first step for many advisors. They are afraid there will be too many “chefs” in the kitchen and that the subordinates will say or do something to damage the client relationship.

But it’s also a mistake to invite the service advisors to the meeting and not give them much of a role. They end up sitting silently for the entire meeting with no apparent function, and it’s difficult for the client to see them as an integral part of the service team. Once a colleague of mine was supporting me in a client engagement and sat silently through the entire meeting while I “hogged” the conversation. The client got up to leave and said to my colleague, “Good that we are paying you by the word.”

The moral of this story is, don’t just bring service advisors to a meeting. Give them a very specific role and give them a chance to shine. If clients are going to accept them as “authoritative” members of your team, they need to see them in action.

At times, the owners of a firm also make an error in thinking that the “junior” advisors should work mainly with the small client relationships. The logic is that it will create capacity for the firm owners and that the risk of losing those clients is much more tolerable.

This is flawed in two ways:

• First of all, throwing an advisor who is not ready to work independently into a “small” relationship is just bad business. The experience of both the client and the advisor will be very frustrating, and any problems that develop are still likely to reflect on the reputation of the firm. A firm should never have clients it is willing to “experiment on.”

• The service advisors are also not very likely to learn much from this experience. The challenges presented by small relationships are not likely to help them learn how to service bigger ones. In chess, they say, you learn the most when you play opponents who are better than you; worse opponents just teach you bad habits. Similarly, advisors will form bad habits if they only deal with simple and uncomplicated client problems.

A much better policy is to have the service advisors participate in large client relationships and perhaps test their ability to lead with both clients large and small to see who responds better to their style.

To successfully work with service and support advisors, a firm needs to have a well-structured client service process. Otherwise it is very difficult for both the lead advisor and the service advisors to understand their roles. In a way, before hiring a sous-chef in the kitchen, a restaurant has to write down its cooking recipes. Your table of responsibilities may not look much like the one I have proposed, but if you cannot create a table at all, then hiring a service advisor will be very frustrating for all parties involved.

Finally, hiring “non-lead” advisors is also a function of the size of the client relationships. Smaller projects are better done by one person—the cost of explaining the steps and circumstances is higher than the benefit of leverage. In a way, you don’t need two chefs to make a cup of coffee—it will have to be a more complicated recipe. Firms with larger and more complex relationships will find it easier to leverage service and support hires.

Hiring service and support advisors is a critical step for advisors who want their businesses to become larger and better. These positions not only bring capacity and leverage to your firm but challenge it in some very positive ways. By creating a place for them, you force discipline on the organization. It puts the responsibility on you to create opportunities for those hires to grow their careers and someday become lead professionals. It forces your firm to not only create the career path but also, very importantly, to find the new clients and new markets that will enable that growth.

Philip Palaveev is the CEO of the Ensemble Practice LLC. Philip is an industry consultant, author of the book The Ensemble Practice and the lead faculty member for The Ensemble Institute. More information about the institute can be found by e-mailing [email protected].

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