Brokerage firms are challenged to provide effective practice-management help to their advisors, according to Cerulli Associates.

The most effective advisor support is done with one-on-one consulting, but trainers who can provide this kind of help are expensive and difficult to find, and individual engagements are difficult to scale across a firm, the research firm says in a report released this week.

The research firm found that heads of practice management programs at broker-dealers of all types indicate that their top three challenges are motivating advisors to follow through on engagements (88 percent), meeting advisor demand for consulting (85 percent) and scaling consulting services cost-effectively (81 percent).

Some firms require advisors to pay for consulting services, while others require detailed data-gathering in order to qualify for a program, all of which help ensure that participants are serious about following through. In addition, practice management programs often limit access to larger producers only.

Team building and succession planning are critical pieces of the practice-management equation since brokerage firms stand to lose significant assets when their solo-practitioner advisors retire or die, according to David Goad, a succession planning consultant not affiliated with Cerulli.

But here, too, firms face challenges, Cerulli says. “Teaming is not the ideal strategy for every advisor. Some are not hardwired to function in teams, and finding a workable synergy with peers can be hit or miss.”

The research firm estimates that 35.5 percent of advisors anticipates retiring within the next decade.

“This is a major issue. … There’s going to be a historic turnover of assets over the next decade,” Goad said.

In the independent channel, about 85 percent of advisors are solo practitioners, Goad added, and many will require a lot of handholding to buy into the idea of merging with a younger partner or larger group.

Cerulli found that technology is emerging as an increasingly important element in practice management. Advisors need help going paperless and communicating more effectively, for example. But simply learning how to use a program isn’t enough; tech tools must be incorporated into an advisor’s practice and used in the right way.

Consultant Matt Oechsli of the Oechsli Institute points out another challenge in the whole practice management space: firms going overboard on trying to get their advisors involved.

“It’s easy for major firms to hire and train people to teach practice management, so it’s become an industry unto itself,” Oechsli said.

Among firms of all sizes, Cerulli says the average brokerage firm has 19 employees working on practice-management support.

Yet many advisors feel lectured to about implementing a practice-management plan, Oechsli said, “so they almost turn a deaf ear to it.”

“The other element to it is that the really good advisors have done all this stuff,” he adds.