More attention is being paid to how financial advisors interact and engage with their clients, and recent research has labeled some advisors as being out of touch and stuck in the old ways of financial planning. By and large, experts say, the days of just focusing on portfolio management are numbered, and that holistic planning is the future.

Aadil Zaman, partner at New York City-based wealth management firm Wall Street Alliance Group, could not agree more. Zaman, whose clients are mostly small-business owners, particularly physicians, believes there is a paradigm shift across the industry in that advisors have to give their clients a 360-degree solution if they want to work as a fiduciary.

And especially in today’s Covid-19 environment, Zaman said, financial advisors must look at their clients’ lives and understand the greater set of problems they face. “As a financial advisor, especially if you are working as a fiduciary, the key is that the more problems you solve for a client, the more valuable you become to them and the stronger your relationship with them becomes,” he noted. 

Prior to the pandemic, Zaman said, he and his partner, Syed Nishat, had been providing the 360-degree holistic solution as fiduciary financial advisors to the many small business clients they service. But the pandemic magnified the roles they play as business consultants.

“What we saw with the pandemic was that a lot of small businesses suffered," Zaman said. "Their revenues went down, their costs went up, and physician practices were no different." He added that many of the physicians who were doing elective work saw their volumes decline and their personal protective equipment costs rise.

Zaman explained that when the CARES Act was introduced, he and his staff had to double down as business consultants to educate themselves and their clients about the CARES Act provisions.

“We looked at all the programs that business owners could benefit from,” he said. “And in doing so, we believe as a financial advisor that if you can act as a business consultant and incorporate that into your holistic financial planning solution, it really helps to put you in a position to be able to help your client in the hour of need.”

Zaman said the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a lifeline for many of his clients. There also was the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program, as well as certain other programs that were specific to physicians. They include the Medicare Advance Payment Program, and the Health and Human Services Medicare Relief Program.

While catering to the business side of their planning, Zaman said they also had to look at the personal side of planning. And that holistic approach, he explained, is efficiently done when there are experts on board at a firm.

“You really have to have that collaborative team of experts approach,” he said.

And while Wall Street Alliance Group already had specialists on board in disciplines such as law, actuarial accounting and real estate, Zaman said it was a learning curve sorting through all the government programs because many of them were fluid and confusing.

He noted the rules and laws of the PPP, for example, have gone through numerous revisions. “We were studying these laws," he said. "We were dedicating our time to understanding all that was there to be able to help these clients.” 

Zaman said he and Nishat formed their firm in 2010 with a focus on being fully fiduciary. They branched off from a broker-dealer who did not support their vision of advising clients both on investments and on broader matters that clients wanted help with including tax planning, setting up wills and updating trusts.

Wall Street Alliance Group has four full-time employees, as well as a broader team of 10 individuals who collaborate on various wealth management specialties. It has approximately $230 million in assets under management.

Zaman said it took time for them to develop their network of experts. “We went through a stringent vetting process over the years before we were able to formulate those key relationships, and that puts us in a position of strength because when a client comes to us, we are able to look at it from a 360-degree angle,” he explained 

During the height of the pandemic, Zaman said many of his physican clients who were treating Covid-19 patients were worried about the health risk because they saw colleagues dying. They wanted to know that if something were to happen to them that their personal assets would transition to their family according to their wishes. Clients also inquired about protection against potential lawsuits for wrongful treatment during the crisis. All of this required setting up wills and delving into trust and estate planning.

“We are not just outsourcing this work, we are involved in it every step of the way, and we have deep relationships with all the CPAs, actuaries and attorneys that we are working with for our clients to get that solution,” Zaman said.

In order to cultivate a collaborative network, Zaman suggests that smaller practices assess the biggest needs their clientele has. For example, he said, the biggest need now for the physician community that he serves is saving money on taxes.

“In order to do that, the first alliances we had to make was with CPAs, as well as actuaries, because that allows them to set up certain retirement plans that help them put away money pre-tax,” he explained.

He pointed out that many clients that advisors work with already have a CPA, so a good starting point would be to reach out to those CPAs and see who would be interested in a collaborative relationship.