In concise and easily digestible chapters, a new book by Curtis C. Brown Jr. and Rob Knapp offers a plan for creating and sustaining financial advisor teams and explains why successful teams increase revenue.
Supernova Advisor Teams. A Pathway to Excellence, the follow-up to Knapp’s 2008 The Supernova Advisor, says that the shift from solitary advisor to “more dynamic and agile team-based models’’ has also led to enhanced productivity and performance.
Brown and Knapp are veterans who entered the industry when solitary advisors were the norm. Brown, a practice management consultant for Knapp’s Supernova Consulting LLC, worked for 30 years at Merrill Lynch in leadership positions; Knapp was managing director at Merrill Lynch, where he worked for 34 years.
The authors argue that productive and enthusiastic teams can counter current challenges and threats: encroachment on advisory firm business from technological innovations; the demands of satisfying an increasingly diverse clientele, price compression, changing regulations and an alarmingly unwieldy workload. Burnout and declining service are the inevitable results of having to do too much and know too much, they wrote.
“The sole practitioner has limited scale to provide an elevated level of service and to be knowledgeable and an expert on a range of strategies and products.’’ the authors said.
Under Brown’s supervision as branch manager for four locations in the Northeast, more than half of the firm’s advisors joined teams and revenues and assets more than doubled in three years.
“What did we learn by creating an environment where more than 60 percent of the advisors were on a team? Merely putting people together as a cobbled-together solution will not work. Teams must have a unifying vision.
“There must be a team business plan with a delegation of duties and responsibilities for each team member. Teams must have working agendas as they approach each day. Communication strategies must be scheduled, and performance must be measured weekly. Teams must deal with common failure points. Teams must achieve performance and leverage.
“The key is to leverage complementary (team member) strengths to achieve more significant revenues,’’ Brown said.
In the 16 chapters that follow, Brown and Knapp refine that basic outline.