A number of registered investment advisory firms—including some well-know billion-dollar shops—are vowing to hold on to all of their talent as the coronavirus challenge continues despite anticipating a sharp haircut to revenues.

According to advisors Financial Advisor magazine talked to across the country, retaining staffing is a priority to firms as they ramp up customer service and communication. That’s despite what is likely to be a 30% decrease in assets and revenues for advisor firms for the foreseeable future.

How important is to retain talent now, despite a shrinking bottom line? “Advisors are in the unique position where as revenue goes down, service needs to be at its highest. So keeping our team in place is really important,” said Timothy Wyman, managing partner at the Center for Financial Planning in Southfield, Mich., which has $1 billion in AUM. “We think that it’s people over profits and [we] won’t be doing any layoffs.”

While staff and salaries may be the biggest expense any advisor firm has, “in 2008 to 2009 we worked really hard to keep our team intact and believe that we benefited from it,” Wyman said.

Keeping fully staffed will be more challenging for some firms than others, depending on their emergency planning, liquidity and ability to fund their business operations. The financial models Wyman’s firm uses estimate they need to plan for a 30% financial asset and revenue decrease. “We have to plan for a two-to-three-year period before we see pre-virus revenues,” Wyman said.

He added that kind of challenge is likely to put pressure on more thinly capitalized advisory firms. “It’s not only crucial for firms to be running a fiduciary practice at this moment, they also have to be running a solid business. You have to be both. Time will tell how many are able to do it,” Wyman said.

Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management in New York City, which has more than $1 billion in AUM, said that rather than laying off any staff, he actually has a new chief compliance officer who will be starting with the firm virtually.

“I made a decision we are not going to participate in this recession,” he said. “There’s too much work to be done. The worst thing you can do right now is to have clients call a phone that doesn’t get answered.”

While Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimated that as many as three million American jobs will be lost by the end of this week, Brown said advisors can only control their response to it.

“Staffing in our industry is absolutely critical right now,” he said.

That doesn’t mean the going will not be tough. “I’m going to tell you without a doubt our firm will be impacted,” he added, “as will every company doing business in America and probably the world. But I also believe that a wealth management firm that does right by their client now is going to see growth at the other end of it. Because not only will existing clients stay put, new clients will hear all about it and want to learn more.”

Rick Adkins, CEO of The Arkansas Financial Group in Little Rock, Ark., also his firm, which specializes in serving physicians, also has no plans to jettison employees. "We run a pretty lean place," he explains.

Tony D’Amico, CEO at Fidato Wealth in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, stressed that advisors’ own business and emergency planning will be integral to their ability to keep staff and serve clients well during these unprecedented times.

“One hundred percent, we have no layoffs or any downsizing planned. We are actually getting ready to hire another position,” D’Amico said. “I feel like we are built for this and couldn’t have done anything else to prepare.”

D’Amico credits his work with John Furey at Advisor Growth Strategies, a business consulting firm for advisors, with helping him do extensive emergency and liquidity planning as part of the process to position his firm for long-term growth.

“In planning the business, it’s all the different things we’ve worked on, from managing P&L (profit and loss) and making sure your margins are in line to having emergency and cushion accounts in place [and] being very clear with value proposition,” D’Amico said.

“The markets have been doing very well lately so people could afford to be more detached, but cash flow and emergency planning are as critical to us as a business as they are to our clients.”

D’Amico said that getting business planning right has given his firm the ability to make existing clients their number one priority right now. To communicate directly with clients, his firm launched the “Navigating This Crisis” series of emails and videos to explain its position on the crisis and detail their actions regarding the investment management and planning process.

“Communicating with clients proactively is so important right now,” D’Amico said. “We get emails and calls thanking us for our calm, educational approach. That’s our focus and we need our full staff to continue to do this and do it well.”