"Next to nobody's business is prepared for a 50% decline in revenues," observes Andy Kalbaugh, executive vice president, business consulting for independent advisor services. It forces an advisor "to understand the guardrails and keep expenses under control."

Kalbaugh oversees a staff that has grown from six to 32 business consultants in the last year and is still expanding, with the recent addition of former Associated Securities president Allison Couch. Perhaps the biggest challenge is persuading advisors to strike the right balance between being a good advisor and being a good businessperson.

Some top advisors are succeeding in spite of their lack of focus on the business. Kalbaugh notes that when LPL surveyed 800 top advisors in its network, 40% actually had a written business plan. That figure probably is higher than the average in the profession, and many American entrepreneurs no doubt dismiss written business plans as exercises in bureaucracy.

Be that as it may, the 40% at LPL with written plans are enjoying a 5% higher growth rate than the 60% without one, and Kalbaugh anticipates an attitudinal shift among the skeptics. "I've done this for 20 years and I've never been in an environment where advisors have had a more receptive appetite for ideas," he says. "The crisis will change how people run their businesses for years to come."

What is the average advisor's major set of challenges? Kalbaugh lists three key issues, including driving efficiency into the firm, marketing the business, and growing equity in it. A subset of advisors place too much energy on growing the top line, which ironically may help LPL more than the individual advisor.

"Advisors really care about all their clients and that's where time management comes in," Kalbaugh says. He doesn't advocate that advisors "walk away from clients, [instead just] allocate your staff's time more efficiently."

In today's world where clients expect calls returned in three hours, advisors who are reluctant to delegate soon will find themselves overwhelmed by the Darwinian developments that Bruton cites. "It's a seismic shift in consumer behavior," Kalbaugh says. "If a business doesn't adapt, it's going to get very challenging."

LPL's consulting engagements drill down on the two primary interest groups driving advisors' practices: their clients and their staff. "We take a step back and look at their book of business from an economic standpoint, identifying A, B, C and D clients," Kalbaugh explains. Then they profile A clients, examining their activities, where they socialize and what they have in common with future prospects.

Carole Ford, who runs Ford Financial, a Fresno, Calif.-based wealth management firm with $300 million in assets, learned during the crisis that her firm could "weather almost any storm." Still, it served as a "stress test" for her and her staff and forced them to turn inward and re-examine the business with Susan Porter, an LPL relationship manager. The upshot is that Ford Financial now tries to "capitalize on opportunities that play to our firm's strengths and our client needs, rather than reach for opportunities that are potentially profitable in the short term, but ultimately distract us from our primary focus," Ford says.

In order to grow their businesses, principals in advisory firms need to free up more time to spend with clients and prospects. So the mantra of Bruton, Papazian, Kalbaugh and others is "delegate, eliminate and automate."