The financial advisory industry is suffering from hardening of the arteries, according to management consultant Mark Tibergian.

Indeed, the financial advisory business needs to rejuvenate itself with new faces, he said, because it's facing many challenges and contradictions.

Those were some of the comments of Tibergien, chief executive officer of Advisor Solutions at BNY Mellon/Pershing, at an FPA meeting on Monday.

It is becoming an older profession, with not enough CFPs, not enough new advisors, not enough women and not enough minorities entering it, he said. Yet these trends are taking place at the same time as when millions of Americans desperately need various kinds of financial advice and aren’t getting it.

“There’s an oversupply of clients,” Tibergien said at the FPA of Metro New York’s 20th Annual Forum in Manhattan. He also noted that, since 2008, there are some 40,000 fewer advisors.

Tibergien added that the industry comprises only 8 percent people of color and 23 percent women.

And the advisory industry is becoming top heavy at the wrong end, he said.

“There are more CFPs over the age of 70 than under the age of 30,” Tibergien said.

How does the industry reach millions of new clients who need their help? It must do it, he said, by more effectively utilizing existing staff and developing new members of the firm.

“This is one of the biggest challenges we have to attracting talented people to our profession,” Tibergien said.

One of the reasons for this problem is that most advisors entered the business to provide a service, such as managing investments, not necessarily to recruit, train and develop new people in the business, he said.

Tibergien said that, given the growth of the industry, the management of the average firm is now critically important. For instance, without more diversity, the average registered investment advisor could lose its assets.

“Without an effort to attract more diverse talent a firm could last for 1.5 generations or a few months,” he said.

How can advisors avoid these problems?

Tibergien said it is important for the advisory industry to become the “the industry of choice.” To do that, advisor executives should look at their firms and think of how they can encourage employees with better compensation and extended opportunities to grow professionally. They should consider how they can help employees grow in ways they hadn’t previously considered, he added.

At the same time, owners need to realize that coming generations of potential clients will not only inherit trillions of dollars, but that they “will also generate their own wealth,” he said.

He said 25 years ago advisors focused on investments, but now they need to pay more attention to developing clients and the employees who will help them reach goals.

That all means that the industry itself must become younger. The age demographics of the industry “are the most disconcerting,” he added.

The industry’s trends require each firm to look at itself and ask tough questions: “What are we doing to replace ourself and what are we doing to reach critical mass?” he asked.

Tibergien argued that some firms today don’t have redundancy protection; if the leader of the firm or other key personnel of the firm died, there would be no one with the experience to run things effectively. That happens in part, he said, because the owner or owners of the firm don’t have confidence in their workers.

In that case, Tibergien cautioned, the firm’s future is at risk.