As the advising profession has moved from a focus on sales to technical expertise to wealth management partnership, the kind of firms that the most successful advisors build is changing, too. Today, it’s no longer about running a one-person operation; now it’s all about team. In fact, according to Fidelity Investments, 84 percent of high-performing advisors work in a team configuration versus only 48 percent of other advisors.¹

Why the need for team? As the advising profession moves from offering a single product or service to providing whole wealth management, advisors can’t go it alone anymore. There are now too many pieces of wealth management for one person to have the time or expertise to manage them all: financial planning, investing, banking, taxes, home ownership, life insurance, estate planning, and more. Then, layer onto that a more sophisticated advising profession than ever before, involving the need for rainmaking, relational skills, technical skills, service skills, marketing skills, and so on . . . and you need a team to thrive.

In addition, if the client, the client’s family, and the heirs to the client’s wealth are going to be able to depend on an advisor, then advisors are going to have to build something that’s truly going to outlast them, and that begins with a team. Having a strong team in place helps advisors operate out of integrity and avoid telling the big, fat lie that they will always be there for the client when they can’t actually deliver.

Unfortunately, some advisors are still operating as sole practitioners, whether in practice or in principle. Some have stubbornly remained sole advisor in their firms, avoiding the hassle of taking on new advisors. Others who do have a team often keep the team members in the background when it comes to client relations, creating a bottleneck that puts too much pressure on the advisor and compromises the organization. It’s another case of advisors framing themselves in an outdated way that is detrimental to their business: the old frame of “I am the best at serving my clients” versus the new frame used by the best in the business, “My team is the best at serving our clients.” At ClientWise, we refer to this as framing oneself as a lone ranger (old frame) versus as a leader (new frame).

What’s a lone ranger? Lone rangers do much of the work themselves. Lone rangers have chosen not to build team or, if they have a group of people working for them, the team may not operate as effectively as it could. Lone rangers believe they are the only one who can advise the client.

Working as a lone ranger can be exciting and rewarding. Yet it can be difficult and exhausting, too, especially when trying to sustain production and grow the business to higher levels. Yes, you can work harder and longer, but you’re still likely to hit a limit with how far you can grow the business alone or without a true team.

If you believe, as emphasized earlier in this book, that the way of the future really is comprehensive wealth management—and if you believe that the client deserves more, today and in the future—then you’ve got to get other team members on board. This reframe is of value to you, the advisor, too. It frees you to focus on the work you love doing the most, it ensures that you can step away from the business when needed, and it gives you an advantage over competitors. The team reframe creates a win–win situation for advisor and client alike.

Where are you on the journey from lone ranger to leader? This chapter will help you explore this question and give you tools to improve your leadership skills and team performance, wherever you are on the lone-ranger-to-leader spectrum.

Surrender Independence to Interdependence

The evolution from lone ranger to leader involves a major reframe. You must shift from framing yourself as the one and only—or the primary operator—of your business to framing yourself as the skilled leader of a competent team.

Advisors using the sales approach may tend to frame themselves as a lone ranger, as they are usually most comfortable in the trenches, where they can be sure of making the sale. But even those advisors who operate from a technical or wealth management approach can easily fall into the lone ranger mentality. In working with a client, they may take the “trust me” approach and make the relationship all about them, not about their team or even the client’s participation and partnership.

In making themselves the primary person who interacts with, manages, and influences the client, these advisors are setting up potential disappointments in the future: disappointment if the advisor is unable to deliver everything promised due to lack of time and availability, if the advisor has blind spots on particular areas of wealth management that compromise chances of successfully meeting client goals, and/or if and when the advisor has to withdraw from the lead role of managing the client’s wealth due to retirement, illness, or something else.

The truth is that you have to let go to grow. For example, you may need to let go of the beliefs that

• the client service model has to be delivered by only you;
• you are the only one who can do a client review; or
• you possess all of the technical knowledge associated with delivering wealth management and that you can be the relationship manager, technician, rainmaker, operations person, and administrative manager.

These are some of the universal beliefs that lone rangers may need to let go of to become a leader.

Then there are those pieces that lone rangers will need to let go of that are unique to their particular firm, due to varying skill sets, strengths, client needs, and so forth. Regardless of the unique profile of a given firm and situation, the advisor undoubtedly will need to be willing to hand certain functions and responsibilities over to others on the team so the firm can offer true wealth management.

Another way to describe this is as surrendering independence to interdependence: letting go of the idea that you need to do everything yourself and replacing it with the notion that your job is to lead others in working as a team to get everything done for the client and the business. It’s a reframe from rainmaker to CEO, from lone ranger to leader. When you’re a salesperson working by yourself, you’re “eating what you kill,” so to speak. When you’re a leader or a CEO, you’ve got to find the ability to let go and trust that in building this team, the profits will not only come but increase because you will be able to better serve the client.

Surrendering independence for interdependence is not easy. One of my high-performing lone ranger clients, Bill, was certainly resistant at first. Bill was bringing in $18 million a year in income because he had done such an effective job of figuring out how to manage people’s investments. He had been doing such a good job, in fact, that people had been telling him his whole adult life of how great a job he was doing and that he should keep up the good work. He was a phenom and everyone wanted more of him, so he just kept doing more.

When I introduced the concept of building a true team around him, Bill was shocked. All of the feedback he had received for years said that he should keep working his professional magic and manage more and more investment portfolios. Now I was encouraging him to learn how to step back and give some control to a team of professionals that he would have to build around himself?

Bill expressed concern that the high performance he had been generating for years might drop if he was no longer doing the investing himself. His statement on the topic was along the lines of, “Why would I ever want to risk having mediocre performance for my clients? They’re paying me to run their portfolios; I’m going to run their portfolios.”

Interestingly, when pressed further on the point, Bill shared that he already had a team—after all, he had hired a bunch of people to process all of the work he generated. I explained to him that what he had was a work group, not a team, and that he could tell the difference between the two by asking what would happen if he was removed from the work equation. “So,” I asked him, “what would happen if you ever got injured or sick?”

The whole tent of his operation would fold—and Bill knew it. So we worked together to build a true team around him: better utilizing current team members, hiring new ones, building a network of other professional advocates in the wider wealth management business, and fostering an effective team culture. Over time, clients began to be able to rely on other people rather than just Bill, and they got more services than Bill alone could provide.

It turned out that Bill’s clients, while they valued his investment expertise and capability, also needed more from him. They needed a true partner to design wealth strategies that could help them live the lives they truly wished to live. Now Bill and his team can meet those needs, and, should anything happen to him, Bill’s tent won’t fold.

In the old days, when you sold one instrument, you could go it alone. In today’s wealth management business, you’ve got to include other people. You may play the role of lead wealth management advisor, but the team will also have a service leader, a technical person, and more—not just the CPA and the attorney, but other technicians like the relocation specialist, the private equity firm, the business valuation person, the primary banker, or the tax return preparer. Then you will have your traditional team as well, to cover areas like marketing, business, development, technology, and compliance. Some of these folks will be on your internal team; others may be on your virtual team, depending on the kind of firm you would like to run and whatever is needed to serve the client. One thing is certain: A team is needed to deliver true wealth management.

Team Defined

For those advisors who do have teams today but who find that their teams are not operating at top capacity, the root of the problem may be found by looking at the way the team originally formed. In the beginning, when an advisor got started in the business, in any channel, the advisor was responsible for doing it all. The more successful the advisor became, the more he or she needed extra people to support the work. The result? The advisor hired staff members and created a “team.”

Over time, the advisor became even more successful and therefore needed to hire more staff members, further growing the “team.” The cycle continued until the advisor woke up one day to realize he or she had become a manager with a lot of mouths to feed on the so-called team.

Managing the team took lots of time and was not particularly enjoyable. What’s more, the advisor never empowered the team members to create strong relationships with the client, so the client still depended on the advisor in spite of there being a team. More and more of the advisor’s time got eaten up by the team instead of being freed up by it.

What happened in these situations? Instead of building an interdependent team that was able to make the advisor’s life easier, the advisor built a work group that took lots of care and feeding. It’s a common mistake that ends with the same results: The work group and the client remain dependent on the advisor because he or she did not follow the steps necessary to create an interdependent team empowered to build relationships with the client, and the advisor becomes overtaxed and overburdened as responsibilities grow rather than diminish. No wonder some advisors shudder at the idea of creating a team, while others run “teams” that are not nearly as productive and helpful to the advisor as they could be.

At ClientWise, we define team in the following way:

A true team is a group of people who are fully committed to mutually defined and extraordinary success of the group as a unit and who hold themselves accountable for the achievement of that success as well as the methods by which that success is achieved.

A team is a group of people who are committed to joint success, a success that is extraordinary. How does one define extraordinary? The team gets to decide. For a true team to exist, all of the members need to have an opportunity to help define success. That’s a little uncomfortable for the high-performing lone ranger used to calling the shots and trusting his or her own judgment. It calls the lone ranger to stretch out of his or her comfort zone. But remember, too, that the lone ranger is becoming a leader, and leaders have the privileged position of helping the group set the vision; the leader has an essential role in defining what success looks like for the team.

The Old Team Structure versus the New Team Structure

The team reframe is not just about moving from being a lone ranger to leader of a team: It is also about moving from the old style to the new style of teaming. Teams of the past were built on a structure that put the advisor at the center of the group dynamic as a sort of gatekeeper between staff members and clients (as reflected in Figure 5.1). This put the advisor in a position of power, but it also created many opportunities for the advisor to become a bottleneck as the bulk of what the client needed passed directly through the advisor; similarly, the bulk of the staff’s work was also passed through the advisor on its way to the client.

As it turns out, the old form of a team wasn’t really a team at all. If you removed the advisor, the team would implode because the client had the relationship with the advisor, not anyone else on the team. The advisor was “the man” or “the woman” to deal with on all issues. Sure, the client might be served by the staff in some ways, but the client did not view them as professional advisors. To create true interdependence, you’ve got to get other professionals working with the client.

Enter the new team structure, which places the client at the center of the group dynamic. As shown in Figure 5.2, the work flow travels directly from each team member to the client as well as through the team itself.

The new team structure removes the challenge of advisor bottlenecks, builds trust between the client and all team members, and encourages collaboration among team members. Information and work flow easily and efficiently from those with expertise and ownership in a given area to the client or through the team first when team input is needed.

Do You Have a Team or Do You Have a Work Group?

Whenever I speak to advisors across the country about the need to have a team in place to deliver true wealth management, the responses vary. Some admit they have no team in place, others describe their team with confidence, and still others wonder if they are on the right track with their current team. I like to ask advisors in the last two situations to consider whether they have a true team or, instead, a work group.

A work group is made up of staff members and/or contractors to whom the advisor hands off work. Each member of the work group has individual goals that the advisor has set, but the group has not come together as a whole to mutually define success. Work group members may or may not happen to interact with each other, and they are not charged with keeping each other accountable.

You know you have a work group if

• you’ve hired a bunch of “staff” to work on individual projects, tasks, or roles, but you have not brought these individuals together to coalesce as a group with a common vision for success;
• you have defined what success means for the group without taking their input;
• you have resisted adding smart, intelligent technicians and relationship managers to the group in lieu of “worker bees”; and
• you hand off service work to the team but not relational work.

You know you have a work group when you eliminate the founder and the entire business implodes because the client is not accustomed to dealing with anyone but the founder. The founder is not so unlike a pole in a circus tent. Pull the pole down and what happens to the tent? It collapses.

In contrast, you know you have a true team when the client believes he or she is being served by the whole group rather than just the leader. If asked, the client would express that the team brings him or her more value than if the client worked with the lead advisor alone. In addition, you know you have a team when

• you observe members at a meeting and see every individual having a voice, speaking up, and taking a leadership role;
• day-to-day, you see team members acting as owners of their share of the business;
• you see team members working together, treating each other with respect, and supporting each other; and
• you sense a culture of inclusivity, collaboration, and camaraderie.

Last, if you have a true team, the members will believe the work that they are doing is contributing to team success for the benefit of the client. They will find their work joyful and will feel they are operating at their best.

Conclusion

Like it or not, as a professional in the financial services industry, you’ve been framed. Because you (or your predecessors) originally entered this business by selling a financial product, clients tend to view you as a salesperson. Most of them don’t know that you’ve moved on from advising on a single product to offering more options. Although clients would love to work with a partner, many of them don’t realize that you can be that to them—or already are—because, quite frankly, you may not have taken the time to educate them on your evolved role as a financial or wealth management advisor. Your job title may reflect the change, but busy clients may still be clueless.

I hope you are now a believer. If you agree that you are no longer a salesperson, you’re a partner; if you’re no longer interested in telling people you will always be there for them when in fact you don’t have a succession plan in place; and if you are ready to trade the lone ranger mentality for the leader mentality, it’s time to turn to Part II of this book, where you can begin to do the real work of reframing yourself, your team, and your business.

First, you get to have a conversation with your clients to gather input and learn about how they are framing you; then, you will have a chance to spend time with your team identifying how you would actually like to be framed. In the process, you will get to answer questions like, What kind of executive do you want to be? What kind of team do you want to build? And what do you want that team to be known for?

These are exciting times. No longer are you limited to advising on a single product. You don’t have to sell; you can partner. What’s more, you get to be the designer of your business, making conscious choices about what kind of clients you’d like to work with and the kind of services you are inspired to provide to these clients.

You no longer have to do it all, either, nor should you. You can build or develop your team to play key roles in serving the client so you are freed up to focus on the parts of the business you love, however you define them. There are a range of professionals out there for you to bring on, too, as part of your team, to support the client where you may not do so internally.

It’s an opportunity for you to lead not just your team and your business but the industry, too. By reaching out to other financial professionals and taking them on as team members rather than mere referral sources, you set a new standard of collegiality in the industry and create a model of true wealth management for the client—one where the client is taken care of in all regards. That’s noble!