Why to Not Avoid Operational Excellence in Your Wealth Management Firm

The exceptional and personalized client service that you deliver is what made your clients choose to work with you as their financial advisor. You clearly made a great impression — you stood out to prospective clients who chose to work with you over the other 380,000 advisors in America. Give yourself a pat on the back!

Making a good impression is just the tip of the iceberg and marks the beginning of the hard work that lies ahead. It is now your job to fulfill the promises you have made, demonstrate continuous value, and ensure that your clients continue to view you as an essential part of achieving their financial goals. Fee compression and lower cost offerings continue to drive a shift in client expectations, with many prospective and existing clients expecting higher touch, comprehensive, technology enabled service from their personal financial advisors. Introduction of new family office style services and financial planning touch points only add to existing complexity, making it even more challenging to service existing clients, let alone focusing on growth. 

Luckily, you don’t need to sacrifice your client experience for growth. A foundation of operational excellence is crucial for your firm's long-term success and imperative to your ability to scale your book of business, your team, and your service offerings.

We've met with hundreds of wealth management firms, and each is different in so many ways, but what ties our users together is their mindset. Hubly users understand how to embrace the principles and technology needed to create sustainable improvement within their firm. Hubly provides the tools that allow firms to achieve the high degree of operational excellence required to provide consistently exceptional service.

Operational excellence is key to be able to do the following:

1. Improve employee satisfaction and productivity
2. Scale your firm with ease
3. Enhance your client experience
4. Create visibility across your firm 
5. Manage Risks 
6. Eliminate time wasted

Improve Employee Happiness and Productivity ‍

When your firm is running like a well oiled machine, there will be less frustration and inefficiency within the workplace. With clear expectations of roles and responsibilities among team members, employees will feel empowered to work independently. As a result, productivity will increase and communication will improve. 

In fact, after surveying advisory firms who implemented Hubly to improve their operational excellence, 96.2% of Hubly users said they would be disappointed if they could no longer use Hubly. The impact operational excellence has on your team goes beyond just productivity and happiness ⁠— ultimately increasing your employee retention and paving the road for cross-training, collaboration, and internal growth.

Scale Your Firm with Ease

Investing time into streamlining your processes and creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) creates predictability and visibility across your firm. In turn your team has the capacity to work like a well oiled machine and scale efficiently. Creating a single place to work empowers your team to see the full picture with one single source of truth. Having everything in one place will ultimately make it easier to scale than if you were tracking clients, juggling recurring processes, and individual one-off tasks across multiple spreadsheets, to-do lists, whiteboards, and areas of your CRM.

Enhance Your Client Experience ‍

As you continue to grow your wealth management firm, it is important that each of your clients receive a consistent experience at the same level of service that you initially built your brand on. By establishing repeatable processes and documenting workflows that are shared and utilized across your firm, you can ensure that every client is receiving the same level of service no matter who they are working with. 

Another important role operational excellence plays is the speed at which client services are delivered. For example, when it comes to opening accounts and moving client funds, the more seamless the client's experience is, the happier they will be and the more time your team will have to work on the business. Therefore, inefficiencies within your firm are not only impacting your clients, but they are also impacting your bottom line.

Create Visibility Across Your Firm

‍A lot of the work that you do between client meetings creates immense value for your clients, yet your clients never hear about it. Clients don't have visibility into the work that goes on behind the scenes, making it hard for your team to demonstrate value outside of meetings. Without a snapshot of all the work that has been done for a client, it is challenging to demonstrate your value to your clients.

Tasks are often spread across routine reports that you run, activities and one-off tasks recorded in the CRM, reminders in your calendar,  and sticky notes. By tracking all work in one single source of truth, your entire team can effortlessly see what was done for each client,  and use this visibility to communicate more confidently with every client. 

In Hubly, the client card summarizes what is being worked on by everyone on your team — providing you with an up-to-date service record for each and every client which is always just one click away.

Manage Risks

Work towards building a proactive approach to client service across your firm. Preventing things from slipping through the cracks and helping your team identify issues before they arise are outcomes that become easier to reach as you move towards achieving operational excellence. With the powerful software becoming available to the financial services industry, It’s important to consider technology's place when it comes to detecting errors early on.

When it comes to operational excellence, finding a workflow management solution that fits your firm's growing needs allows you to be increasingly more proactive in your client service and will help you see return from your investment into your operations sooner.The key word is growing because you want technology that will grow with your firm's needs so that you don’t need to change your technology and processes every few years. We don't mean to brag (maybe just a little), but Hubly's software creates repeatable procedures that drive work for your team with automated task routing and intelligent notifications, so that client service work never slips through the cracks again.

Eliminate Time Wasted ‍

Operational excellence helps you stay lean and agile while scaling your wealth management firm. This means removing time wasted on duplicated work or tasks that get missed in the clutter of multiple tools, so that your team can easily see their priorities and focus on driving value for clients. 

Implementing operational excellence within your firm is no small feat and requires the proper use of technology and a dedicated team member to spearhead the project. This person is most often the Operations Lead for they tend to exhibit the skills needed such as technical proficiency, organization, strategic planning, team management, and prioritization. This person’s role is to ensure that the firm runs like a well oiled machine.

In Conclusion

While putting the work into achieving operational excellence may seem daunting, it’s well worth the effort — helping ensure that you can scale your firm without sacrificing the client experience, or burning out your team. If you could use a hand getting started, Hubly comes with over 60 best practice workflow templates right out-of-the-box on a range of practice management topics such as client onboarding, client meetings, and investment management. 

Want to learn how Hubly can help you achieve operational excellence? Book a Strategy call today. 

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