Whenever I go to industry conferences, I spend most of my time listening to the hallway and luncheon conversations, since you can usually find more really good information there than from the podium. Lately, I've been hearing a common theme, an issue that has emerged and grown more urgent in the past few years.

The theme is business management and productivity--or, more specifically, how difficult it has become to run a business. A lot of the better, client-centered advisers feel like they aren't as productive as they were in their earlier years. They aren't bringing their advice and expertise to as many clients as they would like, and their businesses, which they thought would be really profitable and rapidly growing by now, seem to be stalled and in danger of sliding into reverse.

This general malaise has become a prominent discussion point among my newsletter audience and in interactive discussion forums that I've hosted at industry conferences. Before the discussion, a lot of advisers thought they were the only ones experiencing these professional "blahs;" when they discover how common it is, they are eager to uncover what's really going on.

EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES?

The problem has become especially acute for several reasons. First, the professional environment has been very good for planners. Our community is generally held in high esteem, especially by contrast with the scandals that have plagued other parts of the financial services industry. Demand for financial planning services, while not exactly overwhelming, is higher than ever, especially for the adviser with a mature practice.

As a result, practices have been growing rapidly. Tiburon Strategic Advisors estimates that independent planners have grown their assets under management at the remarkable rate of 16% a year for about a decade. When the Frank Russell Investment Group polled the advisers at its conference, it found that 61% of them expected their future AUM growth rates to be between 11% and 30% a year. Financial Planning's most recent broker-dealer survey reported AUM growth of 35% across the board, even though revenue growth was up "just" 22% and overall payouts rose "just" 27%. The FPA Moss Adams studies depict a similar trend: solid growth in new assets, somewhat less growth in revenues and a slight decline in profit margins.

Rapid growth is great, but it has had the perverse effect of bringing advisers much more quickly to the limits of their existing capacity--often before they've had time to think about how to handle more business. The common complaint heard at industry meetings is that advisers feel like their businesses controls them, rather than the other way around. In fact, a new term is emerging to describe this phenomenon: hitting "The Wall."

According to a flood of exasperated comments from my newsletter audience, The Wall can be precisely defined as the point at which you suddenly, unexpectedly have no more time left to take on new clients or to find or train new staff, you realize you haven't been charging enough to cover the investment in the new people you need, and you're trying to make up for everything by working longer hours.

This, then, is the professional malady of our time: Your small business has suddenly run out of scale just when you have more growth opportunities than you ever expected.

TECHNOLITERACY

Several other factors are making this collision with The Wall more painful and inevitable. Practices are becoming more complicated to operate. Compliance hassles get more vexing each year. And the rapid evolution of technology has made it harder to identify the latest state-of-the-art products. To implement even fairly common changes like the paperless office or posting client portfolio positions on the web, you suddenly need a degree of technoliteracy that was definitely not part of the CFP curriculum. Staying current on rapidly evolving technology has become a small cottage industry in itself; we now have at least one professional newsletter--Virtual Office News (www.virtualofficenews.com), which is exclusively dedicated to the subject, and each of the major trade magazines now has a regular or semi-regular technology column.

Another factor is that, in practice management, planners are forever skating into uncharted territory. There are no standard business models in the profession, the way there are in medicine, accounting and law. That's partly because planning services are rapidly evolving. But also, the planning profession hasn't been around long enough to go through all the trial and error that eventually leads to universally accepted practice standards.

A new doctor has some reasonably clear guidelines about what an office should look like, how the services should be provided, how much staff to hire and what the profit/loss statement should look like. A planning professional with 15 years of experience, meanwhile, is still reinventing her wheel. And chances are that the equally successful office down the street looks very different from hers.