Why offsite meetings help RIAs set and reach their growth goals

An offsite team meeting to kick off the new year could help advisory firms focus on strategies to grow their businesses. It's an approach that can bear fruit throughout the calendar year.

Failing to devise an expansion playbook is a common problem among financial advisors, who are expert at planning clients' affairs yet often "really fall short" of mapping their own future goals, according to Mike Byrnes, founder of advisory practice growth strategy firm Byrnes Consulting. Much like ownership succession, hiring new advisors and devising continuity plans for catastrophic scenarios, strategizing for organic growth in terms of new or deeper client relationships demands often-overlooked planning and execution.

Holding an offsite meeting to update or create those growth plans through discussions led by the founding advisor or a third-party facilitator provides the opportunity to talk through past successes or areas for improvements and identify a specific organic growth target, net of asset appreciation, Byrnes said. From there, each team member can tackle one or more aspects of reaching that level by the same time the following year.

"It's nice to have a facilitator," Byrnes said. "If you can get away from the office and have a whiteboard and have some best practices but also know some things to avoid, you can really accomplish a lot."

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Setting the agenda and drilling down to individual goals

Besides growth strategies, the potential agenda items for an advisory firm's offsite meetings include client segmentation, marketing and branding efforts, as well as barriers to implementing the plans, according to a guide by Julie Genjac, who coaches advisors as the vice president of applied insights with asset management firm Hartford Funds.

"This meeting should be something the team looks forward to, so consider including team-building activities, a celebratory dinner or a fun event afterward," Genjac said. "We strongly recommend that you have 1-3 goals for the upcoming year documented before the meeting ends. Each goal should have at least one person assigned as the keeper of that goal. This creates accountability for execution and a sense of ownership. Also, schedule the next year's offsite meeting when this one concludes. That way everyone can plan accordingly."

Byrnes recommended asking each team member to "grade" themselves in different categories of the company's growth pursuits, then assign themselves numeric targets within specific desired markets or client segments. In some cases, that may point toward further research into how to find and convert new customer leads and possible referrals from a broad array of professional services firms.

"When you then have that big comprehensive goal, then each person who contributes to the goal should then have their own individual goal," Byrnes said. "Within that individual goal, they should have their own individual target markets."

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Thinking inside and outside the box on referrals, tech

Those markets each speak to possible referral sources for advisors who "typically just go to accountants," according to Byrnes, who uses the term "strategic alliances" more frequently than the common industry phrase "centers of influence" to refer to outside professionals who send clients to collaborating wealth management firms. Advisors should consider possibilities for exchanging leads beyond the usual arrangements with local accountants and lawyers.

For example, if advisors are seeking to court high net worth clients, they could think about striking referral deals with, say, golf pros, jewelers, auto dealerships, interior designers, realtors or yacht clubs, Byrnes said. For those with philanthropic expertise, executive directors of nonprofit organizations could act as another source. But the strategy requires thoughtful planning around where a firm's ideal client could be spending their time and how to reach them.

Lastly, the offsite meeting marks a good time for talking about the firm's technology and any new solutions that could "plug into companies and make them more scalable," which means that they "can be profitable at lower asset management thresholds for clients," Byrnes noted. That could come from integrations of new artificial intelligence-powered tools or taking fuller advantage of existing capabilities offered by broker-dealers or custodians. He compared some advisory firms' agreements with those latter vendors to gym memberships that may or may not be used to the fullest extent.

"They have these resources, so use everything that you're already paying for. You'll see that positive return on investment," Byrnes said. "You can pay for stuff like that and, if you don't use it, it's a waste of time and a waste of money."