How to grow your future talent

A new report by Elixir Consulting has offered several tips for advice firms looking to grow their future talent and increase the capacity of each adviser.

The report, titled The resilient advice business strategy handbook 2023, proposes three strategies that advice firms can explore to grow a high-performing team in a tight labour market.

These include home-growing talent from within, offering cadetships or graduate programs, and forward-planning their talent pool.

Below, we bring you Elixir’s tips in their entirety:

• Home-grow your talent from within. Creating a structured training plan for those who want to pursue careers in advice will enable you to grow with people who are familiar with your clients and fit your culture and values. This can include training admin support staff into paraplanning roles and supporting future advisers through their professional years. Ensuring you invest in external training and education will also ensure you keep growing with fresh ideas, rather than ‘inbreeding’ bad habits or outdated ideas.
• If you have significant growth plans, consider offering cadetships or graduate programs to attract talented students with a structured career path and learning journey. There are firms enjoying great success in securing the brightest talent with a documented path through client service and paraplanning roles to associate and qualified advisers. A vague promise of a future advice role pales in comparison to a well-structured, documented career path with accompanying training and skills checklists, particularly when that path might take five to 10 years.
• Forward-plan your talent pool. When you have a long-term strategic plan in mind, you can keep an eye out for quality team members that may suit your firm as your client base grows. You may also accelerate your growth if you meet like-minded advisers who prefer to merge their business with yours and be part of a bigger firm, rather than going solo.

Elixir’s message for advisers is: “Tomorrow’s award-winning adviser might already be right under your nose!”

And their final thought on growing advice teams: “Hiring staff before you absolutely need them will not only enable you to grow your firm without your team suffering burnout, you’ll also be able to train and upskill quality people who may come to you without deep experience in advice”.

“A great rule of thumb is to hire your next team member when your current people are at 80 per cent capacity”.

According to Elixir, to do this successfully, “you’ll need to have your pricing right to include sufficient profit to cash flow fund or have ready access to capital to invest in more staff and a structured marketing or growth plan to provide a steady stream of enquiries to allow you to plan your future cash flow to underwrite additional salary costs to train your future stars”.