Could advisers be serving 600 clients each?

On the latest episode of the ifa Show, financial adviser at Complete Wealth, Dr Ben Neilson, explained how a new framework for advice he developed during his recently completed PhD research can either “increase the quality of advice or enhance the accessibility of advice”.

“In a nutshell, professionalism boosts trust and then trust drives engagement and then engagement enhances comprehension. Comprehension reduces costs and time to create and then lower costs improve your level of serviceability,” Neilson said.

“So now the next job is how do we punch that advice out as fast as possible in a manner that the clients can actually understand so they can make decisions quicker.

“Hypothetically, we can get the transaction, we can get the advice across to the consumer, and then once we can do that, we can rinse and repeat and we can service significantly higher levels of consumers.”

Using this method, Neilson said they are more than halfway to their goal of 600 clients each. He is serving 354 clients, and fellow adviser Matt Armstrong is at 421, all while only working four days a week.

“The faster you can get the result, the quicker you can offer that result to the client and then, in turn, the more people you can see.”

“Because we're doing it so quickly … the profit is going through the roof because we're not sitting on it and following it up and we don't have all these external costs, so we can charge you less and we can realise more and we can have that plan done so you get the results significantly faster.”

To enact this method, his firm utilised advice assistants to speed up the advice process and reduce the time advisers spent on lower-value tasks.

“We can potentially reimagine the adviser's role. So the adviser's role is for really high-level, granular strategic advice, and then the second it comes down to things that are borderline admin, you can outsource that.”

“[The assistant’s] job is to make sure that I don't miss anything, and then they're going to be your point of call for the specific. So you and I can talk about the stuff that matters, the relationship, your family, the advice, the specifics, say around salary sacrifice, and then the advice assistant will go to the fund and figure out what the specifics are of that thing.”

In this model, the assistant completes the fact find, checks to see if the client requires any renewals, engagements or fee forms, and makes any necessary updates to balances, among other things, before the meeting.

Meanwhile, the adviser is still coming up with and implementing the strategies for clients, conducting client meetings and discussing topics as necessary, but has a significantly lighter administrative workload.

“All we want to do is create a synergy around what we think the barrier is and then how to address it so we can expand the heck out of our access. We don't want to service 150 clients, we want to service 600 client groups,” Neilson said.

He added: “It's aggressive, however, we think it's achievable. If I look at what we've done from the last two years, it's highly likely that we'll be sitting here in a couple of months and we'll be bang on that number.”

To hear more from Dr Ben Neilson, tune in here.