Whether you’re a one-person operation or working with a team of talented advisors, your RIA has goals for growth. The challenge is, what can you do to help your firm scale more efficiently? More clients, or bringing on clients with more complex planning needs, will require more of your time — time that may already be committed to other responsibilities. You must find a way to continue delivering your high level of service to existing clients while attracting and successfully onboarding new ones.
The question is, how?
The Key Ingredient to Growth
While growth is important, what most advisors want to focus their time and efforts on is helping their clients achieve their goals. Financial planning is something that requires your unique expertise, and it’s the reason why your clients come to you in the first place. It’s where you bring the most value as a partner to your clients, making it natural that that’s what you’d prefer to spend your time doing.
Of course, planning isn’t the only thing you do — you have other responsibilities to both your clients and your firm. We’re talking about those pesky ancillary tasks that have to get done, yet tend to fall on the back burner at the end of the day.
One of the key ingredients to achieving your growth goals is to outsource the trivial or time-consuming responsibilities that don’t require your expertise to accomplish (but still need to get done). When you’re able to entrust another professional to tackle your to-do list, you can reclaim your time and focus your energy on work that’s valuable to both you and your clients.
Your Scarcest Resource? Time
One of the biggest challenges advisors face right now is time. If you think about it, time is a finite resource. You only have so many hours in a day — and only so many hours you want to spend in a workweek.
For that reason, the more you’re able to outsource (and feel comfortable doing so), the more time you have to focus on what really matters most to you.
By outsourcing your investment-related responsibilities to a knowledgeable third party — an outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) — you’re able to take back your time in a few different ways.
An OCIO can help:
- Provide a second professional opinion.
- Identify and cover responsibilities you may not be doing now, but should start doing in the future.
- Provide depth to the team, expanding your firm’s capacity to respond to market events, client inquiries, etc, even when the firm’s primary responsible party is occupied, on vacation, etc.
See an OCIO In Action
Let’s take a look at how one advisor recently worked with East Bay Investment Solutions and 3x’d their firm by growing their internal team and AUM.
David came to East Bay to find solutions that could help him free up his time. In talking through his current situation and discussing where we could bring the most value to his firm, we found that taking a more client-facing role would allow us to be a valuable resource to David. We helped out in a number of ways, from answering investment-related client questions over email to analyzing prospective client portfolios. David found that these tasks were especially time-consuming throughout his workweek, yet they didn’t require his particular expertise. By offloading those tasks to a trusted OCIO, David could reclaim a significant amount of time, which allowed him to grow steadily. Within 5 years of working with East Bay, David was able to triple the size of his firm.
The key to David’s success in outsourcing his investment-related responsibilities was establishing trust with the firm he chose to partner with. David felt comfortable enough to partner with East Bay so we could help manage investment-related inquiries or tasks, which gave him the peace of mind and confidence to spend his time serving clients, prospecting for new clients, and pursuing his firm’s growth initiatives.
Selecting the Right OCIO for Your Firm
When you’re thinking about beginning a new business relationship with someone, whether it’s an OCIO or another outsourcing partner, it’s critical to make sure you’re fully aligned on expectations. You need to feel safe and secure in allowing this partner to step into your world, and potentially come face-to-face with your clients alongside you.
That means that when it comes to picking the right OCIO for your business, you want to take your time in finding one you can trust implicitly and is dedicated to establishing a long-term partnership. Their investment approach and philosophy should fit well with yours, and vice versa. Otherwise, you and your clients may not resonate with the investment solutions or strategies provided, and the relationship could be in jeopardy.
If you have ambitious goals for growth, you’ll need the right people in your corner to make it happen. An OCIO can serve as a trusted, go-to partner for assisting with your investment-related tasks and responsibilities — giving you hours back in your week to pursue more fulfilling work for your firm and your clients. To learn more about East Bay Investment Solutions and our OCIO services for RIAs, contact us today.