There are real benefits to adding virtual team members. A lot of energy and time are spent in interviewing, educating, training, and managing fulltime employees. Then there’s the money part. Competitive salaries, paid vacation and sick time, health insurance, payroll taxes, bonuses and more add up to a pretty big number in many investment advisory firms and financial planning firms.
Time and money….seems we never have enough. Adding an on-demand Certified Financial Planner as a seasoned professional to execute your financial planning needs can be a win-win. You have major talent with a wealth of knowledge that you might not be able to afford in your practice. And you may not engage enough financial plans to keep a full-time planner busy to justify the expense.
On-demand planners bring experience, maintain their own software, add updates at their own cost, pay for continuing education credits on their own dime and are often flexible about when they are available. In addition, they work with other advisory practices so they can add input on better strategies, ways to execute and present plans to your client base.
Depending on the sophistication of your staff, you may be able to share online files that the planner can access. Once the outside planner becomes familiar with your routine and typical documents collected, they can focus on inputting data, identify key missing information, and model multiple scenarios, etc.
Because it is all virtual, your clients do not have to be physically in your office. You could have one partner in your downtown office, the other in another State with your planner in yet another state. If you do this regularly, it is executed with ease. Since presentations are online, you are not scrambling to print and bind bulky plans just before the client arrives. If the client wishes to run various scenarios, the planner can do this right then and there in the online webinar meeting. You can build in multiple sessions with the client and planner and all you are paying for is their time. If you build in a good estimate for the hours needed for a typical plan in your office, you should be able to effectively price in the planner’s fee and be very profitable.