The Right Staff for Financial Advisors

Professional admins help financial advisors run thriving businesses

First there was “The Great Resignation.” Then there was “quiet quitting.” No matter what the next employment trend is called, financial advisors can’t ignore how staffing impacts their ability to serve clients effectively.

According to the global advisory firm WTW, many companies are planning to increase salary budgets about 4% in 2023.¹ While that statistic reflected a global survey of organizations, financial advisor firms can expect to have to compete with those increases to hire or retain key employees.

Your entrepreneurial spirit may sometimes result in spending half your time on non-client activities, like scheduling meetings and preparing paperwork.² More and more, your clients want you to fully understand their entire financial picture, and to be available to talk with them about their financial strategy through each stage of life and help them problem solve.³  That kind of client focus takes time. So if you’re not able to delegate your more administrative duties to someone else because of staffing costs, what can you do?

Perspectives from two LPL advisors

Donalee Gonzales, president of Mountain View Financial, and Laila Pence, president of Pence Wealth Management, both looked to LPL's Admin Solutions to help them with staffing. Admin Solutions provides LPL advisors a remote administrative professional fully trained in all LPL-related procedures and operations. LPL financial advisors can choose Admin Solutions for long-term staffing needs or for seasonal or quarterly timeframes, like if an employee is out for medical or personal reasons. Both Gonzales and Pence found value in choosing Admin Solutions as a long-term staffing fix.

Pence has earned many industry accolades, including being named to Barron’s ‘Top 100 Independent Financial Advisors’ list, so having the capacity to focus on clients is a priority. “The most important thing in our business is time,” she said. “You only have so many hours in a day, right? And a job of the advisor is to leave as much time to do what they do best and be the most productive. So, what I do best is I talk to clients and meet with clients, everything else I basically delegate.”

Donalee Gonzales calls herself a “solo-preneur,” so she really needed help to manage her time more effectively. “I'm all by myself in my office so I know I could use help – but handing it over to somebody else is a big step for someone like me,” she said. “I started to create a list and timed myself. I tracked how much time I'm spending per week on the admin tasks that I could potentially be handing off to somebody else. After doing that for a couple of weeks, it became very clear that I was spending way too much time doing things that I could easily hand off to somebody else.”

For Pence, outsourcing administrative work to an LPL professional has been a wise investment. “It actually has made me more money, way more money than what I spend on her, because she's freed up my time to do what I do and freed up my senior assistants to do what they do best, which is talk to clients, get dollars on the books.” Gonzales believes Admin Solutions has helped her expand her business. “The time value that you're getting is exponentially higher than what you're paying,” she said. “You’re growing your business instead of filing paperwork and doing all the admin things that I used to do. I can now hand things off and continue to grow and focus on what it is I'm being paid to do. I’m to the point now where I'm saying to my admin, can you please call this person and get X, Y, and Z done. And clients love and appreciate her, which is worth its weight in gold.”

LPL Advisor Profiles