5 Need to Know Ways to Boost Your Business

As a successful business owner, you have become intimately familiar with the inner workings of your practice. Over the years you have come to understand profitability, revenue ups and downs, return on investment, marketing, pipeline management, staffing, and a rush of other entrepreneurial responsibilities. That is of course on top of your primary responsibilities as a retirement plan advisor.

As the “CEO” of your enterprise, you probably have a deep appreciation for spreadsheets, graphs, charts, and other statistical data that help you see a clear picture of your business’ health.

These numbers are often pulled from many different sources and need to be pieced together. It takes long hours, research and focus to find the right numbers to extrapolate the exact metrics you need to work “in” your business. But you have learned the secret recipe necessary to read the tea leaves and understand your business’ vitality. Because – as you know – your livelihood depends on it.

But what if there is an easier way?

Start with revenue.

When you calculate gross retirement plan revenue, are you getting the full picture? Your math may be accurate, but is your revenue aligned with industry benchmarks for your service model? Are you under charging, over charging, under servicing, over servicing, or some combination? That’s why you need to calibrate and evaluate each client to learn if your gross number accurately reflects your value, service and extra credit items.

Calibrate each client.

Opening the hood of each client to learn if they are priced accurately could mean the difference between loss and profitability. By going inside your service model and with Fiduciary Decisions tools, you can objectively learn how your fees compare based on your service model. Then you can appropriately charge your clients.

When each client is responsible for paying their fair share, your business benefits because you are charging a market rate that is supported by industry standards. During the process, you may find meaningful dollars that are being left off the table.

Watch the clock.

Whether it is you or a teammate, working on tasks can creep from minutes to hours to days. With each payroll cycle, those office hours can eat into profitability. That is why time tracking and task ownership are germane to a heathy business.

Ways you could benefit from an organized time management system:

  • Learn which clients take up a lion share of time – and then charge accordingly.
  • Identify which team members are extremely efficient at client workflows.
  • Pinpoint process/organization bottlenecks and ideas to solve them.

However, this exceptionally valuable data is only available after time tracking is implemented. And while it may seem like a big undertaking, as the owner, you will immediately appreciate the perched view that time tracking provides into your practice.

Track new growth.

Each year, most advisors have a number in mind for growth. This year I would like my business to grow by X%. Sound familiar? When you have tangible business goals, it helps you track progress and benchmark success. But how are you tracking your pipeline?

As you know, process is key. This rings true for fiduciary duty and your sales pipeline. Especially in an industry with long average sales cycles, it is helpful to have a streamlined step-by-step process to record activities, link actions and show movement.

  • Identifying plans with Search 5500
  • Adding prospects with key information
  • Nurturing the prospect through the funnel
  • Tracking progress
  • Converting them into a new client

Evaluate plan success.

The goal of a retirement plan is to help hardworking employees save an adequate amount that will comfortably care for them throughout their retirement years. As a retirement plan advisor, one of your many responsibilities is to help evaluate the plan’s overall mission. How effective is the plan at creating successful retirement outcomes?

Thankfully, there are many levers to pull that might nudge the participants closer and closer to achieving a comfortable income replacement ratio. Those could include plan design changes, auto-enrollment, auto-escalation, deferral rates, investment returns, fees, asset diversification, preventing account leakage, financial education, financial wellness resources, and much more. As their trusted advisor, you have the ability to show the retirement plan committee how their plan is compared to their peers, industry standards and overall competitiveness. These insights help you demonstrate the extremely valuable work that you do and prove how your oversight has enhanced the plan – and participant outcomes.

All-in-one CEO Dashboard

At Fiduciary Decisions, we took all of these key business insights and put them into an all-in-one CEO dashboard. The dashboard provides you with the essential knowledge you need to operate a profitable, scalable, efficient and repeatable retirement plan advisory business.

In addition, we have built integrations with recordkeepers, investment monitoring services and RFP systems. These are just a few more of the ways that Fiduciary Decisions helps you see your whole business – with an all-in-one convenient business intelligence dashboard.

Contact us for a demo and learn how your business can prosper.


About Author:

Craig Rosenthal, Head of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer

Craig Rosenthal, Head of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer

Craig is Head of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer for Fiduciary Decisions. In this role, he is responsible for driving Product and Partnership strategy as well as the overall messaging and marketing for the firm.

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