Michael Kitces

The recent rise of the “robo-advisor” has called into question the relevance of financial advisors and the viability of current advisory business models. Yet the reality is that technology “disrupting” financial advisor business models isn’t new, and has actually happened repeatedly over the past several decades… forcing advisors to adapt and move up the value chain, or be left behind. In this session, we look at how technology is once again driving major changes in the business model of financial advisors, driving a Great Convergence across historically-separate industry channels, triggering a Crisis of Differentiation, a Search for New Business Models, and rising pressure on improving the Client Experience. And in the coming years, these trends will only be accelerated, as the consumers of financial planning – and financial planners themselves – shift from Baby Boomers, to the Gen X and Millennial generations that, as “digital natives”, will expect and demand advisors to both leverage technology, and add value on top!

The Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act, passed in December 2019, brought a wide range of changes to the retirement planning landscape, from the death of the ‘stretch’ IRA to raising the age for Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) to 72, to provisions meant to encourage increased participation in workplace retirement plans. And now, Congress has given financial advisors and their clients another year-end development related to retirement planning, dubbed “SECURE 2.0”.

While no single change in SECURE 2.0 rises to the magnitude of the “Death of the Stretch” from the original SECURE Act, there are more total impactful changes in the new legislation. These include raising the RMD age again, allowing transfers of 529 account assets to Roth IRAs (with some significant restrictions), and adjusting the amount of allowed ‘catch-up’ contributions. The legislation also introduces new account types including SEP and SIMPLE Roth IRAs, as well as a “Starter” 401(k) plan. And for current retirees, key measures include reducing the penalties for missed Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) and indexing the allowed amount of Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) for inflation.

The financial planning process is a valuable, but time-consuming, process. And the pressure of ‘spending the time’ to demonstrate the value is only amplified further as advisory firms grow a sizable base of clientele, and must support them in an ongoing manner after the initial financial plan is delivered. In this session, we explore the research on what actually makes the financial planning process more efficient and scalable, including the impact of advanced training and designations, how to develop more repeatable financial planning processes with an annual service calendar, how client variability impacts the efficiency of firms ad their planning processes, and the role that technology does (and does not) play in advisor efficiency.

For decades, the most common way that established financial advisors grow is via referrals from their existing clients. And as a result, the average financial advisory firm spends just 2% of its revenue on marketing. Yet in practice, it’s not clear whether growing with referrals is really a best practice, or simply the only source of growth that’s left when advisory firms spend on little else to market their services! In this session, we delve into the latest Kitces Research on what financial advisors are actually doing to successfully market themselves, the typical cost to acquire new clients and how it varies by marketing channel, why some marketing strategies are significantly more scalable than others, and the best approach to determine the right budget for marketing expenses for your advisory firm!  

As advisory firms grow and add clients, they inevitably reach capacity limitations, because a financial advisor just only has so much time to provide advice and service to clients before they just run out of hours in the day or week, and have to hire more advisor talent. Yet given the cost of advisor talent, advisory firms first and foremost try to lift the productivity of their existing advisors to first generate more with the team they’ve got. In practice, though, firms often don’t focus in the right places to actually generate those productivity lifts.

In this session, Chief Financial Planning Nerd Michael Kitces of Kitces Research will share their latest findings on the four factors that really drive the productivity of advice-centric firms, including the impact of team leverage, face-time with clients, the affluence of the firm’s clientele, and the pricing confidence of the advisors themselves… and in the process, will show how the prevailing focus on AdvisorTech actually plays a remarkably small role in advisor productivity, once advisory firms get the four “big” things right!

Every financial advisor builds their advisory firm to their unique vision of how they believe their clients should be served… which can create significant challenges in assessing the financial health of the business beyond “is it profitable (at all)”, and figuring out whether the firm is pricing its services properly, what its capacity should be, and how to determine whether its team is really being as productive as it should be. In this session, we explore some of the Key Performance Indicators that advisory firm owners can use to understand the financial health of the business, including what is a “normal” profit margin and overhead expense ratio, when an advisory firm should (or shouldn’t) expect to scale its EBOC, how to use revenue per advisor to assess productivity and capacity, and how to leverage revenue per employee as a key indicator of when to hire to grow sustainably.

This is an opportunity to take advantage of Michael’s vast knowledge base and create a session that is more personal to your audience. While this session does not include CE or slides, your audience can ask the questions that are on their minds and create a totally unique experience.