Advisory firm operations: a guide for firms between $75M and $500M
What operations actually means at a one to fifteen person advisory firm, what breaks first, and how to work out which part is costing you.
Insights
What we have learned running advisory firm operations.
Written for principals deciding whether their operation is the thing holding the firm back. No newsletter, and nothing here is gated.
Running the operation
What is actually consuming the hours, and what to do about it.
Using the fourth quarter to fix what slowed you down this year
Q4 is the only stretch where an advisory firm has both the visibility and the slack to change how it operates. Here is what fits in it.
Why another platform will not fix your operations
Most advisory firms have already bought good software. The hours are going somewhere else, and no vendor sells the thing that is actually missing.
What a CRM migration actually costs an advisory firm
The licence is the smallest number in a migration. Here is where the rest of the cost sits, and how to tell whether you need one at all.
Why your tech stack does not talk to itself
Your CRM, custodian, and document system each do their job. The work is in the handoffs between them, which nobody sells and nobody owns.
How to write SOPs an advisory firm will actually use
Most advisory firm SOPs are written once, filed centrally, and never opened again. The fix is where they live, not how they are written.
You acquired a book. Now there are two ways of doing everything.
The financial integration finishes in weeks. The operational one runs for years unless somebody decides which way the combined firm actually works.
Operations for a breakaway advisor: what to build first
Going independent means choosing every system yourself, at the moment you have least time. A short list of what to decide first, and what can wait.
Scaling and selling
What a buyer is pricing, and what makes a firm transferable.
Preparing an advisory firm for sale: the operational side
Your banker handles the transaction. This is the part that happens before them: making the firm something a buyer can see running without you.
What a buyer is actually pricing when they look at your firm
Two advisory firms with the same revenue can be worth different amounts. The difference is how much of the business leaves when the owner does.
People and capacity
Hiring, departures, and how much one advisor can actually carry.
Should you hire an operations manager, or outsource it?
The honest answer depends on whether your processes are written down yet. Hiring into an undocumented operation moves the problem rather than solving it.
Your operations person just resigned. What to do in the first two weeks.
The knowledge leaving your firm is mostly undocumented, and the notice period is the only chance to capture it. What to do, in order.
How many households can one advisor actually serve?
The number most firms quote is a headcount ratio. The number that matters is how much of each relationship is service work that never needed an advisor.
Compliance and records
What an examiner asks for, and whether you can produce it.
Preparing your operations for an SEC examination
Most exam pain is not a compliance failure. It is an operational one: the record exists somewhere, and nobody can produce it quickly.
Next
Start with the assessment.
Tell us what your firm runs on today and we will come back with what an assessment would cover, what it would cost, and how long it would take.