From Fiefdoms to Grower’s Markets: An Evolving Team Model
Comprehensive financial advice teams are approaching a crossroad.
Although scarred by compliance red tape and adapting to work-from-home models, unthinkable pre-COVID, these are golden times where demand exceeds supply.
Success, however, is always the hardest taskmaster.
The increasing demands of success are leading many advisory teams to embrace agentic AI models.
One excited adviser recently told me he hopes to increase his adviser-client ratio from 1:120 to approximately 1:200 thanks to Agentic AI. Automating repetitive tasks makes sense, as did the adoption of email, platforms, new license models, offshore resourcing, and Zoom meetings.
However, each advice system revolution over the past thirty years has been built upon thirty-year-old priorities: make the advice experts as successful as possible. Each ‘system’ revolution, such as Agentic AI, fundamentally kicks the can of overwhelming capacity and struggling profitability further down the road for future owners of advice firms.
Today’s crossroad may be less about systems and more about priorities.
Priorities demand focus while systems demand methodology.
Both are important, but a system built with the wrong focus acts like Stephen Covey‘s ladder leaning against the wrong wall, making profitability, capacity, and sustainability all that more difficult.
The longer the industry prioritises making expert advisers more successful, the more future advice teams mirror the hierarchical structure of a fiefdom, where most value, growth and success flow through the expert at the top of the team structure.
For multi-adviser firms, this creates advice silos with different experts potentially offering different propositions, expertise, culture, pricing, and team management, each with loyal clients who will follow them wherever they go.
Don’t misunderstand: the advice industry needs specialists in investment, tax, estate, structural, and underwriting. Like medical specialists, these experts perform vital functions.
But it’s a dependent model, creating increasingly busy jobs for experts who personally embody the value proposition, making scalability, repeatability, and enduring client relationships difficult.
Junior team members spend years in administrative roles, progressing through cadetships and associate positions before touching strategic work. The skills, experience, networks, and reputations of seniors accelerate at an accelerating rate compared to juniors, growing a capacity gap between capabilities that generates bottlenecks, frustrations, and stress that the best systems struggle to relieve.
Silo teams supporting experts become trapped in familiar activity zones, measuring success by “bigger is better” metrics rather than quality, innovation, or relationship value. An assembly line mentality prevails, with each member handling specific parts of the advice production process. Pricing remains tied to specific investment, tax, insurance, legal, superannuation, or accounting expertise rather than genuine client value creation, making those uncomfortable “where did you get that fee from?” conversations even more difficult.
Beyond the Fiefdom
The model I envisage for comprehensive advice teams of the future resembles less about building experts atop fiefdoms and more about building expert teams focused on consistently ensuring each client is on their unique path to the value they seek from an advice relationship.
Like a grower’s market.
Grower’s markets aren’t for everyone.
There will inevitably be advice supermarkets for those whose shopping priorities focus on convenience and price rather than the longer-term consequences of advice.
At the grower’s markets I’ve explored, I’m struck by how everyone in the chain of delivery fundamentally understands why their clients keep returning for high-quality propositions for specific niches. This has less to do with the expertise of the person at the front counter and more to do with delivering a proposition that consistently meets the value clients seek.
Workers in a grower’s market team understand not just what clients need, but the value they seek. End client value, not only technical expertise, becomes the responsibility of the entire team rather than being bound by one individual. Engaging new team members immediately with clients instils an understanding of the value of advice, not only the mechanics, cultivating perspectives and reducing dependencies in the best learning environment possible: with the discerning client.
All team members need technical proficiency, but a grower’s market model accelerates crucial professional development as clients trust the entire delivery chain, not only the person collecting the money.
The ones that impress me are agile teams embracing the principle that better trumps bigger. As experience and skills grow across the collective, value increases for clients as dependencies reduce for the most experienced founders and leaders, who then focus on setting new directions, ensuring continual value focus and exploring deeper dives into sub-niches and aligned niches.
Growing these teams means attracting better-aligned clients within their chosen niche rather than simply accumulating more clients. The transition from fiefdom to grower’s market represents much more than another system. It fundamentally changes how comprehensive advisory teams approach growth, value creation, and client relationships.
Today’s high-demand market represents the best opportunity for comprehensive advice teams to test collective team advice models built upon client value rather than access to key experts. The fiefdom model works well when firms are intent on building technical experts. The grower’s market model works when firms are building team experts in delivering what clients value.
What do you reckon?
Jim