4 Strategies to Grow Your Wealth Management Business

January 12, 2021

It is always a good time to contemplate how to grow a wealth management business and to make sure you’re taking steps every day to enhance it. Whether you wish to know how to build a client base as a financial advisor or you are interested in growing a financial advisory practice, here are four strategies to help you grow your list of wealth management clients.

1. Make Thorough Plans

The adage “failing to plan is planning to fail” didn’t come out of nowhere, and although planning is time-consuming, it’s critical for earning wealth management clients. Businesses typically have a variety of plans, the most basic being a budget, which defines your priorities for the year. Keep these priorities in mind, continually connect your goals back to them, and understand how they fit within the three major “currents” of business:

Bringing in revenue
Building your pipeline
Optimizing your systems

Set realistic but effective goals for each of these business currents and ensure that they feed into your overall business plan so that all of your efforts are focused on success.

In addition to a budget and a business plan, you should make a transition plan. Whether transitioning people out as they leave or retire, or adding new members to your team, it is important to consider not just how you plan to transition individual tasks (e.g., managing your social media accounts) but also understand key responsibilities (e.g., overall brand management). A transition plan helps ensure that work can continue through staffing changes — and that you won’t feel lost or have all the work fall on you.

2. Reflect Often

After you have made your plans, it’s important to evaluate both the successes and challenges of what you have implemented. Reflect daily on tasks and weekly or monthly on projects, strategies and approaches. Let go of things that didn’t work or aren’t working; trying to focus on too many things — even if they are all successful — can harm your bottom line by pulling you in too many different directions. Dropping things that haven’t worked as well as you anticipated is one way to narrow your focus so your energy is being spent on the goals you’ve set for yourself and are striving to meet.

3. Promote Your Business Regularly and Consistently

The first step in marketing your business is to have a clear understanding of what your brand is. Your answers to these three questions can help you determine what your brand is and how you should position it:

What do you want people to say about your business?
What does your business offer that’s different from what other businesses offer?
What story do you want your clients to tell about the value you’ve added to their lives?

Your brand determines how you are going to market yourself. Once that has been established, you’ll begin the hard work of introducing that brand to the public. If you’re not already involved in the community, as well as in business organizations and/or networking groups, they are great places to start. Everything you do to promote yourself should feed into the brand you have established so that you have one clear message you’re sharing with your community about who you are and what you do.

4. Maintain Balance in Your Life

Here’s another notable adage: You can’t fill the cups of others when your cup is empty. Take measures to ensure that you and your team don’t burn out; take vacations (where you’re not checking your email on your phone); learn something new and exciting to gain a fresh perspective (whether it’s related to your business or not); rely on your team; make your surroundings inspiring; and work to ensure that everyone understands how important and valued they are.

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