When Rebecca Pomering became CEO of Moss Adams Wealth Advisors LLC last June, she had no idea what kind of trial by fire she was about to undergo.
Pomering, a former practice leader for Moss Adams’ consulting division, went from advising wealth managers about best business practices to implementing many of those strategies — just as the financial services industry’s meltdown became critical.
“I was ready to hire people and spend money on marketing,” she says. “Then the economics of our business shifted — drastically.”
Pomering and her team of seven advisor partners decided to refocus on a fundamental best practice: boosting efficiency to better manage costs and shore up revenues.
“The question “Are we making good decisions?” has become more important than it was a year ago,” she says. “When your revenue is growing fast, you can make more mistakes and let more things slide. It’s not a huge deal if you have employees who aren’t fully productive, or your partner dynamics aren’t firing on all cylinders, or your client experience and strategy aren’t articulated. But when times are bad, every one of those things becomes urgently important at the same time.”
Pomering says her most important decision was to evaluate and tweak the firm’s staffing model. Advisory firms aren’t like manufacturers, which can shut down a production line when business slows. Advisers today may face falling revenues, but they’re busier than ever helping out worried clients. Pomering estimates that time spent with clients has doubled in the past year. In better times she might consider adding staff, but that’s not an option these days.
Pomering used the firm’s CRM system to check the specific clients each adviser worked with, how often the adviser met with each client and what the adviser did at those meetings.
“When we saw that a partner was updating financial plans, inputting data or taking notes on client topics, we transferred those duties down to lower levels in the organization such as junior advisors and paraplanners,” says Pomering. “That helps us be more efficient in the use of our time and enables the partners to develop business. It also helps us train the junior people on our team and move them forward.”
She rethought the process of assigning the lead advisor and a secondary advisor to each client.
“Usually the most senior person is assigned as Advisor One, and Advisor Two is junior. That’s just not efficient,” she says. “If your most senior people take the lead on all the clients, it impacts their ability to generate new business and the firm’s ability to grow.”
In reassigning lead and secondary advisors, Pomering revamped how the advisors perceived each role. “Advisor One and Two often get assigned almost like scorecards, with the lead advisor getting more credit,” she notes. “In the current environment, no one wants to give up being the lead, look unproductive and lose credit. So we emphasized that One or Two wouldn’t be as important to compensation as who the source of each client is.” “Now the ideal position is to be the source of a new client but not the lead advisor on the client. That tells us you’re creating new opportunities, effectively delegating and creating a financial footprint at the firm that’s bigger than if you just have a long list of clients that you’re hoarding.”
In the end, Pomering’s first year on the job hasn’t quite lived up to expectations, but it may be her most rewarding career move yet.
“The job isn’t as fun as I thought it would be,” she says, “but it’s become vastly more important than I ever imagined.”
-By Mark Klimek, For Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5265
