Think about why you became a financial advisor. What is the purpose of your practice?
If you are like most financial advisors, you didn't choose this route so you could develop and deploy the latest and greatest back-end IT solutions or plan the smallest details of your next client appreciation seminar. You chose this profession because you enjoy your clients. You enjoy solving challenges, reducing anxiety and fear and helping people achieve and succeed.
From my perspective, I see the purpose of your business as providing financial solutions to meet your clients' needs: making a difference in their lives. You also want to enjoy your own financial and professional success. Would you spend more time dedicated to your purpose if you could spend less time running every aspect of your business?
There may very well be a way to achieve those goals: outsourcing one or more functions that require specialized expertise that may not reside in your business and you are unlikely to hire. Outsourcing certain capabilities can be just as important to your business as how well you personally serve the client.
For example, when you go to the doctor, you go because she was either a referral or because she is qualified within her specialty. Somehow, you've developed confidence in her judgment through the degrees earned, through other patients and through her research and published articles. When you visit the doctor and she draws blood, she doesn't immediately disappear into the lab to process the results. She packages it and sends it to a lab especially for the purpose of achieving that analysis. She's outsourcing this service to specialists who efficiently send back a detailed analysis. The same is true of radiology or physical therapy—you do not lose any confidence in the doctor because you are referred out for particular services. Rather, it is the doctor's way of managing the client service to better understand the issues and deliver desired outcomes.
If you choose to do everything in your business yourself, you may not be able to do everything that is needed for your client. Going back to the doctor analogy, this is why, in certain instances, your doctor may send you to a radiology lab. A doctor doesn't want to do everything and actually realizes that doing everything diminishes patient service and even creates liability. So when she orders a scan, she relies on the radiologist, a specialist, to interpret the results and provide an understanding of the cause of your symptoms. This is not unlike our business, where there's a responsibility for putting client interests first, with managing the money and a heightened standard of ongoing due diligence.
