Most financial advisors are incredibly focused on measuring their assets under management and anything else that impacts their production, but there are several other important measurement opportunities you may be missing that could directly impact your assets under management.
In 2015 think about your strategic planning a little differently by coming up with processes and tools that take into account the following in your work-flow:
Metric 1: Client Information
How much information do you have on your clients and how does this improve your ability to connect with them in terms of improving their financial futures?
Understanding a clients' financial history is an obvious necessity but how does this help you truly understand their future financial goals with that money? Knowing how many grandchildren your clients have, where they plan to retire and how they spend their free time can be just as important as understanding their life insurance protection and income tax structure.
Use your client management system or create a spreadsheet that captures this information, then fill in any gaps as you meet with your clients. Your financial advisory team members can even be helpful in this process by finding time to get on the phone with clients to ask them a little more about themselves, which will also familiarize your clients with your team members.
Metric 2: Client Satisfaction
You might be measuring your clients' performance and tracking their actions against their financial plan, but are you tracking their satisfaction with their relationship with you?
Once you have a client there is no guarantee they'll stay, especially in today's somewhat fluid management environment. There is a lot of emotion tied up in money and it's likely that clients will maintain their relationship with you, come to you for additional services and refer clients your way, only if they feel entirely confident about your abilities from personality through to planning.
Provide them with a short questionnaire or ranking system—something that will take less than five minutes to fill out—that hones in on the areas on which you want to focus as a firm based on your mission, values and vision statement. If their expectations aren't being met, follow up with them as to how and why. If their expectations aren't in keeping with what you value as a firm then perhaps it's time for both of you to explore opportunities elsewhere.
Metric 3: Return on Behavior
Most financial plans take into account how a person should act, not necessarily how they actually act.
