Ron Carson's business is a highflier

Ron Carson says he has no problem finding clients. Nor do most of the top advisers he knows. What the LPL Financial adviser and Peak Advisor Alliance founder has struggled with is building the capabilities to take on more clients. He says preparing reports for a meeting with a wealthy client with complex needs could take his team as much as a full working day. That might be about to change. Mr. Carson and his firm have spent the past three years rebuilding some of his technology from scratch to develop what he calls “the client experience optimizer.” Mr. Carson expects the “CEO” system will be rolled out to all the firm's 19 branch offices by early next year. Already, it's helped him prepare for a complex client meeting in seconds, rather than hours. Mr. Carson's Omaha, Neb.-based firm, Carson Wealth Management Group, received a 2014 InvestmentNews Best Practices Award last month after being identified as one of the top performers among participants in the Financial Performance Study of Advisory Firms. Of the firms studied, Mr. Carson's ranked highest in “revenue per professional.” The achievement is no accident. In addition to his widely shared appreciation for bold wines, bird hunting and piloting private jets, Mr. Carson is almost obsessive about tracking business performance and operations metrics.

"NO GREATER FEELING'

Mr. Carson sees a parallel between flying and management. He spoke with a reporter after flying a Cessna CJ3 from Austin, Texas, to Chicago on a tempestuous fall morning. Despite the lack of visibility while landing (“you can't see anything until you're down on the runway”), “there's no greater feeling in the world,” he said, because he has full confidence that his dashboard and other airplane instrumentation are leading him in the right direction. That's true of running a business, too, he said. “If you're not monitoring anything carefully, then you don't know that your business is in trouble until it's too late,” he said. Carson's CEO system combines elements of customer-relationship-management technology and financial performance reporting for clients. It features integrations with software by Orion Advisor Services, Salesforce.com Inc. and Docupace Technologies Inc. Dozens of data points are tracked: number of referrals, conversions, new assets. When a potential client doesn't get a call returned, a report is automatically created and sent to a supervisor.

"NO PLACE TO HIDE'

“It's a results-based culture,” said Mr. Carson, leaving employees “no place to hide” if expectations aren't met. The process of building the CEO system wasn't easy. “It was really hard to get people to embrace this,” Mr. Carson said. “We actually tied bonuses to hitting certain productivity thresholds.” On top of that, “we underestimated how much we had to spend,” he said. Mr. Carson focuses on the operations side of the advisory business because that's what he enjoys doing. Advisers who don't like sifting through metrics should focus on what they have a greater affinity for, Mr. Carson said. “Make your business a passion that pays you — you should only be doing what you love,” he said. “You'll not only have more fun, but you'll help more people ... God knows our profession needs it because we have far more demand than capacity to serve.”