Who do you need to hire to grow your business?

If you’re a successful financial advisor, chances are you became successful because you are good at attracting prospects and converting those prospects into clients.

The advisors who make it to the top are not necessarily those who are the best at financial planning or have superior skills when it comes to investment management. No, the top advisors are the ones who excel at winning new business. In fact, our industry isn’t too different from many other industries. The highest paid people are the top sales professionals.

If that’s you, the best way to grow your business is not by trying to hire other decent business development folks. They are way too hard to find and, if you can find one to work for you, they’ll command a huge salary.

A better approach is to find those advisors who are great at the planning and investment management side of the business, but struggle when it comes to attracting new clients. Oftentimes these advisors had a stint at one of the traditional firms but didn’t make the cut because they couldn’t “produce” enough business.

My business partner and I built our firm from scratch to over $20 billion not by hiring top producers, but by finding great advisors and helping them with the business development side of things. When we first started out and our client loads began taking the majority of our time, we introduced our clients to other advisors on our team, freeing our time up for marketing, prospecting and meeting with new potential clients.

As our firm grew, I eventually introduced the vast majority of my clients to other advisors on the team, leaving me with just a handful to serve. This freed up my time so that virtually all of my energy was devoted to marketing and bringing on new business.

Many advisors get stuck at a certain size because they spend virtually all their time servicing existing clients. They no longer have the space in their calendars for the lunches, the golfing, the coffees that provided their clients.

What I’ve witnessed is many advisors tend to hire younger advisors and expect these advisors to be “producers”. They want them to go out and find their own clients. Too often these newer advisors are not very successful at generating new business and, as a result, have little impact on growing the firm. In fact, sometimes they reduce the overall profitability of the firm.

Rather than hiring “producers”, a better approach is to hire a high-quality advisor and transfer a chunk of your clients to that advisor. Your clients may not like losing you to another advisor and you may not like giving up those clients. But your clients won’t leave you (I can tell you this from experience) and you’ll have a lot of time in your schedule to generate new clients.

Some advisors get into this business because they like the fact that once they build up a client base, they can take life easy. That’s fine, but if that’s you, don’t expect to have much growth.

But if you believe you have a great service to offer, want to grow and are good at sales, your best hire is not one great at sales and marketing. It’s a great advisor who relies upon you to hunt for new clients.