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Financial advisers -- tell me how you spend your working week

Journalist: Laura Miller, Freelance

ended 13. October 2023

​I'm investigating how small financial advice businesses spend a typical working week., for an article for trade title Money Marketing.

​I have a hunch that, despite their best intentions, small financial advice businesses find themselves sucked into the daily admin and operations of running a small, regulated business, squeezing the time they have available for client meetings, revenue-generating activity and anything else that makes them shine. 

I want to know, in as much detail as possible:

  1. how you spend a typical day/week?
  2. the activities that suck up the most time and energy?
  3. where technology makes a difference (this is particularly important)?
  4.  what you would do if you had more time?

     

2 responses from the Newspage community

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Gary Bush
Financial Adviser at MortgageShop.com
Time is critical in today's financial world both in terms of maintaining client support levels and complying matters to stay on the right side of regulation. We find that a lot of our time is now spent analysing transactions for anomalies and discrepancies that could pose problems with lenders and insurers - without our bespoke IT systems covering automated multi-bureau credit search analysis and open banking account transaction data processing we really would be in a bad place. Having now operated a fully paper-based advice business and a totally paperless/system-driven practice it's clear to us that IT can do a lot of the slog of the industry if you code it rightly. Sadly client interactions do suffer in the financial world of 2023 and we aim to adjust the dial a little back in favour of greater client personal contact to maintain an effective balance.
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Nick Lincoln
Director at Values to Vision FP
1) With ruthless diary management. I have a home office. Every Monday my calendar is booked with a "Getting Stuff Done" block from 0700-1200. This lets me deal with emails that have come in over Friday afternoon/weekend (I turn off emails at Friday midday).

I also use this time to prep for the week's ZAPMs (Zoom Annual Planning Meetings).

Client-facing time is strictly in the morning, and any resultant follow-up work is for the afternoons. I'm available from 0700 every day except Mondays.

All scheduling is done via Calendly. I don't do email "chains".

2) Biggest time suck is onboarding new clients. Everything else in my business runs in an exceptionally organised, streamlined way. But onboarding means dealing with insurance companies. Agony.

3) Calendly/Zoom/Dropbox/Snagit/TextExpander/GSuite/Voyant/FreeAgent. All essential and not negotiable. Tech idiots do not become clients.

4) I "work" about 15 hours a week. The rest of the time is thinking, reading, and "networking".