Putting Money To Work Can Pay Off Big

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Bursa Snipers

Putting Money To Work Can Pay Off Big

BursaSnipers

Publish date: Sat, 13 Oct 2018, 03:56 PM

Putting Money To Work Can Pay Off Big

Advisors reflect on the wisest investment they made in their careers

Advisors help clients make smart investments. So it figures that they practice what they preach.

Successful advisors don’t just manage portfolios wisely and try to pick winning stocks. In a broader sense, they invest in themselves and their business so that they can deliver better service and accelerate their growth.

Like true entrepreneurs, advisors who launch their own firm must manage cash flow and squeeze the most value from every dollar they plow back into the business. And if they join a larger company, many still opt to invest in their education to sharpen their expertise.

For Monica Dwyer, earning her certified financial planner designation propelled her career. Seeking to expand her knowledge and establish herself in her field, she passed the CFP exam in 2009.

“It was a huge commitment,” said Dwyer, an advisor in West Chester, Ohio. “At the time, I was working at Fidelity and I wanted to make myself as marketable as possible.”

She estimates that she invested around $4,000 to get her CFP, although her employer reimbursed her for some of it. In terms of time, she spent parts of nearly nine months in the classroom followed by three months of additional studying for the test.

“It was intense,” she recalled. “But it was a much better investment than my undergraduate degree, even though you need an undergraduate degree to get a CFP.”

The experience also proved an eye-opener for Dwyer. Through her course of study she gained a fuller understanding of how she could assist clients on a range of financial issues.

“It taught me there’s this whole world out there with all these different areas I could pursue, from taxes to estate planning to trusts,” she said.

Blaze Your Own Path

Some advisors enjoy long careers working for large financial institutions.

Others reach a point where they decide to branch out on their own. Tom Balcom, a certified financial planner in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Fla., spent over a decade in private wealth management before he launched his firm in 2010. He calls that move his best professional investment.

“It was a risk to go from a nice, stable paycheck to no stable paycheck,” he said. “You go from certainty to uncertainty. But it improved my quality of life in so many ways.”

Because Balcom had already earned an MBA degree, he knew how to write a business plan and project his expenses. Such diligent planning mitigated his risk.

“I created a budget that included rent, overhead and how much I’d need to charge to survive,” he recalled. “I set aside emergency savings for cash flow and made sure I could pay all my bills.”

After persevering through what he calls a “scary” first year, he knew that he’d succeed over the long term. Today, he raves about all the benefits of running his own shop: the flexibility to work with a variety of clients, the freedom to make his own investment decisions and the financial rewards of growing the business.

For advisors who are always on the lookout for ways to improve their business operation, technology can prove a pivotal investment. Finding better ways to access and deliver information can pay off in spades.

Sean Curley, a certified financial planner in Greenwood Village, Colo., says one of the best investments over his nearly 25-year career as an advisor occurred just last year when he switched to an all-inone technology platform. Previously, he says, he grappled with at least three separate systems.

“There were pain points, including the complexity of the software and the lack of integration,” he said. “We had this disjointed patchwork of systems.”

Ease Of Use

He says the new, unified platform costs $14,000 a year, which is roughly 20% less than what he was paying previously for multiple systems. But the cost savings is only icing on the cake for Curley.

“Ease of use is the biggest savings,” he said. “We now have a very intuitive user interface” that ties in cloud-based performance reporting, document storage, client webportal management and customer relationship management features such as taking and archiving notes on client communications.

Curley hails the new platform for helping enhance his client service. His staff can work more efficiently as well, allowing him to devote more time to clients and less time hassling with tech issues.

“With the prior systems, if a client called we had a five- to 10-minute process to get their performance history up on the screen,” he said. “Now, we press a button and it’s instantaneously there. So we can be more responsive to clients.”

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