Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
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Dear Bev,
I am in the process of growing my advisory firm – have added five new people over the last 18 months. My vision was to bring new team members on and be able to get more done working fewer hours. The opposite has been true. I can’t get out of here before 7 p.m. and I am back to working weekends to catch up. I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong. But I am looking for answers to figure out how to correct the situation before it puts me in the hospital.
G.H.
Dear G.H.,
As often happens, your note raises questions for me before I can give a useful and helpful answer:
- Did you have a clear vision for each of the five hires? Are people crystal clear on what they are charged with doing, what they are rewarded for and what activities are priorities? I often see firms bring in people to lighten the load, but if it isn’t done well there is more confusion – and time wasted – because there is duplication of effort, things not getting done, and so on.
- Is your personal style to take on work where you could delegate, but you don’t like to let go of things? Many leaders suffer from this syndrome. They have been doing things on their own for so long, and don’t always trust others to take things off their plates that they end up holding on even tighter. Examine your willingness to let go.
- Are you as time efficient as you can possibly be throughout the day? If you are a people-person and a talker, for example, and you bring more people into the firm, there are more people you can be having conversations with and losing time as a result. There are more people to send you emails, stop in your office and ask for meeting time. It’s critical to get very time efficient and schedule as much as you can, and be sure you are focusing on your priorities and not becoming distracted by things that aren’t leading to results for you.
- Do you believe you have to “prove something” to your new hires? Sometimes the leader wants people to work harder and harder and so they find themselves modeling this behavior. If you are there late, others will watch you and then they will stay late, right? But it more often than not does not work this way. They go home at a reasonable time and you are still there burning the midnight oil!
- Can you gather your team together and talk about options for better processes and procedures? Your team members might see things that could make everything more efficient but they might not think you are open to new ideas so they don’t voice them. If you are continually finding yourself overwhelmed, it might be time to bring everyone together and try to solve this as the team that you need them to be.
One or more of these things could use some attention. Consider what could be most useful to you, and see if you can’t take some steps to work smarter, not harder.
Dear Bev,
We have had a niche market working with professional women for a couple of years now. My partner and I, both men, have recently brought in a female senior advisor. We thought it was important, given our niche focus, that we had a female on our leadership team (we have seven of them throughout the rest of the firm in operations and support capacities).
Our new female advisor wants nothing to do with working with women professionals. She says she works much better with male entrepreneurs and that has been her focus in the past and that’s what she wants to do here. We don’t want or need a new niche and this was never our expectation in making this hire. Do we cut our losses and tell her this isn’t working out or do we try and show her how profitable the professional women niche can be for her?
O.A.
Dear O.A.,
Yikes – I know it is stating the obvious, but something went seriously wrong in your interview process!
You and your partner had a clear vision for what you needed in this advisor and what her focus would be, but she had an entirely different viewpoint of what she wants to do. I know it doesn’t help to point this out, but maybe it is something you should consider in your next round of interviews. You want to be crystal clear about expectations and ensure alignment before the deal is inked. In addition, it sounds to me like you wanted a female advisor just for the sake of having a female in your firm. This isn’t necessarily a strong reason to choose to hire and I fear it might have made you less cautious than you would have been if you were simply hiring a good partner to work with both of you.
Not all women connect with other women. It sounds like she has carved out her own successful niche and is pretty happy working with the clients she has. It would be a stretch to ask her to change direction, but clearly this is the role you need filled. You don’t say what her tenure is in the industry, or whether there is an option for her to expand her entrepreneurial focus to female entrepreneurs or whether she’d be willing to consider having two niche markets. But I’d explore all of your alternatives before you make a decision to cut your losses. The process of hiring and onboarding someone is expensive – especially at a senior level. See if you can come to a common ground by listening to her goals and desires, and sharing your own and then exploring options together.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry in 1995. The firm launched www.advisorssalesacademy.com in 2018. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate students Entrepreneurship 101. Beverly is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here. 
