What does it take to reach the Advisely Index top 10?

Advisely Team

3 months ago

Since we launched the Advisely Index in November last year, we’ve spoken to several top-ranked advisers to find out what they’re doing differently – and how their industry peers could learn from their stories.

Conrad Francis, for example, emphasised the importance of the adviser's support team; he argued that advisers are there for the "actionable and tangible discussions" and should delegate other tasks, including fact-finds, to more suitable personnel within the business. Anne-Marie Seagrim also highlighted the critical role her team plays in the advice process, adding that advisers should focus on "keeping things simple" and maintaining meaningful client relationships.

Another top-ranked adviser (and Advisely contributor), Deborah Kent, suggested finding "bottlenecks" in the advice process and determining how they could be made more efficient – through automation, say, or moving clients onto a client portal to streamline consent requirements. Anne Graham, also in the Advisely Index top 10, recently wrote an article discussing how the smallest “tweaks” can sometimes yield the biggest results in the long run.

But what kind of results are we talking about? What are the actual, material differences between the advisers at the top of the Index and the average?

Running the numbers

Up until quite recently, most of the Advisely Index research we’ve conducted has used the industry average in Iress’s 2023 Advice Efficiency Report as the basis for comparison. But the Index has now been around long enough (and attracted sufficient interest from our adviser audience) that we can start to extrapolate findings from the Index itself.

What we’ve learned is that the Advisely Index top 10 – as determined by their overall Index result – score better than the average across nearly every conceivable metric, sometimes to a significant degree. They’re more profitable than their peers, for one; in the top 10, the average before-tax profitability percentage is 46.7%, compared to 36.9% for the rest of the Index.

They serve more clients, too, with an average of 186.9 clients per full-time adviser (compared to 135.5 for the rest of the Index) and 151.9 clients per full-time support staff member (compared to 101.6 for the rest). Perhaps reflecting the value of tech platform consolidation, the top 10 also spend relatively less on technology (6.1% of total expenses versus 6.5% for the rest of the Index).

As to how the top 10 manage the twin feats of increased profitability and a larger client base, one imagines their efficiency in advice production and implementation plays a substantial role.

Compared to their peers in the Index, the top 10 are, on average, 2.5 hours faster at producing strategy papers, three hours faster at producing basic SOAs, 6.1 hours faster at producing complex SOAs, 1.1 hours faster at implementing basic advice and 1.8 hours faster at implementing complex advice.

These results paint a pretty clear picture: the more efficient your advice process is, the greater your capacity to see more clients and increase your profit margin. As Conrad Francis put it in his profile, efficiency allows an adviser to focus on their “high-ticket item” – the skills and activities that deliver the most value to the business and the client.

If you’re unsure as to how you could improve your advice efficiency, do the Index if you haven’t already. It’s free, takes five minutes and only requires an Advisely account to get your personalised result.

From there, you can explore Advisely's growing library of resources aimed at maximising the value of your advice technology:

“As business owners, you get so stuck in the day to day of running a business. So to sort of pull back from that and have a look at how we sit compared to other businesses, it really helps rationalise a lot of what we're doing.”

Matt Coman, Principal at Twomeys