/ by Craig Rosenthal

Retirement Plan Trends: 3 Ways Advisors Can Keep Clients Informed

 

When you live in an economy with historically low unemployment rates, the competition for top talent can be fierce. From student loan repayment programs to onsite day care to enhanced retirement benefits, employers are becoming more creative when offering incentive plans that persuade quality employees to choose them. It’s an employee’s market. Therefore, employers need to know what employees’ value and retirement plan advisors can help by knowing the important trends and keeping their retirement plan client’s informed.

Here are three ways retirement plan advisors can discuss competitive total rewards practices that recruit, reward, and keep great employees.

Offering an employer match

The average employer match is 4.7% of salary, which is a record high, according to Fidelity.[1] As an advisor, this could be an opportunity to discuss your clients’ current match formula and compare it to the national average and/or industry specific averages. When smart employees are comparing benefits, … Read More

/ by Craig Rosenthal

Advisor Business Management Dashboard – Profitability

[Part 4] Efficiency + Repeatability + Scalability = PROFITABILITY

Recap

Can you imagine doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your advisory firm’s profitably? In a time of fee compression and shrinking margins, it seems that the only direction compensation is going is down. However, increasing your firm’s efficiency, repeatability, and scalability is the secret recipe to boosting profitability. In this article, we share how retirement plan advisors can accomplish exactly that.

Profitability

When you add up efficiency, repeatability, and scalability, it equates to profitability.

When the time it takes to run a report is significantly reduced because the data is right in-front of you, it makes for a more efficient use of your time, thus increasing internal profitability.

As you look at your client services, service partners, and investment screening processes, the more varied they are, the more they break down repeatability. Yet, if you use a dashboard … Read More

/ by Craig Rosenthal

Advisor Business Management Dashboard – Scalability

 

[Part 3] Efficiency + Repeatability + SCALABILITY = Profitability

Recap

Can you imagine doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your advisory firm’s profitably? In a time of fee compression and shrinking margins, it seems that the only direction compensation is going is down. However, increasing your firm’s efficiency, repeatability, and scalability is the secret recipe to boosting profitability. In this special four-part article series, we are going to share how retirement plan advisors can achieve greater profitability. 

Scalability

After you have solved for efficiency and repeatability, it’s time to scale. Once your internal processes are running like a fine-oiled machine, it’s now possible to bring on 10, 20, 50 or more plans per year – if you want.

Scalability and profitability are not the same. However, it is a lot easier to increase profitability when you’ve solved for scalability.

Say you are preparing for an annual plan review meeting and … Read More

/ by Craig Rosenthal

Advisor Business Management Dashboard – Repeatability

 

[Part 2] Efficiency + REPEATABILITY + Scalability = Profitability

Recap

Can you imagine doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your advisory firm’s profitability? In a time of fee compression and shrinking margins, it seems that the only direction compensation is going is down. However, increasing your firm’s efficiency, repeatability, and scalability is the secret recipe to boosting profitability. In this special four-part article series, we are going to share how retirement plan advisors can achieve greater profitability.

Repeatability

Repeatability is the core of an efficient process. Click here for Part 1 – Efficiency of this series. From investments to fee benchmarking, and everything in between, as a retirement plan advisor, your ability to sustain and grow your practice is dependent on being able to perform similar tasks, for multiple clients time after time.

So, when it comes to operating your own business, how repeatable are your internal processes?

Many times when speaking with advisory firms, we … Read More

/ by Craig Rosenthal

Advisor Business Management Dashboard – Efficiency

 

[Part 1] EFFICIENCY + Repeatability + Scalability = Profitability 

Can you imagine doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your advisory firm’s profitability? In a time of fee compression and shrinking margins, it seems that the only direction compensation is going is down. However, increasing your firm’s efficiency, repeatability, and scalability is the secret recipe to boosting profitability. In this special four-part article series, we are going to share how retirement plan advisors can achieve greater profitability. 

Efficiency

Efficiency is the power to achieve more by doing less; and as a society, we have become much more efficient. For example, take a look at how you used to purchase office supplies. In years past, many of us would shop at our local office supply store. We got into our cars, drove to the store, wandered the aisles to find pens, paper, and ink cartridges; then we would wait in line to make the purchase, go … Read More

/ by Craig Rosenthal

Business Management Essentials

 

Are you wondering why I didn’t call this article Practice Management Essentials? Well, a couple of reasons: 1) you should be running your practice with the same structure as if you were CEO of a small to medium size business and 2) as a retirement plan specialist, you shouldn’t be “practicing” anything – you should have this retirement plan stuff down pat!

All kidding aside, regardless of which theory for organizational structure you subscribe to: People/Process/Technology or Tasks/People/Structure/Technology the goal is to establish a good foundation so you can drive client satisfaction, risk management, revenue growth and more. The end goal should be to make your business efficient, repeatable and scalable so that you and your team can do more with less.

Let’s talk about some of the high-level components that can turn that dream into a reality:

Data

Data when used properly is knowledge, and knowledge is power, so having access to your … Read More

/ by Craig Rosenthal

Are Your Plans Overdue for a Check-up?

If your plan sponsor clients are not reviewing their plan reasonableness on a regular basis, then you are missing out on major opportunity to help them mitigate fiduciary risk, improve plan results and protect your business.

According to the Center for Disease Control, 88% of Americans between the ages of 45-64 have seen a health care professional within the last 12 months.[1] So, what does that have to do with retirement plans you ask? Well nothing, but employers often ask, “How often should we do a “check-up” on our 401(k) plan?”

The Department of Labor (DOL) recommends benchmarking about every three years. Of course, there are also best practices which indicate plans greater than $100mm should be benchmarked annually. For plans with assets between $10 – $100mm, they should benchmark every other year and plans less than $10mm every three years. However, benchmarking can also occur as often as needed to ensure … Read More

/ by Matt Golda

Are Your Client’s Retirement Plans Working? No. And Here’s Why.

An Advisors Guide to Fixing the Retirement Plan Crisis

A Bleak Outlook: Savings Crisis Facts

It’s no secret that Americans are severely underprepared for retirement. With social security looking less and less likely to provide for younger generations as the years roll on, retirement plan advisors have a duty and a responsibility to encourage people to save.

Encouragement is only part of the picture, however. There are a number of reasons why Americans aren’t saving for retirement:[1]

40.1% say they don’t make enough money
24.9% say they are struggling to pay bills
10.3% say they don’t think they need retirement savings
9.9% say they have used their retirement savings for an emergency
9.2% say their company doesn’t offer a 401(k) plan
5.7% say they are prioritizing paying down debt

In addition to the savings crisis, there is still large discrepancies in the way retirement plan advisors service their clients from the IPS, plan design, employee education, and more. … Read More

/ by Craig Rosenthal

Are Plan Fiduciaries Asleep at the Wheel?

Are Plan Fiduciaries Asleep at the Wheel

 

Retirement plan advisors – did you know that almost 49% of plan sponsors don’t know they are a fiduciary to their company’s retirement plan?[1] Is it lack of knowledge? Your fellow peer advisors aren’t providing fiduciary education. Plan sponsors are juggling too many responsibilities from payroll to management. Essentially, many plan sponsors are asleep at the retirement plan wheel, and this needs to change.

Unfortunately, plan sponsors are not paying enough attention to the direction and outcomes necessary for a successful retirement plan. Fiduciary awareness is fading, and participants might be suffering because of this.

With more than 75% of employees living paycheck to paycheck and another 25% claiming that personal finances are a distraction at work, retirement plan advisors are facing an epidemic to provide meaningful financial wellness solutions to plan sponsors and their participants. [2], [3]

It’s time for advisors to push plan fiduciaries to … Read More

/ by Matt Golda

Love It or Hate It, Time Tracking is Important for Retirement Plan Advisors

Love It or Hate It, Time Tracking is Important for Retirement Plan Advisors

Have you ever looked up from your work, glanced at the clock to astonishingly find that it is already 5:00 pm? In that moment, you can’t help but wonder, “Where has the day gone?” It feels like you were just debriefing from your 10:00 am meeting and now another day is coming to a close.

Whether you are preparing for an annual committee meeting, meeting with wholesalers or responding to RFPs, monitoring how you spend your time is important. Which is why, actively practicing your time management skills during the working day is crucial to the productivity and health of your retirement plan practice.

Believe it or not, effectively tracking your time leads to generating more revenue for your firm. Think about it like this: You have contracted 12 hours per quarter dedicated to ABC Company from back-end plan administration to committee meetings. However, if a client is requesting more of your … Read More