Lightening the Load for a Successful Financial Advisor Retirement

A successful succession planning process doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, a healthy retirement timeline for a financial advisor should take years of strategic planning and execution. This not only gives you enough time to carefully extract yourself from your business and your clients’ portfolios, it also gives your clients a chance to acclimate to their new situation and make a successful (and happy) transition with their finances.
Because the right succession plan will take some time, you’ll want to gradually start handing over the responsibilities involved in managing your clients’ wealth. This can happen over a period of time, but ideally, you’ll start to hand over a more significant bulk of your workload in the year before your retirement. This is a timeline that is built into the process used by advisorRETIRE™ to help our clients transition into their retirement years.

What to Take Off Your Plate in the Year Before Retirement

Scheduling client meetings.

Whether you are working with someone you’ve recruited to take over your business or having a company like advisorRETIRE™ do the work for you, you should start allowing the transition team to start scheduling and preparing for client meetings. This gives the new team a chance to get some hands-on experience with the client’s portfolio and begin making plans for their wealth management in the long-term.

Marketing your business.

It’s time to leave the marketing to someone else. As an independent financial advisor, you’ve probably been carefully crafting your marketing plans for years (or even decades). It’s time to let someone else do it, and potentially even co-brand materials for a new advisor taking over your book. Keep in mind that while you might not take an active role in marketing in this final year, that doesn’t mean marketing should stop. You can continue to grow your business to help ensure the success of the next advisor as well as to maximize the profits for the sale of your business.

Client meeting participation.

Finally, it’s time to start saying goodbye to your clients. Taper off your participation in client meetings over the next year. Bear in mind that even right before your retirement, you can still pop in to say hello to your clients. This is especially true if they are still meeting in your offices. This can give your clients a sense of confidence that you aren’t leaving them “high and dry” when it comes to their portfolio management. Eventually, though, the meetings should be entirely run and managed by the new advisor so they can build their own connection with the client.

Preparation is the Key to Making This a Success

All of these things should ideally start to happen in your final working year. It’s important that none of them happen overnight. To do all of this successfully, you’ll need to stick with well-thought-out and time-tested succession plans. That’s where advisorRETIRE™ can help. If you are a financial advisor and want to retire in the next two, five, or even ten years from now, it’s time to start planning. Get in touch with our team to learn more about our succession planning services for financial advisors and how we can help you successfully retire from your business.