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Financial advisors are under an immense amount of pressure to provide value to their clients and differentiate themselves in the hyper-competitive financial marketplace. While competition can come from everywhere, it is also true that unique sources of strategic support and positioning are available from some unlikely sources – like boutique asset management firms – that offer new ways of thinking and challenging your business approaches, which can lead to new ways of growing your firm and stronger competitive positioning.
To learn more about this topic, we reached out to Jon Robinson, CEO and Co-Founder of Blueprint Investment Partners – a Greensboro, NC based asset management firm with strong opinions about and experience in partnering with advisors to address their investment and practice management challenges. The firm is unique in a number of ways, such as providing à-la-carte style services for advisors and its dedication to being a practice management resource. Included in its toolkit for advisors is "The Elite Advisor Playbook,” which identifies four pillars to being a top financial advisor, and a recent webinar, "Building An Elite Performance Culture For Your Wealth Practice," which features Dr. Eric Downing, who has more than 35 years of leadership and development experience in both military and corporate roles.
The firm’s goal is to offer robust investment products, operational support, business strategies, and coaching that helps financial advisors implement an optimal business model to address some of the major challenges in the current investment environment and compete in our industry’s new operating environment of accelerating change. We asked Robinson questions to explore the firm’s insights.
Hortz: Blueprint Investment Partners has done a lot of work to support financial advisors with practice management resources. Why are you so passionate about these topics?
Robinson: It's simple: We believe when our advisor partners and their clients win, we win.
This philosophy means our interests are well-aligned with those of the advisors we serve. The more we do to support our advisor clients and make their lives more efficient, the more dynamic our business can become. We think our value is strongest when we have a truly unique business proposition centered on the advisor and how we can be an uncommonly great partner for them.
Hortz: Given all the work you do with independent financial advisors and RIAs, what do you think are some of their biggest headwinds? What have you seen successful advisors doing to fight against those pressures?
Robinson: Advisors are constantly being pulled in 15 directions at once. They are responding to their clients, operating a business, leading a team, trying to learn new technologies, managing portfolios, dealing with compliance and regulatory requirements, receiving calls and emails from vendors, and so on. Some of these things are mission-critical, but some distract an advisor from what should be their core focus: client service and business development.
In our experience, top financial advisors are the ones who spend the bulk of their time on the activities that add the most value to their practice. Then, they find partners to take over many of the other important but time-consuming aspects of their business.
Successful advisors are also smart about how they automate processes and leverage technology. Our team has spent a lot of time getting up-to-speed with which platforms seem to be game-changers in driving practice efficiency. I am hesitant to name any specifically so as not to seem like a commercial, but we are happy to share our experiences and knowledge with anyone who reaches out.
Hortz: Why do you think so many financial advisors have moved toward using outsourced asset managers over the last several years?
Robinson: There is a big opportunity for advisors to generate alpha for their business on the relationship and planning side. More and more advisors understand that doing so requires them to find a partner to take over investment operations, thereby freeing them up to focus on finding new clients and better serving existing ones.
Bringing in an outside partner can be an efficient way to manage clients’ portfolios without adding the time, energy, and expenses associated with hiring a larger staff, training them, etcetera.
At the end of the day, I think most of an advisor’s clients care mostly about outcomes. If the advisor is helping them reach their financial goals in the way they expect, clients are not overly concerned about who’s doing the portfolio management. In fact, we have heard from many advisors who partner with Blueprint Investment Partners that their clients are comforted by knowing their portfolio is being managed by a team that specializes in asset management day in and day out.
Because more advisors are moving toward an outsourced model for portfolio management, it is also putting pressure on asset managers to broaden their service offering. The days of only trading a model and then playing a “not our job” card for everything else are dying. The asset managers who are going to succeed, in my view, are ones that consistently offer the uncommon – something we have been doing for years. I am thinking of partnerships that look and feel like being able to quickly access real humans who actually answer the phone and their email when the advisor has a question, offering white-labeled sales and marketing materials, proactively sharing communications about changes taking place in the portfolios, managing held away accounts, and providing direct indexing.
Hortz: Why might an advisor consider a partner like Blueprint Investment Partners over another asset manager and traditional TAMP?
Robinson: It comes down to our commitment to personalized service. Advisors can reach out directly to people on our team that they know by name and have a relationship with. Because we are intentional about our growth, we can be nimble. At the end of the day, we aim to provide a partnership that goes above and beyond what most advisors are accustomed to from other managers and TAMPs.
Our partnership looks different from one advisor to the next, depending on what they need and want from us. Our wheelhouse includes customizing models and UMAs, as well as helping with tax planning, marketing, required minimum distributions and cash outs, business continuity coaching, succession planning, etcetera.
In most cases we can do it at a price that is lower than the larger TAMPs, which makes our offering attractive, especially for the small- and mid-size RIA's who might not get a whole lot of attention from a larger TAMP.
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The Institute for Innovation Development is an educational and business development catalyst for growth-oriented financial advisors and financial services firms determined to lead their businesses in an operating environment of accelerating business and cultural change. We operate as a business innovation platform and educational resource with FinTech and financial services firm members to openly share their unique perspectives and activities. The goal is to build awareness and stimulate open thought leadership discussions on new or evolving industry approaches and thinking to facilitate next-generation growth, differentiation, and unique client/community engagement strategies. The institute was launched with the support and foresight of our founding sponsors — Ultimus Fund Solutions, FLX Networks, TIFIN, NASDAQ, Advisorpedia, NAIFA, Pershing, Fidelity, Voya Financial, and Charter Financial Publishing (publisher of Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines).