Building the team for success: Recruitment, training and succession planning

Going beyond the skill set

The recruitment and training of new advisors is an important area for development within any practice. Handing the practice over to that younger generation is difficult, but it can be highly rewarding. To see what top advisors look for when recruiting, and how they integrate new advisors into their practice, we spoke to Stephen Popper, Senior Vice President and Managing Director at SageView Advisory Group, Kathleen Kelly, Managing Partner of Compass Financial Partners, a Marsh & McLennan Agency LLC and Douglas Bermudez, Managing Director at Strategic Retirement Partners.

Key takeaways

1. Finding new advisors who fit the team culture can be more important than finding new advisors who want to just win business.
2. Training is for the whole team, not just the new members. There are experts across the organization, and they should be able to teach their skills and knowledge to other advisors.
3. Recruiting advisors with a range of background and experiences not only improves the firm by bringing different perspectives to the table, it also helps get business.

Finding the right people is important for any business, but for one as personal as retirement advisory, it becomes about the right skills, attitudes, experiences, and broadening the base of advisors in the practice to be able to have conversations with all the different clients a firm works with. Stephen sees the main need as getting people who approach this with the right attitude, saying, “We really want people who are willing to learn, that’s first and foremost. I don’t want to recruit people that know everything. I need people who are going to be open minded.”

Kathleen is focused on the drive and emotion that employees bring to the table: “The participant experience and delivering effective financial wellness solutions is what we love to do — it’s our secret sauce. You’ve got to have passion, and if you don’t, this is not the right business for you. We try to think ahead, so we’re not in a crunch to hire. It’s been fabulous since we’ve been with Marsh McLennan Agency, because we have much more support now.”

Douglas looks to build a blended team that works well together, in his view, “We want to build our team to have complementing competencies. We don’t want everybody to be the same. It’s about character and a moral compass. We want someone that really takes pride in their work. We know that we’re not going to get someone with every skill set available, but is that person a good person, a hard worker and are they comfortable in their own skin. We want someone that’s going to be vocal and challenge us. We want the team environment to be a safe place for all of us to get better.”

“It’s really about getting the right people on the bus,” adds Kathleen. “We find good people that have the character, competence, compassion and chemistry that align with our team. We also want our people to have curiosity. We get hired for our intellectual capital and thought leadership because the prospective client believes in us, and our ability to improve the retirement readiness of their employees.”

Stephen sees this sharing success and building as the right way forward. While it is fair to look for people with a competitive side, it should not be to the detriment of the organization as a whole. He adds, “I want people to have a passion for success, not only theirs, but others’ too. I want people who are competitive, but not people who capitalize on the loss of others to win. My passion is helping HR. That’s where the business has really grown in excitement for me over the last decade. I’m trying to find new and different ways to help the individual employees be more successful so they can do their day job, and I need advisors who feel the same way.”

Training the advisor of the future

As best practices, technology and clients change, ongoing training is necessary for both newly recruited and seasoned advisors to continue to enhance their skills and knowledge. Douglas and his team approach this holistically as a firm, leveraging the right person for the job wherever they are, as he says, “it’s about rallying around that individual and using the infrastructure at SRP. We have so many people here with tons of talent in very different parts of the business. We want to lean on those people. There’s a lot of different resources we’re able to provide to this individual that way. In addition, there are great resources out in the industry, including a number of certifications we encourage people to go through.”

The focus for Stephen and his team is matching the knowledge and skills of the advisors to the needs of the clients, thinking about the questions that clients are asking and then finding or training advisors to match those needs specifically. He says, “We’ve got to figure out a way to collaborate and put everybody in a better position, because at the end of the day the employer is the one who needs the help. In 2025 we’re going to spend a lot of time focused on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and training folks on how to consult both pre deal, during the deal and post deal on M&A. It’s more of a compliance approach than sales, but we have to be aware of the pitfalls when a client acquires another organization. We’re also now seeing it in the nonprofit space for the first time ever. We have to be experts to do the analysis and then make a good recommendation. That’s the part I love about the training and then implementing it with coaching.”

Kathleen sees this process as aligning skill sets, personalities and chemistry. “From an industry standpoint, specialization is great. If I can bring someone in who has worked with five similar clients to do participant education, then they already know what that looks and feels like. We are highly in touch with where we can really deliver meaningful alignment to meet the needs of our clients.”

The client need is paramount throughout. And while the skills and knowledge of advisors is part of the issue, the diversity of advisors and the diversity of clients means a range of experiences and approaches are needed. Douglas looks at the ages of his advisors and thinks about how that resonates with employees whom they are trying to persuade to start saving: “Our education team at SRP is on the younger end of the spectrum, but I think that’s an additive approach. The other is the bilingual aspect of it, which is something that I do the majority of because English is my second language. I enjoy doing education. It puts me in touch with the participants — understanding their fears, myths or misinformation they’ve heard. But fundamentally, it’s the passion, the content, and how you deliver it. For clients and participants, it is being able to meet them with someone that understands them and can relate to them.”

It is that need of the client, and the business case that make the most sense to Stephen. He has a deep cultural resonance with diversity and building communities, and sees the value in building coalitions, but, as he says, ultimately an advisory practice is a business. Stephen says, “We have a large growth of people of color, and people who are first generation immigrants that are going to have wealth. They’re going to be savers and investors. If we ignore them, we’re missing out on a huge part of the population. We want to be smart — recruiting advisors with a range of experiences and backgrounds so we don’t have the same opinions at the table. I’m going to miss out on things if I think I know all the answers. To me, the concept of diversity is a win for a business owner and leader, because every day you have to think about what the future will look like. Diversity could also be hiring someone with compliance expertise instead of record keeping, or someone who’s been in a call center versus someone who hasn’t. If it’s good for business, then I want to do it, and if it’s bad for business I will stay away.”

Kathleen resonates with the need to be intentional to continue developing the workforce too, adding, “I said it’s about having the right people on the bus but if they want to change their seat, that’s just fine too. Right now, I’ve got three people on our team that are transitioning between roles internally. Having awareness and helping team members have a consciousness that if job satisfaction isn’t there, it’s not necessarily because of us as the employer, but it may be because of the actual job that they’re doing. They may perhaps be far more interested in another area of our business, and we want to accommodate that.”

The succession puzzle

“I have goals, and my goals are to spend more time with my family,” says Douglas. “I’m only 53 years old. I’ve always said I’m going to grind until I’m 62 and see where I’m at. Is it time to just do education and let the rest of the team worry about the other stuff like the P&L, the new business, and retention? We brought in a gentleman from Las Vegas a couple of years ago, and he is a similar age as my business partner. I’ve told them my goal is for them to eventually buy me out.”

There is an institutionalization of succession planning that is changing how senior advisors think about their practices. Stephen has seen this happen across the industry, to his firm and others like it. “This is where private equity investment is creating an opportunity for the corporatization of succession planning like never before. Now that SageView is a part of a consolidator and I don’t have to think about succession planning as much as I used to. I used to look for someone as a second generation business leader and they would buy me out, but in essence I’ve been bought out. I’m part of a larger organization with my revenue going into a bigger pool. We have an opportunity we have never seen before in financial services, where succession planning isn’t on me personally, but it is more on me as a corporate leader.”

For Kathleen, “The decision to partner with MMA was a huge step, but they were the clear winner as they met our three non-negotiable objectives. First to make sure we could go to our clients and tell them with absolute certainty they were going to be better off as a result of our acquisition. Second, we needed to be able to share with all of our colleagues we’re not leaving anyone behind, and this is going to be better for you, professionally and personally, which it has been. Then third, for George and I, it had to be the right fit, the culture and DNA of the organization needed to align with our values. We love where we landed, and we’ve been able to grow significantly while still having the autonomy, flexibility, and entrepreneurial mindset that we had prior to the acquisition.”

Douglas has seen similar developments within his practice, and that was an important part of the business plan itself. “SRP has an infrastructure for succession planning. It’s something that was very important to Jeff Cullen (CEO and co-founder) and the advisors that we have. At the end of day, we want individuals to get what they deserve for the work they’ve put in. But, at the same time, we have to make sure that our clients continue to be taken care of. You’ve got to think ahead as a firm.”

For Stephen, the younger generation and the advisors who are now being recruited hold the key. “If I can find some 20 somethings that are interested in taking risks and challenges, they will eat this business up because they see the opportunity. My favorite part about this is that there are no rules for where we’re going in the future. That was the one thing I took out of Covid. We are changing the way we can build a business. We can take a person who is selling widgets or air conditioners and train them up to be a subject matter expert in three to five years. If they’re passionate and willing to learn I will invest in them all day long.”

[Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to receive our Retirement insights.]