Brad Johnson: What if I were to tell you the number one cause for financial advisor burnout is that you’re actually doing three jobs, not one, and most of you don’t even know it. Today, we’re going to get into why that would be the equivalent of running a Chick-fil-A by yourself. Can you imagine that? But more importantly, we’re going to show you a better way. It’s a proven model designed for clarity, for growth, for scalability, and the best thing is it’s actually already working out in the real world. Many Triad members have used this to scale their firms by getting away from the red line burnout and getting to the green line of scaling a business bigger than themselves.
The biggest key I would say is it’s a model that’s built for efficiency, for scale. It’s one that helps you bring in the right talent, and more importantly, set them up for long-term success so that you’re not just training them and then they’re leaving a few weeks, a few months, a few years later to go do their own thing. We call it the Triad Advisor Model.
And today I’m going to walk you through exactly how it works and why it is the future of scaling a business bigger than yourself. And make sure you stick around until the end. My team has put together a special tool to make sure you have everything you need to put this into action in your firm. The question is, how was this model created? It was actually born out of necessity. As we looked at the top-performing advisors all across America, they were maxed out. In traditional org charts, they just weren’t cutting it. People were hired without role clarity. It led to misalignment. It led to frustration, led to turnover.
The big breakthrough is realizing that the advisor role isn’t just one job, it’s three. And we’re going to break that down and we’re going to show you exactly how that works today. Okay. Back to Chick-fil-A. We said this is essentially the equivalent as an advisor of doing three jobs all at once. Let’s step back into the last time you were at a Chick-fil-A. Now, just imagine you’re running the entire operation by yourself. That’s not going to work very well. And many would argue not only is Chick-fil-A one of the most profitable business models in the world, it might be even more efficient than it is profitable.
Because to serve the millions and millions of customers they do every year, you have to have it absolutely dialed in. I had a chance to meet one of the top Chick-fil-A franchise owners out of California. She has over 100 employees to run one of the top-performing Chick-fil-As in the country. So, imagine all of the moving parts there, and imagine trying to do that by yourself. As we walk into a Chick-fil-A, I want you to just visualize this. The last time you were there, you walk in, there’s typically always a line, but once you get to the front to place your order, you’re at the cash register. And now imagine you put in, if you’re me, that order for a spicy chicken sandwich, extra pickles.
So, you put in this order, and now imagine your product, spicy chicken sandwich, it’s being manufactured in the back. That’s by a different employee. The person at the cash register typically goes, grabs it, checks it real quick, hands it across to you, and now you’re off to your table to enjoy your order. And not too long after, there’s probably a Chick-fil-A employee that is actually swinging by, and they’re saying, “Hey, do you need a free refill? Hey, can I get that trash for you?” That’s now three different interactions with three different employees at Chick-fil-A to make that experience happen.
So, now let’s take this into financial advisor world, and I’ve got it up on the board here: a selling advisor, a service advisor, a planning advisor. And I want you to, now, we’re going to make the analogy of how that would apply to financial services. Okay. The cash register, that’s the selling advisor. In most financial services firms, that is the individual that’s responsible for developing the relationship and driving the revenue. The revenue can only go as fast in financial services as you can be across the conference room table, potentially across the Zoom, that is your version of the cash register.
So, now imagine that order is placed, that prospect is in the process of turning into a client, and you say, “Just a second, I’ll be right back.” And you run into the back to create your version of the spicy chicken sandwich, aka, your financial plan. Well, if you were in a Chick-fil-A and that happened, you’d be like, “What kind of operation are they running here? This isn’t efficient at all.” And the line would be out the door because it just wouldn’t move very fast. It happens all the time in finance. That’s the problem because you’re wearing two hats. You’re wearing selling advisor hat. You are wearing planning advisor hat. That’s the first piece of this dance.
Now, the plan is delivered. It’s presented. Now, this individual is a client. They’re a customer in Chick-fil-A and now imagine they take the order to the table. In this world, they would have the financial plan that’s in place, and now you are servicing them, right? They’re an existing client. Now, you’re servicing them. Imagine you don’t have the person in Chick-fil-A that comes by the table and asks for their free refill. What happens all the time in financial services? In fact, real world story. I once had a client. They brought in $60 million one year, and their goal the following year was $50 million. They said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m burned out.” Well, why?
When we looked at their calendar, they actually, half of their week was filled with service appointments, with reviews, because they were the equivalent of the person in Chick-fil-A walking around to the tables doing free refills. There’s a reason in Chick-fil-A they don’t let that happen because imagine if every other person in line was a free refill. They would only drive half the revenue that they do without the person that’s going out, working the floor, playing the role of service provider. So, that’s the same equivalent in financial services. And why that role is so important that once you put a financial plan in place, that is the beginning of the journey for your clients, not the end. And so, to be able to navigate and take them through that journey and follow them through their ideal retirement, that takes a whole another role to do that at the highest level.
So, I hope that makes sense, and why it’s so important that we’re not wearing all three hats as a financial advisor, because it leads to burnout. It leads to lack of revenue or not being able to grow nearly as quickly as you could without these specialized roles. And now we’re going to get into exactly how that works. Getting back to the three types of advisors, and instead of one person wearing three hats, three individuals, so you can now scale a thriving firm. First off, selling, the equivalent of the person at the cash register in Chick-fil-A. Planning, the equivalent of the person making the product in the back. In our world, that’s a financial plan. In Chick-fil-A World, that’s the spicy chicken sandwich.
Now, the last step, service, once the product is delivered, this is the ongoing process to make sure you have happy customers, happy clients. Chick-fil-A, that’s the person working the floor, doing the free refills. In our world, that is the service advisor that’s meeting, that’s doing the reviews, that’s navigating the changes in life that impact the financial plan as you go. Okay. Let’s break down the three big steps to making sure all three of these roles are crushing it inside of your firm. Who do you hire? How do you compensate them? How do you train them, number two? And number three, once you’ve got those two down, how do you scale? As they say, the first time’s the hardest.
Once you create this advisor pod, these three working in conjunction, now, it’s super easy to scale it over and over. Just like Chick-fil-A, if they have a school bus of kids get off in the parking lot, and they’re overwhelmed with customers, now they don’t just have one cash register. They open up a second, a third, a fourth, so they can meet customer demand. In our business, now you turn up the marketing to generate more appointments, and more appointments can now be handled by multiple advisor pods, aka cash registers to where you can open up more pods so you can scale without creating that overwhelm many advisors face.
As we unpack these three roles. Let’s get into one of the biggest mistakes I see over and over in finance and it’s trying to make everybody a selling advisor. This is one of the hardest roles to master in finance. It takes confidence, it takes experience, it takes being able to navigate different situations, objections on your feet, and it’s a role that’s very tough to master. In fact, typical statistics would show one in 20, one in 30, one in 40 actually end up being able to navigate this role long term. So, let’s talk about this. The service advisor role is typically what I find to be the most efficient way to hire new advisors. Because if you think about this, we have a rule at Triad: no appointments done alone.
And if you think about being a great selling advisor, you have to be curious, you have to ask great questions, you have to actually listen to people so you can see how you can help them. Well, it’s really hard to be a great sales advisor if you’re constantly having to take notes because building a financial plan is very detailed work. And so, if you’re part relationship question asker and part note taker, that’s really hard to wear those two hats. So, what we recommend is teaming up a great selling advisor with a great service advisor. Now, also, you’ve got tools like AI, Zocks, tools that can take notes while you’re in the meeting. So, that’s an opportunity.
But what I will tell you, one of the hardest things to do in finance is to scale a business built on I and me. You have to scale a business built on we and team. And if you now introduce that prospect to a team-based approach in the very first appointment they ever do and say, “Hey, here at XYZ Financial, we build these plans as a team. We’ve got a team-based approach. We’ve got multiple eyes on every plan.” This stuff is really important. In fact, I’ve got Joey, the service guy in here because we want to make sure we don’t miss anything. And you know what? He is going to coordinate with our planning team that helps make sure we’re building world class financial plans because we build one-of-one plans that are custom to you, not one-of-many plans that are just kind of one-size-fits-all.
And that takes high attention to detail and that takes coordination and a team-based effort because we’re putting hours into every financial plan that we build and create on behalf of our clients here. We’re small, we’re a boutique, we’re a high-end wealth management firm, and that takes a team-based approach. So, as you look at this dance, the best models I’ve seen hire a service advisor, that’s stop number one. Now, think about killing two birds with one stone. We have a more efficient selling advisor up here at the top because they just have to worry about relationship building and asking great questions. We’ve got the notes being captured here. Think of the equivalent of the cash register at Chick-fil-A. Order is placed.
Now, imagine this as the conduit, like the cash register that’s now displaying the order in the back. That is the dance we’re playing, to where now the plan can be delivered in the back to somebody that geeks out on spreadsheets. In many of our firms, that’s going to be CFA-type of personalities that dive in. They might not be people people, but what they are is they love building a world-class plan, the high attention to detail, the ‘I love spreadsheets’ coffee mug, all of that. And now what you’ve done is you’ve created a very efficient dance, very similar to the Chick-fil-A analogy we just walked through. And now you’re serving your clients at a higher level.
And the different types of personalities to hire here. These are the people that they walk into every room, they’ve never met a stranger. Typically, good relationship skills. A lot of former athletes tend to gravitate towards this role because there is a form of being compensated based on performance, very similar to athletics. Over here, starting out in this role, you’re going to have more of a salary-based role. Many of our firms, also, we had one firm that hired somebody. They were overseeing a billion-dollar book of business and they said, “Just don’t make me sell. I love people. I love taking care of them. Just don’t put the pressure of sales on me.”
So, you might have those type of personalities there. Now, they can kind of ride shotgun. With a great sales advisor, they love the client relationships, and it’s kind of a tag team effort there. And then we already kind of talked through planning. Both of these are salary-based roles typically tied to the bonus compensation at the end of the year based on the total firm’s performance. We do have some other firms that have a finder’s fee here. So, imagine you bring on a new client, there’s $1 million that they move on that you all manage. And then the service advisor that’s meeting with them annually says, “Hey, by the way, they inherited a new $500,000. They found new assets.” They’re going to bring selling advisor back into that conversation, and they might get rewarded for finding those new assets and get some sort of compensation tied to that. As far as personalities, I’ve kind of walked through their compensation models.
And then back to training. We’ve seen great service advisors. The cool thing is if you have a great selling advisor, this is a great entry into a firm because now you get the benefit of not only helping the selling advisor, but they get a chance to absorb all of the sales language. If they’re riding shotgun, they can now start to understand how a meeting flows, how that information goes into a great plan. So, they’re really in a seat where they get to see it all play out, and we’ve seen many service advisors grow into great selling advisors as they mature, as they gain confidence. Typically, three, six, sometimes 12 months in that chair, you’ve got great service advisors that can now grow into a great sales advisor.
And then here’s the key. Never leave an empty seat. So, you don’t just make this person a selling advisor. They need to train their replacement. Oftentimes, they may train two or three people at the same time because it’s the same time and effort required. And now, all you’ve done back to scale is you’ve replicated the model. So, we’re basically copy-pasting this model, opening additional cash registers at your firm. So, now this service advisor, they come up and create that next cash register. They’ve trained their replacement, service, and typically a planning advisor. They can take care of three, potentially four advisor pods. So, this role here can actually scale to multiple advisor pods depending on the type of plans you’re building, depending on how many appointments you’re running per week. But then also, as you get to bandwidth there, you’re going to add additional planning advisors.
As we wrap, the final thought on how to create and train a great service advisor, grow them into a great selling advisor, sometimes they also grow into great planning advisors is we do something called riding shotgun and an after-action review. So, what you’re going to do, service advisor’s going to ride shotgun with selling advisor. As soon as that meeting is wrapped, I did an episode on the ideal calendar when it comes to financial services firms. In fact, I think my team is going to go ahead and pop that up right here so that you can check it out. But go check that one out. We break down the whole calendar. But as we do that dance, which you can do as an after-action review, you need a 10-minute buffer between appointments to where now you can get out and you can deconstruct in the moment what went well, why you asked the questions you ask, all of that.
So, now you’re training as you are both running appointments, but growing new advisors and creating that talent you need to scale your firm. Once you get that down, you do what’s called the reverse shotgun, where service advisor actually steps into selling advisor seat, but selling advisor that’s seasoned doesn’t leave the room. They just step down into second chair, and now they’re there to help a new selling advisor, just in case they get in the deep end a little bit and can’t swim. The other thing you do when you start to scale multiple cash registers is you do not throw the $1 million, the $2 million, the $3 million prospects to a new advisor. It’s almost like, in effect, kind of a totem pole where the new guy starts at the bottom, and then the more seasoned advisor goes up. And so, you might take the most successful selling advisor. Now, their new minimum is $1 million . The new advisor is going to be $500,000 to $1 million.
And now, as you develop more seasoned pods, the most seasoned pods go to the top. In fact, one of our firms, the founders only meet with clients that have at least $5 million plus because they have a team of seasoned advisors. That would be the 3 to 5 and the 2 to 3 and the 1 to 2. And so, now you’re making sure your most seasoned, your most successful advisors are seeing the people with the most money back to maximizing the revenue you can drive to the firm. So, the Triad Advisor Model, here’s the beautiful thing about it. When done right, this model gives you a way to grow without losing your sanity, your soul, everything along the way just for production revenue, a bigger bank account.
And in fact, one of my favorite Triad members, a guy named Anthony, who many of you have watched his episode, he told me one year after he was recognized as being one of the top producers in the entire country, he walked across stage, got recognized. Millions and millions of dollars of revenue created that year. One of the most successful advisors in the country. He walked across the stage, took his picture, grabbed his award, walked directly into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and said, “I will never do that to myself again.” And that’s the importance of building these firms in a sustainable way to where you can both build an incredible business but also create freedom in life. And as you know, that’s what we’re all about here, doing business, doing life, and creating a business model that blesses your life, doesn’t become your life.
So, as a thank you for you sticking with me this far into the video, my team went ahead and we put together a PDF that shows the entire Triad Advisor Model, including its complete with org chart, advisor roles, the key compensation structures to make each of these roles work. And all you need to do is directly below this video, or if you’re listening on audio, go out to our website. We have a form. Just fill in your name, your email, we’ll send it to you, no questions asked, as a thank you for tuning in. And by the way, if you want to see more of these videos, please like. Please give us a subscribe. Please leave some comments of what hit home or maybe what’s missing that you want to see on a future episode.
As we stated today, as we started, there’s really three different roles in finance. And doing all three is the equivalent of running a Chick-fil-A by yourself, and nobody can survive that for very long. So, the key is specialization, dividing those three roles into three separate roles, specializing training, having a structure to hire, to train, and in turn, to scale. Think about Chick-fil-A. There’s one on just about every street corner. So, these principles work and would allow you to scale your firm to multiple locations. So, with that, here’s to building a business that blesses your life, doesn’t become your life. Do business. Do life.
