There are an almost infinite number of details that you can work on when planning to establish your own business as an independent financial advisor. But I want to outline those critical few things that you absolutely must have when you make the move. In particular, I’m focused on the first ninety days of your new practice.
If you’re working in employee model (at a wirehouse etc)-- here is the third thing I think you need to think about (mostly in order) to set up your own practice.
If you would rather listen to this in audio, you can also listen to the entire list in episode 26 of our podcast by clicking HERE.
3) Develop a Plan
The third requirement starts to get into the actual tactics and work to be done. I kind of categorize this number three as plan -- you have to DEVELOP A PLAN.
Would you give more thought to house plans or the plan that pays your mortgage?
That includes the items on this list: making sure you've thought through how you're going to address each of those items that I'll talk about: the story or explanation you give your clients when you let them know you've made this change, all the other administrative items that are very important in the first 90 days, what kinds of accounts you're gonna use, if you're gonna change your business model at all, how do you communicate that and how do you explore all the other options.
But broadly speaking you have to have a plan and that plan can be as detailed as it needs to be especially on the operations and administrative side. But you have to have a plan on how you're gonna accomplish this: what is the timeline, how you're gonna explain to clients, how you're gonna get things ready and get through that first few months -- three to six months -- whatever the time frame is or transition takes up a lot of your time.
Certainly by six months it should start to slow down but the first sixty to ninety days is usually a whirlwind so you wanna have as much of the what-if stuff as you can. So that's number three.