When Should a Financial Planner Hire a Virtual Assistant?

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When Should a Financial Planner Hire a Virtual Assistant

The answer to the question of when should a financial planner hire a virtual assistant comes down to two main reasons. First, a virtual assistant for financial planners should be brought on when an Advisor can’t get everything they need to do done. Secondly, virtual assistant services for financial planners should be leveraged when a Planner cannot staff locally or with in their budget. In the remainder of this article, we will cover what is the role of a virtual assistant for a financial planner, when does a virtual assistant for financial advisors make sense, and finally Valenta financial advisor virtual assistant services.

Role of Virtual Assistant For Financial Planners

Financial Advisors and Financial Planners are Increasing in importance and in numbers year over year. As more and more countries increase their middle classes the demand for Financial Planners increases. Financial Advisors have always been in high demand in developed countries. Making the best use of money and investing for retirement has never been more important globally as world population ages and longevity increases. Financial Planners and Advisors need to be client facing and also doing the most challenging and technical work within their practices.  Virtual assistants for financial planners can be assigned many administrative roles to free up the advisors and any paraplanners (a role we also fill) in an office. A virtual assistant for financial advisors can manage nearly all client onboarding and also set up and send out meeting agendas and summaries. They can enter CRM information and all admin tasks related to data management. A virtual assistant for financial planners can also address client communication and correspondence and fill out forms for the companies that provide financial instruments to clients. Examples of these types of companies include Schwab, EQIS, Kingdom Trust, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, and many more. All in all, the role of a virtual assistant for financial advisors is to be a time saver and an offload of lower level work that higher value staff and fee earners should not be completing.

When Does a Virtual Assistant for Financial Advisors Make Sense?

As we mentioned above, getting work done and finding resources for jobs that might go unfilled are two of the biggest reasons to engage virtual assistant services for financial advisors … but there are more. We have listed the Top Four reasons we hear from Financial Planner clients as to why they seek out virtual admins in addition to paraplanners that we provide them.

Focus on the Core Business – The best reason to engage with service providers of financial planner virtual admins is the ability to focus on the core business of financial planning and the clients of an advisor. Many roles filled by our virtual assistants are back office jobs that are time consuming and take away from clients and actual financial planning. Assigning this type of work to someone who might be remote makes tons of sense.

Augment Existing People in the Practice – In nearly all of our engagements virtual assistants we provide work very closely with local staff and help them to be more efficient. We offload all the work that does not need to be done in person and all the back office work that is best done offsite at lower costs. By doing this, higher value work can be completed by the people best suited for the job, … typically higher paid ones.

Acquire Needed Staff – Getting needed staff to fill open reqs in the door is the number one reason to outsource staff and use staff augmentation services. Frequently lower paying roles can be hard to hire staff for.  It can be hard to locate staff within the budget a company has available for a position. Getting needed skills in the door helps a practice or organization execute on its goals and serve clients most effectively.

Reduce Costs – When a business combines the salary for a role with additional costs it gets an accurate picture of the total expense for a job. Federal, state, and provincial taxes must be accounted for. Benefits for health care and retirement are also big costs, and infrastructure and overhead costs must also be examined. After adding all of these expenses up staff augmentation can often fill roles for 30% to 50% of these total costs. Our staff saves our clients’ money that they can allocate to other roles.

Valenta and Financial Planners, Learn More

We have extensive experience with Financial Planners and Advisors at Valenta. We also serve other Financial Service providers like CPAs and Accounting firms. We have provided our Financial Advisor clients with Paraplanners for nearly a decade. We have been providing virtual assistant for financial advisors services for the same amount of time. If you are a Financial Planner and would like to complete our Financial Planning Practice Check List, we could have a conversation about ways to enhance a practice. To learn more about our paraplanner and admins for financial planning practices please visit our page for this service. To learn more, about all the roles we fill please visit our main Staff Augmentation page.

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