Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
#99 - Outsourcing for Peak Productivity with Andrew Burgess of AdvisorOps360
Want to make your financial advisory business more efficient? Andrew Burgess, founder of AdvisorOps360, shares his journey from math major to operations expert. He talks about the shift from traditional advisor roles to running his own firm, which helps RIAs streamline their operations through training, development, and transition support.
Andrew highlights the importance of knowing the true value of your time as an advisor. By tracking your daily tasks, you can identify inefficiencies and delegate work that doesn’t maximize your skills. He also stresses the need to hire administrative support sooner rather than later.
Learn about flexible engagement models like hourly blocks, retainers, and project-based pricing, and discover how Andrew serves as a “defensive coordinator” for advisors. Don’t miss this chance to hear practical advice on outsourcing and operational strategies that can help your business thrive.
Andrew's Website and Social:
https://www.advisorops360.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-burgess-098828207/
We are excited to announce the BC Brokerage Mixer at XYPN Live 2024! All fee-only planners are welcome. Join us from 7 PM to 11 PM in the Northwoods Room at the Hyatt Regency on the second floor for great music and drinks. We’ll have a DJ, cocktails, and mocktails. Drinks are on us! It’s the perfect way to unwind after a long day. Bring a friend and RSVP via the link below. Looking forward to seeing you there!
https://www.linkedin.com/events/bcbrokeragexypnlivemixer7244741904142065
How's it going everyone? Welcome back to the Only Fee Only podcast and, as always, we appreciate you taking the time, spending some time with us and being here After a little bit of a break. I was on vacation. We are back and ready to get back to business as usual. Today on the show we have Andrew Burgess, who is the founder of AdvisorOps360, a firm that is helping advisors all over the country get things in order by being able to outsource operational tasks, and he also helps people kind of get their things together as well. He was in the advisor space and then decided that he really liked the operations side and said there has to be people out there where this is not their favorite thing to do, and so we're going to give them a solution. This was an awesome conversation. We really enjoyed listening to. You know what his offering is, the way he's helping advisors, and I think you guys are going to enjoy this. So enjoy this podcast with Andrew Burgess on the Only Fee Only podcast.
Speaker 2:What's up everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast. I'm Peter Travalo. I'm here with my co-host, brock Buckles. How's it going today, brock? It's good man. I'm excited. Let's do this, let's do this man. Very excited today to have Andrew Burgess on founder and solutions expert at Advisor Ops 360. I'm really excited to have him on the show today talk about operations, back office support and how RIAs are functioning today. So, andrew, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you guys so much for having me. I appreciate this opportunity. Definitely a fan. Congrats on 100 episodes, right? I think we hit that pretty recently. So congrats on that Big time stuff.
Speaker 2:Thank you, man. Well, I'm really excited to have you on and talk about operations. This is definitely a side of the business that everyone can work on. No matter what level you're at, there's always a KPI or some metric in the business that can be improved. So really looking forward to the discussion today. But for those who don't know who you are and what your business does, you want to currently go over it 30, 60 seconds.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, I'll give you some of my background. I've actually listened to a lot of episodes. I realized how much I have in common with so many other people in the industry. I started in college without really knowing what I wanted to do. Quite frankly, I think it was Brittany from Hilltop a couple episodes ago who started as a math major. So did I. I was a math major starting out, just kind of figuring out. I loved numbers. I loved, uh, the black and white as she described. I love that where there's an answer to everything. You know, um, didn't really know what I wanted to do.
Speaker 3:I was trading stocks in a e-trade account at the time scott trade account at the time and loved that aspect of it. So, you know, kind of started to put an emphasis into the finance world, got an internship, worked there for a summer, knew that I loved the industry and the impact that we have on families' lives, but maybe not necessarily in an advisor capacity. You know I didn't necessarily love the finding the clients and the going out and doing that kind of stuff. So transitioned pretty quickly into an ops, an ops role, and really developed that passion for the industry on the operations side at that point and worked for several different firms wire houses, broker dealers in the back office, independent advisors, insurance investment you know insurance investment type firms and you know insurance investment type firms and you know, ultimately settled. I always wanted to start my own business and kind of started to put the wheels in motion last year to develop AdvisorOps360 and officially went live in April.
Speaker 3:I consider us like a fractional COO firm, a comprehensive operations consulting firm for advisors for ras. I'm a huge fan of the fee only world uh, you know, hence our conversations here. I think it's the way the industry is trending and I think it absolutely is. Um, oftentimes the best fit, gives you the most flexibility and the most options and does the right thing by the client more often than some of the other type organizations out there. So we operate in a fractional COO role for advisors, giving them that executive approach on a part-time basis, if you will. We operate a lot of training and development programs for people trying to get into the industry and we deal with transitions and creation of RAs as well.
Speaker 1:Love it, man. I mean it's really cool. I think that there's something to recognizing what it is that you do want to do and what you don't want to do. So good for you for figuring out. I respect, I admire the advisor side. Obviously, there's a huge need for it out there, but I'm more of an ops guy and that's what you actually enjoy doing. And then, beyond that, going and starting your own company I mean that's huge. So what was the thought behind wanting to go start your own thing? Obviously, peter and I know what that's like. A lot of the people that we work with know what that's like. But how did you decide that you wanted to go out and really give this thing a shot on your own?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can say, ever since I was a kid I always had a business mindset, kind of that entrepreneurial mindset. I've done a lot of different small business ventures, if you will. You know, in college I ran a company where I made you know bags, boards, cornhole boards and sold them online. You know I love that like being an entrepreneur. So it really comes down to finding the opportunity to do it and and kind of the niche you know where you can add value. You know it's easier maybe as an advisor to say, okay, I'm going to go out and I'm going to start my own shop and I have this is what I do. You know, I was really looking for that Like, what can I do? And once I really got comfortable in the industry and realized the value that I added to the firms I was working at, it started to become why can't I do this for more? Why can't I replicate my expertise here and help many different firms out there? So I would say it's just always been something I wanted to do.
Speaker 3:I had a time capsule type thing when I was in fifth grade. You fill up the time capsule and you bury it and you pull it out 20 years later and mine said I want to be a CEO, I want to start my own business. It's always been something I've had in my mind and the timing was right. That's another huge piece of it in life, you know, I I I had an unbelievable firm. I was working for a mentor, the ceo of that firm, adam, who was incredibly instrumental in helping me to realize like that was my one big thing, like that was the thing that mattered more than anything else to me was being able to do that. And I'm at a time in my life where, if I don't do it now, I'm never going to, realistically, I'm only going to get older, I'm only going to have more responsibilities and more things that keep you tied in to the employment world. So it was time to take the leap and I'm extremely happy that I did.
Speaker 2:Love that. So I mean mean with your experiences, like with the internship and working with other firms, like what were maybe some aha moments or examples of like when you saw an outdated system or something that lacked a process, like what were some of those aha moments that eventually led you to start your own business yeah, you know, 2012, I guess 2011 is kind of when we're here and you have a lot of old advisors easy, low-hanging fruit here.
Speaker 3:You have a ton of old advisors that are doing everything paper and pencil. It's all old school. We sit in front of the client, we fill things out with paper and then we have paper applications that we fill out and the client has to sign them. What signature? And looking at that and realizing this is an incredibly labor-intensive process. You know, with as much technology exists out there and and now I mean in the last 10 years, the technology has even, you know, exponentially increased to where it's so much easier and more efficient to run a business um, you know doing things electronically. You know looking at those types of systems and saying, if I can cut my labor, I'm the one doing the work. Now, I'm the one that's filling out all these things and taking all your paper notes and putting them into the computer anyway, why can't I save myself this energy, which will only save you time, and advisors were doing a lot of it themselves.
Speaker 3:It's maybe an old school mindset of not trusting delegation or not trusting systems. I have to control the process, start to finish, and seeing a lot of those things and saying why don't we try this? Here's how much time it saves us, and here's my hourly rate as your admin. Yours is significantly higher than that. Here's the return on investment Just being able to go back to that black and white, the numbers game, and say here's what we're doing now, here's how many hours it takes and here's the cost of each one of these that we do. What if it was X? You know what if we cut that in half? Or it's 25 percent as much as it is now? You know, imagine the capacity that you have. Imagine the capacity that I have, and you know, imagine the capacity that you have. Imagine the capacity that I have and you know the amount that we can grow without having to bring in additional staff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean there's a big. There's a big, there's a big thing when it comes to getting out of your own way. I always say you know, one of the hardest things to do is to get out of your own way. But when you actually do it, you realize how much more efficient you can be just by taking advantage of little things right, like DocuSign, instead of wet signatures or hiring someone to do the work. That it's just not the best use of your time and you need that, and I know for sure, peter, and I feel that way.
Speaker 1:When you hire the right people and you have the right people in the right seats doing what they're really good at, that's going to make the business grow a lot faster and ultimately, it's just going to be a lot more rewarding for your personal life as well, because you're spending your time doing what you want to do and what you're good at. So what does the process of engagement look like when people come to you? These are the softwares that we're going to do. What's the initial questions usually look like?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and great question. I'm a question asker. I think the best way to find information out is just ask a ton of questions and then listen, and I think the best advisors do that with their clients, and I take a lot of how I operate in my business from the great advisors I've worked with in the past and understanding how they got to the root of their client challenges. So that's generally the same approach I take. We'll have an initial conversation and we're just talking. We're just figuring out. What challenges do you have in your business? What does an ideal practice look like to you? What are some areas that you are spending your time doing?
Speaker 3:One thing that I always emphasize, and one of the first challenges I give to advisors when we're having a conversation, before we even engage in an agreement, is calculate the value of your time. Be as simple as take your revenue, divide it by the hours you work. If you have a $500,000 revenue practice and you're working 50 hours a week, 52 weeks a year which we know is oftentimes not the case with advisors just there, at the bare minimum, your time is worth $250 an hour at the most basic level of calculation, and that's working 50 hours a week, every single week of the year calculation. And that's working 50 hours a week every single week of the year. Um, so what? What are those? And then you know, once you have that calculated, then to really take a look at what you're doing on a daily basis and you're even if it's grabbing a task sheet and every single thing you do, write it down. How long it took. You do that for two weeks and then go back and look at it and say, wow, I actually do spend 20 hours a week doing ops things, fixing NIGOs, tracking down paperwork that needs to be signed, scheduling meetings. Wow, that's 20 hours a week. All of a sudden, right there at $250 an hour, you're losing a lot of revenue that you could be meeting with clients.
Speaker 3:The most valuable thing advisors do, and what they're the best at, is sitting with clients and and gathering assets or putting putting plans in in place. So every time that they're doing a, a task or spending an hour, that could be a 30 or 40 an hour admin rate, but they're250 an hour time. Look at what you're losing. So those are some of the challenges that I always give advisors on the front end. And then to figure out how much of that do you want back in your day? How much do you do want to spend time outside of work? I'm a huge work-life balance advocate. I think it's really easy to get burned out of this industry, especially when you're starting out and you're meeting clients later. You're doing everything you can to gather assets or to land clients. It's easy to get burned out. So how can we improve your quality of life while also improving your bottom line?
Speaker 2:I love that. Yeah, because I think when people think about operations and things, especially today, it's like oh, let's just sign up for new software, let's automate something. But I love how you say let's just start at the very beginning. You know, I couldn't help but think of Jarvis's book. Like Delivering Massive Value.
Speaker 2:Like are you working or are you playing office? Right, a lot of advisors like what's your skill set? You're good with meeting the clients. Well, that's what you should be spending your time doing. Brock says it all the time. Right, like outsource what you're not good at or what you don't like doing. So I think that that's a great point. I mean, what are some main like concepts around outsourcing work? Right, because in the beginning advisors are just trying to survive. Right, we've all seen, like the XYPN benchmarking study, where the first year you know the average revenue, gross revenues in the teens. Right, like 15, 17,000,. Right, like at what point does an advisor really start reaching out to you and where can you really start helping? Because they got to have some clients on the books and they got to have some clients to put into a CRM.
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah. And you know I I wouldn't say there's a specific number or a specific range where I would say it's more of a realization that I spend more time doing X than I am doing Y, or I had a new client, or I had a potential new opportunity that I wasn't necessarily comfortable taking on or pursuing because I'm not sure I have the capacity for that. It really starts to become once they realize that I'm losing valuable. I say selling, but I use that term very loosely. I don't believe that we're salesmen or advisors or salesmen, but that role of sitting with a client and having those conversations, you know, once they start to realize that they're losing that time to do other stuff, is where my value can come in.
Speaker 3:You know, a lot of times the first reaction is I need to hire somebody, I need to hire an admin. Well, that's probably true, that's oftentimes true. I'm a huge advocate for building a great admin team. But what does that look like? How many hours do you need an admin? Do you need a full-time admin? Do you need a part-time admin?
Speaker 3:So it really starts to once they realize that I'm being held back, I'm holding myself back or my team is not able to grow. We have bottlenecks in our organization and we're not able to grow. That's really where I think I come into play. There are advisors that will take that leap and outsource or bring on people before maybe the revenue says that they should. But then down the road they realized that was the best move I could make because it did allow me to really explode my growth, which only increases the bottom line seriously. So they're not necessarily a number or maybe a timeframe, but it's more the mindset, more the mentality, it's more once I realize that I'm getting stressed about the other stuff that somebody else can do for me, that's really where I can start to add the most value.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's a mindset of are you working on the business or are you working in the business? Right, a hundred percent, yeah, yeah, and I don't. I don't see any problem. If you're doing the things in the business that you like to do and that's fulfilling to you, I think that you could still be working on the business. But if you're constantly doing tasks that drag you down and take a lot of mental capacity and energy that you're just either not the best at, or even if you're okay with them, you just like, after you're done, you just feel completely depleted. That's what you're trying to stay away from, right.
Speaker 3:Correct. Find what gives you the energy and find what drains your energy. It's like the John Gordon, the energy vampire type thing. You know what are those things that you don't, you know that you walk away from and I have to do this, not I get to do it, it's I have to. I mean, you guys know this as, as business owners, you know, even starting a very small single man operation here, you know, I've realized that I spend a lot of time just doing mundane business tasks that I have to do, you know, and I've started to evaluate myself what can I outsource? You know what are those things that, even as a small you know, just doing this by myself, really, you know what are those things that I can start to outsource because I don't like doing them and they're taking a lot of my time away from having conversations with advisors, for sure, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like, what are your general thoughts? I mean, what other positions need to be outsourced, right? I mean, we talked about general admin, but we see there's fractional CFPs, if you will. There's video editing, fiverr Upwork, people have TAMPs and things like that for portfolios. What are you seeing as some of the most common solutions?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I, it comes down, I think, a lot to what the advisor themselves to your point, like what do they enjoy, to what gives them energy? You know, if marketing is something that they like and they're a creative mind and they love the concept of let's put some marketing things in place, you know, have an outsourced marketing person but you can run the team, you know you can be involved in a couple of those meetings but you're not doing the work yourself. You know you can provide the strategy but you're not doing the work yourself. You know you can provide the strategy but you're not doing the work yourself. You know technology is another big one with a lot of the outsourced kind of CTO roles there. Technology is a huge benefit, obviously, and makes life more efficient, but there's always things that are going to go wrong and integration breaks. Or Google pushes a new update and all of a sudden your emails aren't getting sent to gmail accounts. You know that's something we experienced.
Speaker 3:Like yeah, we know that, we know that one that was q1 this year yeah, it's something that happens, and all of a sudden you're like well, what do we do?
Speaker 3:you know, how do we fix this? Who do we call? You don't have the, you don't have the wire house. You know teams where you just say what do we do? Um, that's a big one of compliance, obviously a big one, um, you know, having an outsourced compliance partner to do everything and to keep your business protected is a big one. Um, and you know I, with advisor, ops, university and kind of the training and development piece of it, that's a huge one. I think a huge opportunity is for the career development, training of your staff. You know that's a people spend hours and hours a week having conversations with their team.
Speaker 3:And you know I am a huge advocate for the back office and very passionate about, you know, putting a great team in place and a team that aren't just they're not robots. It's well, we did this before, or the paperwork that you gave me says this, so I'm automatically just going to do that. I want to create a back office. I want to create admins that are thinkers and can look and say this doesn't necessarily make sense. The statement I have says X. What you gave me says Y. Why don't they match up? You know, and, and and to proactively solve problems instead of have to be reactive, so that that piece of it and helping your team to become more industry knowledgeable, to become more advanced and then to to eventually, as you grow, be able to step into new stages of your business and to take next steps.
Speaker 3:Maybe they're going from a CSA or a paperwork office manager person to a paraplanner now because they have an understanding of the role and they already have those relationships with your clients, so it's easy to step into. Maybe it's an associate advisor, maybe eventually they become an advisor on your staff. But it's because they were invested into and developed along the way and you know a lot of advisors don't have the capacity or the knowledge. Maybe they're not great people, leaders, they're great advisors, they're great planners, they're great technical thinkers. So that's another big piece of it where you know, I think it's always important to have an advisor operations relationship. That's extremely valuable.
Speaker 3:But maybe some of the development and the career development and the career path planning that they don't necessarily have the experience for. So the HR side, hiring, performance reviews, you know, really anything that's not sitting with the client, I think can be outsourced and I think it can be done if it can be done 80% or better than you would do it, it's something that should be outsourced. I've heard that metric thrown around. If you think somebody can do it 80% of what you can do it then allow them to do it, because in general that's going to be an expense that's less than than 80 of what your expense would be if you would do it well and realistically, it's going to be more than enough.
Speaker 1:I mean, you, that's what you find right? It doesn't mean they do it exactly the way that you do, but they and a lot of times they'll do it better than you would like. You don't realize that, like when we hired our most recent hire, carmen. She's amazing and you know she's in charge of all these things and sometimes she does stuff and I'm like, literally I own part of this business along with Peter, and I've never even thought about that. So it's really cool, even if they can only do it. You're like, even if they're just 80% as good. Sometimes they're bringing things to the table that you're not even thinking about and they're helping you get out of your own way, which I think is really cool as well.
Speaker 1:I want to get down to brass tacks a little bit, because I'm big on qualifying and I want the people that reach out to you from this podcast because I'm sure there's going to be some to know what they're getting into and to make sure that they're the right fit for you. So it's a good use of your time as well. What are the brass tacks around? Like pricing, does it depend? Is it negotiable? How are you approaching that? Does it depend on the size of the team? Let's get into that a little bit, andrew. Conversation is cost.
Speaker 3:You know and and and money. You know I I love doing this role. I love doing it for myself and having the flexibility to do it on my own. So it's never it's X, it's always X, no matter what. You know, in those conversations that we have, in that initial conversation, and I'm having you to, or I'm challenging you, you know, to calculate the value of your time, or I'm helping you do that along the way, and we're starting to look at what are some of those things that I can help you with.
Speaker 3:You know, how often do you want to meet? How often do you want me to meet with your team? How often do you want me to come on site and evaluate in person these things that are happening? And you know, from there we kind of get an idea of here's how many hours a month. From there we get an idea of here's how many hours a month we can estimate that it's going to take. It's never oh, we hit this many hours. I'm done, not going to take any more phone calls from you. It's an estimation.
Speaker 3:This is generally what we think it's going to be an investment from my side, for time we work backwards into understanding. Okay, here's what the cost is going to be to that I. I want to work with people that want to listen, you know. You know that that want to take my advice or my recommendations and implement them, same way as you, as an advisor, want to work with clients that are going to take your recommendations and and and and do them. You know, the worst clients we have are ones that are constantly asking questions and taking a lot of your time but never do anything that you say or recommend, no matter what.
Speaker 1:Why are you?
Speaker 3:paying me Correct. I want to be in that same boat where I want to work with advisors that want to work with me and I want to be flexible and figure out what works for your budget along the way. So, uh, you know I have, I can. You can buy blocks of hours that are on a tiered, tiered rate, and then we, once we use those hours, we can decide what what we do. Moving forward, I operate on a retainer basis as well as just a flat fee per month and then, however many hours we use, that's what we use, Um, and then I do project based pricing as well.
Speaker 3:That's what we use. And then I do project-based pricing as well, Like, hey, right now I am a hybrid firm but I want to go RA. Only, how do I do that? So that's more of a project. We have a start and we have an end date, and here's what it costs to do this from a project level basis. So I would say it comes down to what value that I can add, what's the return on investment for you when you can look at, okay, this is how much I was opportunity cost spending doing these tasks and here's what I'm paying you. And you know we want to make sure that those numbers you know make sense for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I like that because what I'm hearing you say is there's not a huge barrier to entry, right? Someone could start kind of buying that block of hours to do a project based, and as that starts to work, as they start to become more efficient in their processes, they could continue on a retainer model or something on a more ongoing basis, right?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I love having conversations and you have a question that I can give you an answer to in an initial conversation. I'm happy to do that without being compensated for it. It's about having the conversation, it's about providing value and if I'm doing the right thing by the advisors I'm working with, I'm going to work with more advisors, and that's really. If we can consistently prove value and prove a return on investment, then my business is going to grow as well. So I would say the barrier to entry is limited. You know, we'll figure out what works for you when we get to that point.
Speaker 2:Love the flexibility. Any last golden nuggets, andrew, anything you wanted to mention on here before we part ways?
Speaker 3:No, just, I really appreciate it. Again, I've been watching and listening from afar for a long time. Uh, you know Twitter, linkedin, um, and uh, love what you guys are doing, you know, to support the RA space, the fee only space. Um, I'm a huge sports fan, so I I I use a lot of sports analogies, but you know, I want to be your defensive coordinator. Let me come in, let me run the defense, let me make sure that your business stays, your business stays protected and gives you more times to score, gives you more opportunities to score the ball on your end. So I look forward to you know, connecting with, with only feel, only listeners, and having those conversations. I would love to, and you know we'll see where it goes.
Speaker 1:Awesome man. Well, hey, before we let you go, how can people get ahold of you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, my website advisorops360.com. All one word, andrew. At advisorops360.com is the email address. There's kindly links and ways to schedule, to hop on my calendar there. Linkedin is another great way to connect. Andrew Burgess, yeah, I'm pretty reachable. I'll give you guys my information as well. So if anybody reaches out to you directly, you can shoot them my way and you can find me. You can definitely find me.
Speaker 1:Awesome, man. Well, we'll put that in the show notes Again. Andrew Burgess. Thanks so much. Great talking to you, man. Well, we'll put that in the show notes Again, andrew.
Speaker 3:Burgess, thanks so much. Great talking to you, man. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, awesome, I appreciate it, thank you.