What Is the Average Number of Clients Per Financial Advisor?

Douglas Greenberg
4 min readAug 8, 2022

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If you are a sole financial counselor, you are undoubtedly curious about the number of customers you can take care of at any given moment. The response is going to be determined by several different things. Your first order of business is to calculate how much time it will take you to complete the five hundred and twenty-one households. This indicates that you need to organize two meetings with different clients every single day. That is a very full schedule of events! When you have 521 clients to take care of, there is no time left over for financial planning and portfolio management.

The typical financial adviser spends just approximately half of his time on client-related activities, even though he is compensated for providing advice. This involves doing planning analyses, preparing for meetings, and providing customer service. On the other hand, more experienced financial advisers spend just around 12 percent of their time prospecting for new clients and roughly 17 percent of their time interacting with existing clients. However, the time invested in acquiring new customers is not a trivial matter. Therefore, if you are thinking about a profession in providing financial advice, you may wish to give great consideration to the aforementioned question.

The time commitment required of a financial adviser changes according to the kind of company they are working with. Meetings with clients can often take anywhere from four to nine hours of an advisor’s time. In addition, the typical time spent each week on marketing and business development by an adviser is five hours. Investment-related chores, such as investment research and trading with customers, take up 5.5 hours of a financial advisor’s time per week, in addition to the time spent meeting with clients. In addition, each week, advisors put in 3.2 hours toward their further education and training.

You may be wondering how to advertise yourself at the lowest possible cost if you are working toward a career as a financial adviser. You may choose from a wide variety of different marketing approaches. Some are expensive, while others are rather pricey. You might benefit from client referrals, certificates of participation (COIs), sponsored advertising, solicitors, online listings, or seminars. Paid advertising on social media platforms and general networking are two more successful marketing tactics. The following is an examination of the techniques that are the most effective in terms of minimizing the amount of money spent to promote oneself.

Single-paying consumers pay just $300 per month, whereas double-paying clients spend an average of $3,600 per year. Single-paying clients pay less. To maintain the same level of revenue, a financial adviser who works with customers who are considered to be mass affluent often has to maintain a minimum of 36 clients. Although this is quite a huge number of customers, the income per customer might not appear to be extremely significant at first glance. Despite this, having more customers might result in a higher income for a financial adviser.

When determining the worth of a financial adviser, it is important to remember that the quality of their services is directly proportional to the number of clients they serve. That implies a financial adviser shouldn’t have more than 100 customers at most, and five is the absolute most they should have. If we take it for granted that a customer has a net worth of $2 million, we can say that the value of their connection with their adviser is greater than the client’s wealth. Consider some of the following benefits of working with a financial adviser if you’re still unsure about the usefulness of getting one:

When it comes time to negotiate compensation, the worth of a client is a crucial statistic for a financial adviser to take into consideration. An adviser should aim to earn around $26,000 in fees from each customer on average, which is the typical charge for an adviser. This figure accounts for both the annual average pricing as well as the total number of transactions carried out by financial advisors. It is also vital to take into consideration the length of service that each client requires. Even if broker-dealer commissions have the potential to change the cost of working with an adviser, they should nonetheless strive to reach this figure.

Instead of basing the fee structure on the size of the business, the number of customers that each financial adviser is responsible for should be determined by the services that they offer. The number of hours needed by a customer will determine the fee structure. Customers that fall into the same pricing category will be eligible for a variety of different advantages. Figuring out which of your services are most beneficial to your customers requires defining a niche for your business. After that, you’ll be able to devise an optimal charge structure depending on the specifics of this specialization.

There are a few different approaches to taking money from a customer. The hourly rate is the least frequent form of compensation for financial advisors and is determined by the total number of hours spent working with a client. It is anticipated that the proportion of a financial advisor’s total pay that comes from hourly fees would increase to 0.7 percent by the year 2022 from its current level of 0.5 percent. Commission-based fees are another kind of fee that is charged, and they compensate the adviser whenever a product is sold. On the other hand, AUM is only paid out once per quarter or after a customer has been engaged with the adviser for a few months after they first begin working together.

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Douglas Greenberg
Douglas Greenberg

Written by Douglas Greenberg

Douglas Greenberg has a history of taking initiative. At the age of 19, he launched his own company, and he hasn't looked back since.

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