Financial advisor jobs
are amongst the careers where the pay is high, there are not too many barriers to entry, and employment opportunities keep growing fast.
After working so many years helping out others looking to join the financial jobs industry, we will explain in this FAQs page briefly and clearly the main duties of what does a financial advisor do in some of the most typical work days.
Financial planners earn a living by helping people sort through and choose investments, insurance and other financial products. They do retirement planning, college funding, estate planning and general investment analysis.
Many job titles names, like the financial planner, financial advisor, personal financial consultant mainly focus on the financial sales jobs.
One of the most important tasks of what does a financial advisor do to be focusing on is obtaining new business.
Finding clients who need those services and building a customer base is crucial to experiencing success as a financial planner; furthermore, referrals from satisfied clients are an important source of new business. You’ll need to find new clients, whether by giving seminars or lectures, through social or business contacts or simply by cold calling.
During your first five years in the business, it’s all about the numbers. Decades of studies within the industry show that for every 10 people you contact, you can get 3 of them in front of you for an initial meeting, and 1 of them will become a client at some point in the next three years. So if you’re following those numbers, there’s going to be making many phone calls to get many leads. You’ll have to be resilient and keep your confidence up even when you’ll be getting your unavoidable noes. Be ready to meet with people when they can, so if someone wants to do a phone appointment at 6:00 a.m. or doesn’t get off work until 9:00 p.m., their schedule needs to become your schedule, too.
In the end, your financial knowledge won’t be useful if you cannot convince a potential client to invest with you and your firm.
It’s going to be important to make sure you have a good support system. Find a mentor and have your mentor’s wife be your wife’s mentor because she’ll need it, too! Leverage your optimism and keep a large reserve of it even when instead of great days and paychecks, you could end up with thin ones, if you will only get paid in commissions.
The early stages of being a financial adviser are difficult, but once you build a book of business large enough to support yourself and ensure your job security, you can finally put on your advisor hat and align your own interests with that of your clients. Moreover, you’ll run your own desk and have the opportunity to almost guarantee a comfortable level of income each year. And you’ll be in high demand. As you can imagine, banks kill for proven advisers with healthy books of business. Six and even seven-figure signing bonuses are available for those willing to move from one brokerage house to another.
In some cases, you can choose to try and join a team where you can learn under a veteran while picking up some of his customers who don’t generate a ton of revenue but who need attention.
Furthermore, luckily, the opportunities for non-business-development employee advisors are getting better and better, with even more opportunities, thanks to the ongoing separation of being the person who gets the clients, versus the one who services them with great financial planning. Just as sales and service are separated in most other industries as well.
Of course, since it’s harder to get a new client than to serve and retain an existing one, those who can do business development and get new clients are way more likely to earn better compensation and have more opportunities to become a partner with their advisory firm. This is still a good incentive opportunity to learn to do sales and prospecting, but at worst, it’s not a skill that needs to be developed later in the financial advisor career track, and shouldn’t prevent you from earning a reasonable living in the meantime!