Outsourcing gives teams time back, but what you do with that time determines whether your practice actually grows. Too many advisors outsource investment management or operations, then fill the newly freed hours with more of the same individualized tasks. The missing ingredient isn’t more capacity—it’s management skills, and developing these skills is crucial for future success.

According to a 2026 Gallup survey, managers account for 70% of the variance in team-level employee engagement.¹ As advisors often point to the Brinson, Beebower, and Hood study to explain why policy decisions matter more than day-to-day tactics, the research on team performance points to a similar conclusion: the skill of a manager plays a critical role in employee engagement.

Yet despite this, a Gartner study found that approximately 60% of new managers fail within their first two years.² This failure doesn’t stem from a lack of effort—it stems from a lack of training. Research highlighted by Harvard Business Review points to four recurring root causes:³ ineffective communication, poor relationship building, an inability to adapt, and inadequate development.

For financial advisors specifically, that last cause hits especially hard. Most advisors were trained to manage portfolios and plans, not people. The skills that make you a great financial advisor don’t necessarily make you a great manager. To take your practice to the next level, it’s essential to build and integrate managerial capabilities.

One of the challenges many advisors face is a reluctance to give up the activities they’ve always performed themselves. This reluctance often stems from a sense of identity. Many advisors built their careers and self-worth around personal production; letting go of that can feel like losing what made you successful in the first place. Yet as firms grow, advisors often find that success depends not only on technical expertise, but also on their ability to lead, develop, and empower others.

Outsourcing tasks provides a remedy to this challenge, but where does one start when it comes to becoming a better manager? The financial services industry isn’t the only one where high-performing individual contributors struggle to transition into leadership; the technology sector has grappled with this exact challenge for decades—and has produced some of the best thinking on the subject.

In her book The Making of a Manager, Julie Zhuo, former VP of Product Design at Facebook, shares lessons from her own journey from individual contributor to leader. One of her key arguments is that “great managers are made, not born.” With that in mind, what steps can financial advisors take to become better managers equipped for unlocking growth? Here are three next steps for consideration.

1. Build, Subtract, Grow

Many advisors outsource to free up time and capacity but continue acting as the sole decisionmaker on everything else. Research shows team-based advisory practices significantly outperform solo practices in both assets and organic growth. Cerulli found that team-based firms have more than double the annual organic growth of solo firms and are more likely to employ specialized support staff.⁴

This makes intuitive sense: teams create capacity for specialization, and specialization can create better client experiences, more referrals, and ultimately contribute to faster growth.

One way to start building a team is to answer a simple question: “What should I stop doing so someone else can grow?”

To answer this, create a “stop doing” list. For two weeks, track and evaluate all of your activities categorized into three buckets:

• Tasks only you can perform
• Tasks you can do, but someone else could also do
• Tasks someone else should be doing

 

Tasks in the latter two categories are prime candidates for outsourcing or delegation.

Question to consider: Have you ever delegated a task, watched someone do it differently than you would have, and taken it back—even though the outcome was still good?

2. Assign, Don’t Assume

Your “stop doing” list has now given you a set of tasks to outsource or delegate—but it can also help you identify what team role makes the most sense to build next.

Are the identified tasks best suited for:

1. A Client Service Associate: Scheduling, paperwork, client communication?
2. An Associate Advisor: Plan preparation and client meetings under your supervision?
3. A Financial Planner: Deeper planning work for complex clients?
4. An Operations Manager: Workflows, compliance, and technology?

 

If one of these roles seems obvious, you now know the next hire to make. If not, identify which tasks would free up the most of your time or which tasks you find most unpleasant to do yourself—that’s often a good tiebreaker.

When hiring new staff, it’s important to avoid confusion about who owns which parts of the client experience. Create an ownership structure that clearly defines responsibility for core client experience functions.

Questions to consider: Who owns the client onboarding experience—you or your associate? Who’s responsible for scheduling annual reviews? Who handles urgent client requests when you’re unavailable? Without clear answers to these questions, tasks either fall through the cracks or get duplicated—both of which erode the client experience you’re trying to build.

3. Measure, Then Manage

These first two steps will help you start making a mental shift. Many advisors are “accidental business owners.” As firms grow, success increasingly depends on communicating vision, developing employees, establishing accountability, and managing processes—rather than personally doing all the work. Michael Kitces notes that growing RIAs often discover they must evolve from advisor to manager once the firm reaches several employees.⁵

One of Zhuo’s most powerful ideas is that many new managers continue to think like individual contributors long after they’ve taken on management responsibilities. She argues that managers create the greatest value not through their own output, but through their team’s output.

The measure of success is no longer how many plans you built, reviews you prepared, or portfolios you managed; the measure becomes how effectively your team serves clients, develops relationships, and delivers a consistent client experience. As the old management adage goes, “what gets measured gets managed.” If your dashboard still only reflects your personal production, that’s exactly what you’ll keep optimizing for—whether you mean to or not.

Put this into practice by updating your dashboard: alongside personal AUM or revenue, start tracking team-level metrics like client satisfaction scores, new clients acquired through team generated referrals, and the number of client issues resolved without your direct involvement. It’s also worth participating in industry benchmarking surveys, which can highlight where your business is already strong and where it still needs work.

Questions to consider: If a client asked what you do all day, would your honest answer still be, “I manage portfolios and meet with clients”—or has it become something closer to, “I run a business”? And when you introduce yourself at a conference, do you describe yourself as an advisor who has a few employees, or as the CEO of an advisory business? Which one is actually true today, and which one do you want to be?

The Bottom Line

Great managers aren’t born—they’re made. Adjusting your day-to-day activities and learning managerial best practices, both from within wealth management and from other industries, is a powerful way to build these skills.

The three steps outlined here—building a team, clarifying roles, and redefining how you measure success—are a strong place to start. The transition won’t happen overnight, but it represents the real difference between advisors who outsource tasks and stay stuck, and those who outsource tasks and use the newfound capacity to build something greater than themselves.

Sources:

¹ Gallup, 2026
² Gartner (formerly CEB Global), 2023
³ Harvard Business Review
⁴ Cerulli Associates, U.S. Advisor Metrics 2025
⁵ Michael Kitces, “Using EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) To Manage An RIA,” Kitces.com

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For educational purposes only. This reflects the opinions of Focus or its representatives, may contain forward-looking statements, and presents information that may change. Nothing contained herein may be relied upon as a guarantee. The appropriateness of a particular strategy will depend on an adviser’s individual circumstances. This is prepared using third party sources considered to be reliable; however, accuracy or completeness cannot be guaranteed.

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