One of the largest wealth managers’ desire to grow financial advisors’ practices has led to its hiring of a new head of business consulting.
Michele Dillon started at Cetera Financial Group in April and has over 30 years of experience in the industry. She was most recently employed at St. Petersburg, Florida-based financial services firm Raymond James, where she served as vice president of private client group education and practice management.
Dillon will report to Andy Gill, Cetera’s head of strategy and solutions. Her hiring came through networking after connecting with Lori Hardwick, who serves on Cetera’s board of directors.
In her new position, Dillon plans to focus on scaling the firm’s initiatives beyond one-on-one coaching, episodic training and education of advisors at scheduled conferences.
“If you look at the industry right now, most of the broker-dealer firms have spent a lot of money on resources, strategies, tools and especially technology to help advisors transition from commission-based broker-dealers to life advisors,” she says.
In other words, advisors and brokers have gone from simply managing a client’s investment portfolio to managing their life portfolio — a visual representation of someone’s current activities and priorities that helps them understand where they spend their time and how that aligns to their desires — from a financial perspective.
Other firms have created similar resources and technologies, but Dillon says the problem is that advisors aren’t engaging with them.
Dillion plans to expand the resources within Cetera to close that gap by building a more continuous path through learning-enabled platforms and techniques. This will allow her wealth managers to become the “central advisors” in a client's life, she says.
She will also work to create a consistent structure and process that will enable the firm to deliver resources and engage advisors to have a direct impact on the profitability and efficiency of their businesses, she says.
“We want to meet advisors where they are. We're creating an organization that will allow them to affiliate with us in every way possible, whatever makes sense for their business,” she says. “And then we want to be an incredibly supportive resource for the success of their business — that success being the ability to run an efficient, profitable business that meets the needs of their clients and puts them in a position to help their clients with their entire life portfolio.”
Dillon’s hiring is emblematic of a larger trend within the industry, says Dennis Gallant, senior analyst for Aite Group.
“We're seeing this real focus on the question of ‘how do we get firms to restart focusing on growth?’” he says.
Coming out of the pandemic, there’s greater competition and more digital choices in the marketplace, prompting traditional independent advisors to ensure their preparedness in all areas as they grapple with similar questions: Are they making the right decisions? How do they manage your portfolios? Should they be doing some of it themselves or outsourcing? How are they expanding services? Where are they leveraging them?
Firms want advisors to be more engaged with their clients, more digitally-oriented and more capable in managing assets. Therefore, Gallant says, across the board, leadership is adding more support and capabilities.
“At the end of the day, if you want to raise the quality of advice, production, improve and broaden our services, you have to provide the support for those advisors to access,” he says.
