The possibility for improvement doesn’t stop when you’re successful.

In early 2021, Top of the Table and Court of the Table members completed the MDRT Financial Benchmarking Survey to compare their business’ performance to their peers, revealing areas of strength and opportunities for change. For the 359 participants, information included revenue by type, the effect of COVID-19 on business and the portion of total revenue that is recurring.

Participants received a downloadable performance report for their business, including a report card evaluation and their business’ ratios compared to the industry norms. The 2022 survey is scheduled to launch in April. More information is available at mdrtbenchmarking.com.

For Simon D. Lister, Dip PFS, one particularly useful finding in the survey identified revenue per team member (an average of $208,000 per full-time employee). Though the 14-year MDRT member and 11-time Top of the Table qualifier from Wymondham, England, U.K., ranks in the top 25% in terms of revenue per equity partner, he is in the bottom 25% when it comes to revenue per full-time employee.

So Lister, whose practice has 18 full-time employees (three advisors and 15 support staff), looked for the inefficiencies causing this divide. It wasn’t that the business, which creates holistic financial plans for 800 pre- and post-retirement clients, was overstaffed; it was that certain processes needed to be streamlined. Lister met with the entire team to consider places where the process could be clunky and in need of refining, which led him to invest in new financial planning software.

The reason is that the previous software the practice used required team members to start over for each part of a financial plan covering multiple areas (including pensions, investments and more). The new technology works two to three times faster, allowing staff to see more clients in less time.

Though this adjustment is only a few months old, Lister is already seeing results from applying the survey findings.

“As a business owner, things can be very personal to you, and you might not go into granular detail that survey results show, highlighting areas we need to work on,” Lister said. “And when talking with team members, the observations are coming from an internal source, so no one takes it personally. We just picked up the information and started to work on doing something about it.”

The results have also been helpful externally, Lister said. By having statistics define where the practice stands in relation to others, the practice’s tagline (“Large enough to matter, small enough to care”) can be proven and explained in more detail to clients — not to mention the satisfaction provided to compliance with this numerical evidence. 

Contact: Simon Lister simon.lister.mdrt@mlfa.co.uk