Although his paraplanner is based in India, Chris George, CFP, TEP, has more control over that virtual staff member than he would if that person were a direct employee working at his office in Canada. Aaron Kane, B Bus, employs the services of five admins in the Philippines, and their work, rather than replacing the duties of his onshore team in Australia, has empowered them to build better relationships with clients.

Both advisors have their unique reasons for not hiring more full-time staff in-house that go beyond the presumed motive of hiring cheaper help overseas.

Getting control by being a customer

The last in-house assistant who George, a 12-year MDRT member, hired started off phenomenally well. But eventually, she stopped showing up or would leave early, and George and his partner found themselves doing the work they had hired her to do. They tried to coach her and get her back on track, but she just was not working out. It was time to fire her for cause. But not so fast.

Labor rules in the province heavily favor employees, and George’s lawyer advised them to move slowly, even pay a couple of months of severance, or else a human rights complaint alleging improper dismissal and a ruling from the sympathetic employment standard division could cost the practice a year or more of severance pay along with covering attorney expenses. That experience, along with another hire who turned out poorly, prompted George in 2020 to consider another way to “find that diamond in the rough.”

He found a Canada-based agency that connects financial advisors with offshore paraplanners. The agency complies with the country’s regulations for data security and confidentiality; its assistants are pre-vetted, familiar with some of the profession’s software and processes; and if a specific virtual employee is not the right fit, George can ask for someone else without having to deal with the drama of dismissing an employee.

“When you’re an employer and you have a direct employee in the office, you actually give up a lot of control, but when you’re with this company, we’re their customer,” George said, likening the agency to being a sort of headhunter for finding competent staff, except you’re selecting an employee from their organization to work for you. “If we have a complaint, we can bring it to the company to deal with because we’re a paying client. You actually have a lot more control as a client than you do as an employer.”

George has an in-house assistant who manages about 500 disability insurance policies and handles time-sensitive tasks like following up to verify that documents are completed and signed and payments are current. He also reviews summaries of client meetings, created by Zocks, an AI notetaker, with highlights and action items and sends those to clients on the same day. The paraplanner in India receives a link with read-only access to a video recording of the meeting, which is used to create a lengthier summary with updates to the planning notes that includes goals and next steps. The report usually is ready within one to three days, and the 13-hour time difference helps the workflow.

“While we’re sleeping, the reviews, updates and the planning notes are sent to us. We review those notes for accuracy and make sure that everything is what we talked about and send it to the client from there,” George said.

Previously, an in-house staffer would watch a video of a meeting in its entirety and pick out notes to highlight, which took much longer.

“Our clients absolutely love having a summary of everything we talked about right away and then a copy of our planning notes shortly thereafter. We found client satisfaction went through the roof for that,” George said.

For upcoming client meetings, the offshore paraplanner prepares the meeting plan and agenda and includes issues brought up during previous sessions, so the advisor will know what to talk about.

Bringing in the team

Kane, an 11-year MDRT member, offshored administrative tasks five years ago to assistants in the Philippines. He started with two assistants hired through an agency, and then a couple hours a day of videoconference training taught them the processes they needed to master. Tango was used to record screenshots and web actions during those training sessions, and a step-by-step instruction manual was created, which the two assistants then used to train a third admin who was hired later.

“I’ve heard of businesses where they treat them as a commodity and just throw work at them, don’t include them in team discussions and team activities,” Kane said. “We do include them even though they are not here. Every time we have a team meeting, they jump on screen. You’ve got to treat them right. They’re team members.”

As the Philippine team became more process-driven and adept with handling additional back-office administrative duties, the staff in Australia started acting more like team leaders.

“They’re no longer pumping out application after application, and that allowed them to build better value relationships with clients and get to know them a bit better,” Kane said. “They’re not just stuck in the weeds doing administration all the time. My onshore team has more motivation. They have more job satisfaction, and they grew in their roles. They’re actually doing bigger activities now and more value-added stuff for our clients.”

Thwarting turnover

So, Kane now had an offshore team assembled and working efficiently. But what if one or more of the virtual assistants leave for better-paying jobs? Their knowledge walks out the door, new assistants would need to be trained and the learning curve starts all over again. Kane had a team he wanted to keep, so he approached the agency, bought out their contracts and hired the assistants directly. Then he doubled their salaries — still cheaper than hiring staff in Australia — flew to the Philippines with new laptops and took them to a resort for a weekend of onboarding and socializing.

“They appreciated that, and they’re very loyal as long as you treat them right,” Kane said.

The team has since grown to five assistants with one designated as the team leader. She arranges events, takes co-workers out to lunches, and acts as a liaison for presenting and discussing their issues with the Australian office.

George has worked with two paraplanners in India since offshoring. His first assistant was with him for three years before leaving to start his own business. Before departing, he trained George’s current paraplanner, who has been working with the practice for almost two years. Keeping a lid on turnover calls for decent pay, and George has even sent bonuses directly to him.

“We are very much in favor of well-compensating people who work for us. For what we send the company, we wanted to know how much was actually going to the paraplanner,” George said. “If it was $2,000 a month and the paraplanner was getting only $200, we probably would have gone elsewhere because we want the paraplanner to be well-compensated. We’re not there to enrich a company for hiring cheap labor.”

Offshoring caveats

George and Kane offer these due diligence recommendations for advisors considering outsourcing work offshore:

• Compliance — “Before we did anything, we made sure everything we did was compliant with Canadian, provincial and insurance regulatory law,” George said. “You can’t just go to someone you met on Craigslist. We went through a Canadian company that is subject to Canadian law. That was key for us.”
• Data security — The laptops for Kane’s offshore team work off of his practice’s servers in Australia through SharePoint. Anything stored locally on the assistant’s desktop is deleted each day. A third-party IT team based in Australia monitors activity, so if someone attempts to download or move a file, an alert is activated and the computer can be shut down remotely. “We’ll get a phone call in two seconds,” Kane said. The IT vendor also fixes any software glitches with the offshore team’s computers.
• Turnover — Once you find a good assistant, you want to keep them for as long as possible. Find out if the agency will let you. When Kane was searching, he learned from other advisors that when one particular company sees your virtual assistant performing well, they’ll promote them internally and take that person away from you. He went with the agency that assured him his assistants would be his to keep.