Across the South African financial services industry, most FSPs grow the same way, whether they have three advisors or thirty. New business arrives through referrals, individual advisors prospect however they see fit, and the business itself has no structured, repeatable way of opening a market or generating a lead. It is an approach with a long track record of working well enough, right up until it does not. An advisor has a slow quarter and the business feels it directly, because there is nothing underneath the numbers except that person’s own activity. An advisor leaves and takes the pipeline with them, or the pipeline simply stops, because it was never anything the business itself had built or owned.
That gap rarely gets named for what it is, and even fewer businesses have built anything to change it.
That’s the pattern we see in FSP business after FSP business. Growth happens, but it’s never something the business can point to as its own. It’s borrowed from whoever happens to be doing well this quarter, and the moment that person eases off or leaves, the business finds out how little of its own it was ever standing on.
FI Consult is a South African company that helps FSP businesses grow and scale, working across strategy, operations, human capital and M&A. Our six-step business development consulting model is one of the services that we offer, built to close the gap so that opening a market or generating a lead becomes something the business owns and repeats, rather than a set of habits carried by whichever advisors happen to be good at it in any given season.
The thinking behind the model did not arrive from a single insight. It was built over more than a decade spanning two very different vantage points inside the industry: a business that had – unusually – built a new business development function of its own, one that generated leads and opened markets independent of any individual advisor, and years spent since then building and delivering large-scale prospecting programmes for advisors themselves, at industry scale, across hundreds of practices. Between those two experiences sat a problem that needed to be solved.
Training an advisor to prospect better changes what one person does. However, it doesn’t change what the business owns. The moment that advisor slows down, moves on, or simply stops, the business is back where it started. It isn’t a skills gap so much as a structural one, sitting at the level of the business rather than the individual. That distinction – between what an advisor can be taught and what a business actually owns – is what our six-step model was built to answer.
A pattern the industry sees over and over
Most FSP leaders will recognise the pattern immediately, whether or not they have ever taken the time to name it themselves. A business with six advisors finds that two of them generate most of the new business, while the same activity from the other four barely registers, not because of ability, but because prospecting was left to individual initiative rather than built into how the business operates.
A principal takes over a practice from a predecessor and discovers that the client relationships transferred, but the ability to generate new ones did not, because it was never a business capability to begin with, only a set of personal habits carried by whoever was doing the work. A strong advisor moves on and a portion of the pipeline goes with them, or simply stops, because there was no infrastructure underneath it to keep functioning once that person was gone. None of this is a failure of any individual advisor but simply what happens by default when growth is never designed as something the business owns.
Building the function, not training the individual
FI Consult’s position is that new business development is a business function, in the same way that compliance, operations or finance are business functions. It should not depend on who happens to be good at it now but should be designed, owned and maintained at the business level, so that every advisor in the business benefits from it, and none of them is required to carry it alone.
That belief has been built into our structured, six-step consulting process, delivered by a founding team whose backgrounds span financial services, business development strategy and consulting.
A Foundation phase orients the leadership team and introduces a library of 37 market-opening strategies drawn from across the industry. A Discovery Session, a half-day, in person engagement, examines the business in real depth, its people, systems, market and current activity, and produces a BD Readiness Report and two tailored strategy blueprints, arriving printed and bound, couriered to the business rather than emailed as an attachment. A Planning session then confirms the chosen strategies and builds a rollout plan, and it is here that the business opts into steps 4 and 5.
We tell businesses upfront that, after the Planning step, they can roll out on their own. However, if the first three steps have done their job properly, that’s rarely where it ends, and the business will continue with us into phase 2.
Those that continue move into Setup and Implementation, where each strategy comes with its own set of tools.
There are between eight and twelve templates per strategy – scripts, spreadsheets, tracking documents and more – all designed and prepared. It’s what takes a blueprint from a strategic document to something a team can actually pick up and use that week.
FI Consult stays involved as the systems, roles and processes go live, and for businesses that want it, phase 6 is an Ongoing Advisory retainer that supports the business over time.
Remember, business development, done properly, doesn’t have an end date. It’s a capability you keep building.
A different kind of ownership
Growth is meant to live inside an FSP, not with the best advisor in the room, and not with whoever happens to have the most energy for prospecting at the time. It should not be dependent on surviving personnel changes, market conditions or time.
For FSP leaders who have watched growth rise and fall with individual advisors for years, often without quite naming why, that reframing tends to land easily.
We’re not teaching people to prospect harder. We’re showing businesses what it looks like when growth finally belongs to them, and not to whoever happens to be good at it this year.