How financial advisors can be more productive

Let’s be honest. Most financial advisors aren’t struggling with talent, intelligence, or drive. They’re struggling with focus. With too many “tabs” open on their browser and in their brain.

The best advisors don’t just work harder. They build systems, protect time, and stay obsessively focused on the few activities that move the needle.

So, if you're ready to stop being busy and start being brilliantly productive, here's the truth top advisors learned long ago:

Productivity Isn't About Doing More. It's About Doing What Matters Most.

In a business where your time and attention are your currency, success is less about hours logged and more about how precisely you deploy those available hours.

You need to operate like the CEO of a high-performance advisory firm, not just a service provider with a crowded inbox.

The 5 Areas Top Advisors Focus on to Maximize Productivity

1. Client-Facing Time (Your Revenue Engine)

The most productive advisors protect at least 15–20 hours per week for meetings, relationship deepening, and prospecting.

How to Do It:

• Block 3 days per week as client-facing days. No admin. No team meetings.
• Follow our Advisor Practice Management "APM Growth 90" Rule—90 uninterrupted minutes every morning for your #1 growth activity, no excuses
• Utilize scheduling tools to streamline the scheduling process and eliminate back-and-forth communication.

Why it matters: Conversations create conversions. If it’s not client-facing, it’s not revenue-generating.

2. Strategic Thinking Time (Your Growth Engine)

Top advisors don’t just work in the business. They strategically shape the business. They regularly carve time to reflect, refine, and reset strategy, empowering themselves with a sense of control and direction.

How to Do It:

• Block one hour every Friday to review: What needs to change? What didn’t work? What did? How can we replicate that?
• Use a whiteboard, journal, or digital mind map to visualize firm growth.
• Ask yourself: What’s the one bottleneck that, if removed, would free up the most growth and allow me to bring in more ideal clients?

Why it matters: Strategic silence beats reactive noise. Being curious and creating clarity creates momentum.

3. High-Leverage Delegation (Your Time Multiplier Engine)

If someone else can do it 80% as well as you, delegate it. Great advisors hire before they’re drowning, not after.

How to Do It:

• Audit your week. Circle every task that’s admin, repetitive, or outside your unique genius.
• Assign or outsource those tasks within 30 days. Start with one: scheduling, CRM updates, meeting prep.
• Document your process as you go. Record a video showing how you perform tasks, then convert it into a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manual.

Why it matters: You’re not paid to proofread paperwork. You’re paid to deliver insight, confidence, and “show-up”.

4. Systemized Client Experience (Your Client Retention Engine)

Every minute spent reinventing your service process is a minute lost to high-impact work. Top advisors don’t wing it—they orchestrate the client experience.

How to Do It:

• Build a 12-month service calendar that includes onboarding, reviews, touchpoints, gifting, and reporting.
• Automate confirmations, prep emails, and follow-ups with your CRM.
• Delegate follow-up workflows to your team with built-in checklists.

Why it matters: Consistency builds trust. And trust creates loyalty and referrals.

5. Energy Management (Your Productivity Engine)

Burnout is the silent killer of advisory excellence. Top advisors aren’t just productive—they’re energized, intentional, and present.

How to Do It:

• Treat sleep, movement, and nutrition as performance strategies—not side quests.
• Design your calendar around your energy rhythms: dedicate deep work to the morning and reserve the afternoon for administrative tasks.
• Take one “strategic recovery day” per month. No meetings. Just thinking, planning, and recharging.

Why it matters: Your presence is your product. Protect it at all costs. Give yourself all of the energy you need to perform in the coming months.

Bonus: The Weekly Review Ritual

Every high-performing advisor I coach has a version of this. It’s how they reset, refocus, and realign—every single week with the focus on practice value, revenue, growth, retention, delegation, client experience, and productivity.

The 30-Minute Weekly Review (Friday Afternoon or Monday Morning):

1. What were my most significant wins this week?
2. Where did I waste time or energy?
3. What are my top 3 outcomes for next week?
4. Who needs to hear from me before the week ends?

You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. This is your system.

Final Word:

Be Ruthless With Your Time but Generous With Your Presence

Your calendar is your finite time allocator. Want to be known and seen as a top advisor? Want to scale with purpose? Start by protecting your greatest asset: time, and how you use and offer it.

You don’t need more time. You need more traction on the few things that matter most. And that defines how advisors can improve their productivity every day.

Your Next 3 Moves:

1. Audit your week—highlight every task that could be delegated, delayed, or deleted.
2. Redesign your calendar—block your days for client work, strategy, and deep focus.
3. Run your first Weekly Review—this Friday, before the weekend, get clear and take control.

Thank you for reading! This is what we help advisors do every day!

Jeff Thorsteinson is a partner in Advisor Practice Management, an organization that helps financial advisors build world-class practices through innovative concepts, tools, and systems. Jeff works with individual advisors, investment dealers, insurance firms, and fund companies. For more information about Advisor Practice Management, contact [email protected] or 1-800-223-9332, or visit the website at www.apm.coach.

To book a no-cost no-obligation appointment with Jeff to discuss practice management or coaching, click https://calendly.com/jeffthorsteinson/30-minute-q-a-explore-apm