Adviser capacity leaks through the review calendar, not the client count

When a firm tells me it has run out of capacity, the number I ask for is not the client count. It is the count of annual reviews falling in each month of the year.

That number is almost never level, and almost nobody has looked at it.

Why the calendar has the shape it has

In most firms the annual review sits on the anniversary of the client joining. It is an obvious convention and it has the advantage of being defensible, which is probably why it survives.

The trouble is that clients do not arrive evenly. They arrive after a seminar, after a professional connection starts referring, after an acquisition brings forty files across at once, after a good spring. Every one of those bursts becomes a permanent ridge in the review calendar, and it repeats every year without anybody deciding it should.

The arithmetic

Take a firm with 240 clients on an ongoing service, two advisers, one paraplanner.

Level, that is 20 reviews a month. Twenty is comfortable. Ten meetings per adviser, five reports a week for the paraplanner, and time left for the work that is not a review.

What I actually see is closer to this:

March and April are 69 reviews against a level 40. That is where the overruns are, where reports go out late, where the paraplanner works two Saturdays, and where a firm concludes it needs another member of staff. July and August look like slack, and are mostly spent recovering and catching up on the March reports that went out in May.

The firm is not at capacity. It is at capacity for eight weeks a year and has spare capacity for another eight, and the two do not cancel out, because you cannot do March's reviews in July once March has already overrun.

Levelling it

This is the part that sounds harder than it is. You are not rescheduling everybody. You are moving the surplus out of two months.

Start by counting. One query, reviews due by month, twelve rows. Most firms have never seen it laid out and the picture usually settles the argument on its own.

Then decide the level: clients on ongoing service divided by twelve, with a little headroom.

Then take the peak months and identify the surplus, ordered by whoever is easiest to move. Clients with simple affairs, clients whose review has drifted anyway, clients who have asked to change the date before.

Then make the call, and be straightforward about it. "We are spacing reviews more evenly across the year so we have proper time for each one. Would October suit you better than March." I have never known this to be a difficult conversation. Clients do not have a view about the month. A handful will say they prefer to review after the tax year end, which is useful information and easy to accommodate.

Then set the new date as the review date, not a one off deferral, or the calendar reverts next year.

Two peak months at 38 and 31 reduced to 24 and 23 takes about 22 conversations. That is a fortnight of small calls, once, against a peak that recurs every year for as long as the firm exists.

Why it holds

Because the anniversary is a convention rather than a rule. Nothing in the client agreement says the review must fall in the month they signed, and nothing in a suitability file is improved by it.

There is one honest caveat. Once you move a review, the interval between that client's last review and their next is longer than twelve months, and that gap has to be a deliberate, recorded decision rather than a drift. Note it, keep it modest, and do not move the same client twice.

What comes after

Levelling the calendar does not make the firm more efficient. It makes the firm's existing efficiency available all year instead of in bursts, which is usually worth more than the next process improvement on the list and costs nothing but a fortnight of phone calls.

It is the first thing I would look at, and in a decade of these conversations it is the last thing anybody has already done.