The Advisors Business Hour

The Growth Curve Nobody Warns Advisors About

August 19, 2026

The Growth Curve Nobody Warns Advisors About

How to Build a Practice That Can Actually Handle Growth

The Advisors Business Hour Hosts: Sherry Sarver Johnson and Jeff Mount

Episode Overview

Growth is exciting—until it starts creating problems you no longer have time to solve. In this episode of The Advisors Business Hour, Sherry Sarver Johnson and Jeff Mount take a closer look at the growth stage of an advisory practice and the challenges that can emerge when a business grows faster than its systems can handle. They discuss why growth and scalability are not the same thing, why advisors should think about their niche and unique value proposition early, and why marketing needs to be built before an advisor runs out of referrals from family, friends, and early contacts. The conversation also explores how automation, AI agents, marketing systems, and repeatable processes can help advisors reclaim valuable time without immediately adding more people to the team. The goal isn’t simply to grow bigger. It’s to build a practice that can actually handle growth.

Why Growth Can Become a Trap

Advisors often enter the growth phase focused on one thing: getting more business. But when growth accelerates, the systems that worked when the practice was smaller may no longer be enough. Advisors can find themselves spending nearly all of their time serving existing clients, managing portfolios, handling administrative work, and putting out fires. That creates a dangerous cycle. The practice is growing, but the advisor has less time to improve the business, develop new systems, or continue generating the next wave of opportunities. As Jeff explains, advisors can get stuck with their old systems because they’re too busy managing the business to change them.

Growth Is Not the Same as Scaling

One of the central questions in this episode is the difference between growing and scaling. A practice can grow organically without being scalable. For example, an advisor may bring in more clients but continue managing every portfolio personally, customizing every process, and handling every conversation manually. Eventually, the advisor reaches a point where there simply aren’t enough hours in the week to continue doing everything. Scalability means building a practice that can serve more people without requiring the advisor’s time to increase at the same rate. That requires planning.

Build the Marketing Engine Before You Need It

Many advisors begin with family, friends, and referrals. Those early relationships can help establish a practice, but they eventually run out. That’s why marketing should not be something an advisor waits to build until referrals slow down. A website, search engine optimization, AI optimization, branding, niche positioning, and other marketing initiatives can take time to produce results. The ideal time to build those systems is before you need them. By the time early referrals begin to slow down, the marketing engine should already be working to generate new opportunities.

Define Your Niche and Unique Value Proposition

Advisors need to know what they stand for and who they want to serve. Being able to do everything doesn’t necessarily make an advisor stand out. In fact, trying to serve everyone can make it harder for prospective clients to see the advisor as an authority. A strong unique value proposition becomes even more powerful when it is connected to a clearly defined niche. Financial planning can be valuable, for example, but an advisor also needs to determine who that planning is designed for. Business owners? High-net-worth clients? Middle-class Americans? The answer affects how the practice needs to be designed and how scalable the business needs to become.

Build for Scalability From the Beginning

Scalability needs to be considered before the practice becomes overwhelmed. A business plan should address marketing initiatives, expected costs and results, early prospects and referrals, staffing, and how the practice will handle future growth. It should also consider whether the advisor’s core value proposition can realistically scale. Managing highly customized portfolios, for example, can become increasingly time-consuming as the client base grows. The objective is not simply to find a successful service model. It is to find a service model that can continue working as the business grows.

Automation Can Give Advisors Their Time Back

One of the biggest challenges advisors face is time. Sherry explains that one of the opportunities in automation is taking processes that already work and turning them into systems that require very little human intervention. Even saving two or three hours a week can make a meaningful difference. Those hours can give an advisor more time to think strategically, make important decisions, or work on the parts of the business that have been neglected. Over time, small improvements can potentially add up to an entire extra day each week.

AI Agents Are Changing the Front End of the Business

The conversation also explores the growing role of AI agents. AI can potentially help with front-end screening, answering basic questions, and determining whether someone is ready for a deeper conversation with a member of the team. The objective isn’t to pretend that AI is a human. Instead, the goal is to use technology appropriately so human team members can spend more of their time on conversations where their expertise and judgment matter most. For financial advisors, compliance requirements still need to be considered carefully, but the potential for saving time is significant.

Educate Before the Deep Conversation

Another opportunity is using technology and systems to provide education before an advisor’s meeting with a prospect. If a prospect spends most of a one-hour conversation learning basic information, the advisor has less time for discovery and personalization. Providing appropriate education beforehand can help prospects arrive better prepared. That allows the advisor to spend more of the meeting understanding the person’s situation rather than simply explaining fundamentals.

Don’t Hire Your Way Out of a Broken System

Adding employees isn’t always the answer. If an advisor hasn’t stepped back to create a clear plan and repeatable processes, hiring more people can actually add complexity. New employees may not know exactly what to do, and everyone can end up looking to the owner for direction. Instead of solving the original problem, the owner may have simply created another layer of responsibility. The better approach is to determine what should be systematized and automated first, then hire people for the areas where human involvement truly adds value.

Keep the Human Element Where It Matters Most

Automation doesn’t mean removing people from the business. In many cases, it means making better use of people. Sales conversations are one example where human interaction remains especially important. When administrative and repetitive work is reduced, advisors can spend more time training and developing the people responsible for those high-value conversations. The result can be a team that has enough time and support to become excellent at what it does.

A Practical Path to Sustainable Growth

For advisors entering the business, the recommendation is straightforward: Start with a real business plan. Identify the niche. Define the unique value proposition. Establish the marketing strategy. Think about scalability. Determine what staff and systems will eventually be required. At the same time, develop a repeatable sales process and continue refining it. By the end of the first year and into the second, the goal is to have a process that becomes increasingly familiar and effective, while marketing systems begin generating opportunities. Then AI, automation, and other systems can be layered into the business to make the operation easier to administer and easier to follow.

Key Takeaways

Growth can expose weaknesses in a practice’s systems.
Growing a practice is not the same as scaling it.
Marketing should begin before an advisor runs out of referrals.
A clearly defined niche helps establish authority and focus.
A unique value proposition should also be scalable.
Automation can give advisors valuable time back.
AI agents can help with appropriate front-end screening and education.
Technology should support the human experience, not pretend to replace it.
Hiring more people isn’t always the solution to operational problems.
A business plan, repeatable sales process, marketing system, and scalable operations create a stronger foundation for long-term growth.

Transcript

[00:00]

SHERRY: Welcome back to The Advisors Business Hour, where we dive into the heart and hustle of building your ideal advisory practice. I’m Sherry Sarver Johnson with Beneficial Business Solutions, and I’m here with my co-host, Jeff Mount, President of Caddis LLC. He’s also the guy affectionately known as the Advisor to Advisors. Welcome to the show, Jeff. JEFF: Thanks, Sherry. So good to see you. SHERRY: It’s always so good to see you, and I’m excited about today’s episode. Our conversation actually started a few episodes back when we were talking about the lifecycle of an advisory practice: Grow, Maintain, Exit. You went over how that whole lifecycle works. What I’d like to do today is revisit that lifecycle but spend our time on the growth stage. What I’ve noticed with advisors, and with many other companies, is that sometimes they get stuck in that growth stage. They’re working hard to hit those numbers, they start growing quickly, and then they’re stuck with their old systems because they don’t have time to change anything.

[00:01]

SHERRY: It can become a pretty perilous time, leading to burnout and other problems. So I’d like to get your take on that and really dive deeply into the topic today. JEFF: I’ll do this together with you because I look at you as a marketing expert, and I think marketing is often overlooked in the very beginning. Quite frankly, I don’t think it’s the salespeople who should be blamed for that. It’s management. Whether you’re working for an insurance agency, one of the big mutual companies, or one of the big wirehouses, those sales managers often come to their salespeople and say, “We want you to fill out this sheet with everybody you know.” “We want all their information, and these are going to be your first prospects.” I’m going to sound cynical here, but I think anybody who’s been in the business knows this is true. If you fail out of the business, guess what the firm just got? A whole bunch of prospects they’re going to work. And, of course, these are your family and friends.

[00:02]

JEFF: So the idea is that you start with them, get referrals from them, and grow from there. But there are a number of challenges. First, there’s no marketing. That’s not marketing. At some point, you’re going to run out of family, friends, and those early referrals. If you don’t take an omnichannel approach from the very beginning, you could be putting yourself in trouble. That’s number one. Number two, you’re brand new at this. You may have all of these family and friends who come on board, but you don’t necessarily have a staff there to help you. You don’t know how to manage portfolios yet. You may not even know whether you should be managing portfolios yourself. There’s so much to understand before you go headfirst into this, and I think it’s really important that you build a business plan and think everything through carefully.

[00:03]

SHERRY: That’s a good step back because I was diving right into the point where they’re already in the middle of the growth phase. Everything is going crazy. They’ve got tons of business. At the same time, they have to handle all of that business in a way that provides the level of service they want, while protecting the reputation they’ve built. How does somebody step back and say, “Okay, I have to wear the visionary hat in the business, but I also need to be the business manager sometimes so all of this can settle down and become sustainable?” What you brought up about marketing is important too. Someone could get a lot of growth from the kind of activity you just described, reaching out to friends, family, and early contacts. They suddenly have a lot of business coming in, but they don’t have a plan for where to go next.

[00:04]

SHERRY: Maybe they’ve added administrative staff and put things in place to support that growth. Then they’re left holding the bag because they have all these systems and people in place, but no new business is coming in. I could see that being equally dangerous, or maybe even more dangerous, at that stage of the lifecycle. JEFF: You and I both know marketing doesn’t kick in on day one. It takes time. Whether you’re talking about building a custom website around your niche, and hopefully identifying that niche is part of your business plan, or you’re talking about search engine optimization or AI optimization, there’s a lot that needs to be built. It should be built from the very beginning.

[00:05]

JEFF: That way, by the time you start running out of those early referrals from family and friends, the marketing is already working and generating the kinds of leads you need to grow long term. So yes, I think it’s incredibly important to do the business planning and make marketing an important piece from the very beginning. SHERRY: A big part of that, and we’ve talked about this before, is establishing your authority. Branding is important too because, as you’ve mentioned, if you’re known for being able to do everything, you’re really not known for anything. You don’t create a strong attraction for the people you actually want to work with because they don’t necessarily see you as a contender or an authority in their particular niche. Your marketing doesn’t resonate with them.

[00:06]

SHERRY: So one of the first things is deciding what you stand for, who you want to serve, and what your niche is. Then you want to get that marketing engine started early so you’re building perceived authority in that space. JEFF: You used the word authority. I know a lot of people in the business use the phrase “unique value proposition.” I think it’s important to identify what your unique value proposition is going to be. Is it going to be financial planning? Okay, that’s fine. The challenge is that, on average, financial planning can take a significant amount of time from start to finish for each client. That’s a major time commitment if you want to make sure it gets done correctly. Or you could say, “My value proposition will be managing portfolios.” That’s fine too.

[00:07]

JEFF: However, I’ve noticed, especially in the wirehouse environment, that advisors who are managing portfolios themselves can eventually reach a point where they have very little time left to go out and get new clients. They’re busy managing the portfolios of the clients they already have. And those portfolios are often customized rather than model-based, which makes things even harder because the advisor has to go back and remember why each portfolio was constructed in a particular way. So it’s important to come up with a unique value proposition that is also scalable. SHERRY: What I hear you saying is that you need both. You need the unique value proposition, and then you need the niche you’re going to apply it to. JEFF: Yes. If you’re going to do financial planning, who are you going to do financial planning for? Is it going to be business owners? High-net-worth clients? Everybody talks about wanting high-net-worth individuals.

[00:08]

JEFF: But you’d be surprised. There are advisors who say, “I don’t really like working in that space. I’d rather work with middle-class Americans.” That’s fine too. But then you really have to be scalable because you’re going to need to serve more people. And when markets go south, that can become much more challenging to manage. So scalability becomes very important. SHERRY: And when I talk about authority, I mean that people don’t simply see what you offer and recognize your unique value proposition. They see you as a go-to person. Somebody who knows more than average. Somebody who’s on the cutting edge. Somebody who knows how to lead them. That’s why they’re coming to you in the first place. They want help. They don’t want to do all of this on their own.

[00:09]

SHERRY: So to your point, all of this has to be thought about well ahead of the growth cycle because the growth cycle is not the place to figure it out. You’re already swamped. JEFF: Exactly. SHERRY: Very good stuff. When you’re working with advisors and being the Advisor to Advisors, what do you say to someone who’s just getting licensed and getting everything put together? How early should they start thinking about their niche and their unique value proposition? JEFF: It should be part of the business plan. There are a number of software packages you can use to help build a good business plan. One I like is LivePlan. There are others out there too.

[00:10]

JEFF: The idea is to build a realistic, executable plan that identifies your marketing initiatives, what they’re going to cost, and what you can reasonably expect from them. It should also address the things we’ve been talking about, including your early prospects and referrals, scalability, and who’s going to be on your staff helping you manage all of this. I think you need to do that at the very beginning. But a lot of people don’t. They get pushed immediately toward, “Give me that list of names, numbers, and emails. Let’s start calling.” Then the idea is, “We’ll train you later.” I don’t think it should work that way. Those things should happen simultaneously.

[00:11]

SHERRY: And the good news is that this is an industry that’s been around for a long time. We’re not talking about inventing something completely new or pioneering a path that’s never been traveled. There’s so much available to help people figure it out, including tools like LivePlan and people like you who consult in this area. There’s really no reason to go into it blindly. The pathways already exist. It’s a matter of choosing what resonates with you as an individual. That’s one of the beautiful things about choosing to be in the financial advisor business. You don’t have to create everything from scratch. JEFF: That’s true. You really don’t. There’s plenty of opportunity not only to generate leads, but to close business and manage it carefully moving forward if you have the foresight to plan for it. SHERRY: Absolutely. Let’s move forward. Let’s say everything is going great in the beginning.

[00:12]

SHERRY: They’ve got a growing practice. Now they’re in that stage we were talking about initially, where it almost feels like things are growing a little too fast. They’re spending all their time doing the business they already have, and they don’t have time to fix systems or develop new ones. Can we distinguish between growing and scaling? Because growth can happen organically without necessarily being scalable. JEFF: I think you can contribute a lot to this because I know SEO, AI optimization, and automation are areas your firm works in. Why don’t you share some of the things that can help take ongoing marketing and sales efforts off the advisor’s plate so they don’t lose the momentum they’ve built while they’re trying to manage the challenges they already have?

[00:13]

SHERRY: Without turning this into a self-promotion moment, that really is where our sweet spot is. We love coming in and looking at how things are working right now. Then we look at how we can take what’s already working and turn it into a system that requires very little human intervention. We also look at what could work better. Maybe something is already working to a certain extent, but we can test a slightly different version of the process and find a way to shave two or three hours a week off the owner’s workload. That’s significant. Those are two or three hours the owner can spend looking at the big picture or making decisions they’ve been putting off. And then you keep refining the process. Eventually, maybe you’ve given them an entire extra day in the week.

[00:14]

SHERRY: That’s what gets me excited. What can we automate to a certain extent so the experience still feels human, but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every single client? You’ve organized the process. The backend is moving things forward. You know what stage everybody is in. You know when somebody needs to be contacted. And it can bring some joy back into the work. JEFF: Without a doubt. You just hit on probably the sorest of sore points for advisors, whether they’re in the Grow, Maintain, or Exit phase. They all say, “I have no time.” “I literally have no time.” If you can give them two or three hours, or, my gosh, an entire day back every week, they will love you. That old phrase “time is money” is absolutely true in this business.

[00:15]

SHERRY: What’s exciting now is that, in the past, we often had to figure out ways to delegate and maybe add more people to the team. Today the team doesn’t necessarily have to grow as much, or sometimes at all, if you organize the business and put the right systems in place. JEFF: Let me ask you a question. Is your firm working with AI agents? SHERRY: We are. JEFF: How are you deploying them? What kinds of purposes are you using them for? SHERRY: We work with a few different industries. We’re in finance, and we’re also in the medical industry. What we’ve seen quite a bit in medical, and I think finance may follow, is the ability to use AI agents for things like prescreening people before they get into a deeper conversation.

[00:16]

SHERRY: That can cut down tremendously on the time required from the people who are doing the one-on-one conversations. In medical, many of those consultations are happening virtually now, and obviously you need the proper HIPAA systems and safeguards in place. Finance has its own compliance requirements that need to be addressed as well. But when it’s done properly, it can save a tremendous amount of time. These systems have also become much more sophisticated over the past year as the underlying AI models have improved. The conversations used to feel pretty awkward. A year ago, talking to an AI agent often wasn’t much fun. That’s changing. And I want to be clear about something. We don’t suggest that anybody pretend the AI is a real person.

[00:17]

SHERRY: At the same time, you don’t want the experience to be annoying or feel completely mechanical. We’re seeing AI agents help with phone conversations, text messaging, WhatsApp messaging, and a lot of front-end screening so that the human staff can spend more of their time actually helping people. One example is a medical facility we work with. They receive a large volume of leads. Their sales consultants were so busy trying to help a little bit with everybody that they had less time to spend with the people who were actually ready for a serious conversation. By bringing AI into the process, the AI can handle some of those early conversations and basic questions.

[00:18]

SHERRY: It can also help identify whether somebody needs more information or whether they’re ready to have a real conversation with a member of the team. Then the staff can take a breath and spend more time with fewer people instead of being spread so thin. JEFF: I think those are great examples. And you actually took automation a little further than I was originally thinking. I’m a big believer that when an appointment is done, whether you’re still in discovery, diagnosing, designing, or delivering, there should always be some touchpoint between that appointment and the next appointment. There should also be some kind of call to action. I think AI agents could potentially help with both.

[00:19]

JEFF: And without a doubt, having some of that initial conversation handled through an appropriate system could save time and help determine whether a prospect even makes sense for the practice. Because straying too far from your niche can create problems later. SHERRY: It can also help with education. Let’s take a financial advisor as an example. If the advisor has to spend 45 minutes of a one-hour conversation educating somebody on basic information, they have much less time left to be effective and tailor the conversation around that particular person. Or think about the discovery conversation we discussed a few episodes ago. They could have spent that time on discovery and really learned about the client. Instead, they’re using most of the meeting just trying to get the person up to speed enough to understand the conversation.

[00:20]

SHERRY: If some of that education can happen ahead of time, until the person feels comfortable having the deeper conversation, it tees everybody up for a much better meeting. JEFF: Absolutely. SHERRY: It’s really exciting to be in business right now because we’re just at the beginning of this. JEFF: We’re just scratching the surface of what this can do. SHERRY: Exactly. And then we’re talking about backend workflows and other processes that might have taken a human being hours or even days. Those things can now be compressed dramatically. And these systems continue improving. JEFF: Agreed. SHERRY: Thank you for letting me talk about some of the fun things we’re doing. JEFF: Absolutely. I think your service is incredibly valuable.

[00:21]

SHERRY: Thanks. We think of ourselves as sitting at the intersection of marketing and systems because they work together. If you have the marketing and you don’t have the systems, you’ve wasted your marketing. If you have the systems and you don’t have the marketing, there’s nothing coming into the system. It’s nice to be able to work on both because otherwise business owners are trying to piece everything together themselves. They have one service helping with this and another service helping with something else, and then they’re stuck in the middle figuring out how it all fits together. So let me bring us back to the main topic. I know we’re running out of time. What else would you bring forward for somebody who’s in that stage where the practice is growing, but what they really need is to begin scaling?

[00:22]

SHERRY: What are one or two things they could do to start having that conversation with themselves? Maybe that eventually leads to working with us to put systems in place that free up their time. Or maybe it means working with you to step back, get the vision right, narrow the niche, and figure out how to get off that hamster wheel. JEFF: That’s just it. Everybody who comes into the business is so eager to get on the hamster wheel. And almost all of them do. Many have had very little sales training and haven’t constructed a real business plan. They’ve simply got a sales manager saying, “Give me that list. Start calling.” It’s unfortunate that there isn’t more of a “hurry up and wait” moment where you pause and say, “Let’s build the business plan correctly first.” Bring in a coach who can help train you in sales.

[00:23]

JEFF: I don’t want to pick on any one firm, but in a lot of organizations the sales process can be vague. Bringing in a professional coach, whether it’s me or somebody else, can help. You want someone who knows multiple systems and can deliver a process that is repeatable and memorable. Then you continue refining that process until, by the end of year one or somewhere into year two, you’ve become very good at it. You’ve also got your marketing systems up and running. They’re producing. Your website is uncovering leads. Now suddenly you have the best of the human element, where you understand social styles and know how to identify and motivate people, combined with the scientific element.

[00:24]

JEFF: That scientific element includes many of the things you’ve been talking about, whether it’s AI, automation, or simply building a system that is easy to administer and easy to follow. Put those together and, by years two and three, you can become whatever you want the business to become. SHERRY: I like that. I think that’s very well put. One of the things you just reminded me of is that I’ve seen advisors, and other business owners, feel like they can hire themselves out of the mess they’re in. But if they haven’t done what you just described and stepped back to put the plan in place, sometimes they’ve simply added fuel to the fire. Now they’ve got a bunch of people who don’t know exactly what to do, and everybody is looking to the owner for guidance every day. So the owner has added another layer of responsibility instead of solving the original problem.

[00:25]

SHERRY: The beautiful thing today is that so much can be done without immediately adding more people. Then you can hire for the things where you genuinely want a high human touch. Sales conversations are one of those areas. And now you actually have the time to train those people properly so those sales hires have the opportunity to become rock stars. JEFF: Agreed. SHERRY: Instead of everybody drowning and floundering together. Nobody wants to manage that. JEFF: No. SHERRY: Of course, this is life. We’re probably all going to have periods like that. JEFF: That’s true. SHERRY: Hopefully they don’t last too long. All right, Jeff. It’s great to see you as always. I love our conversations. Tell folks how they can find you and get in touch.

[00:26]

JEFF: I’m going to do the opposite for you as well because, given all the information you’ve shared, I know people may want to talk to you too. I can be reached by email at jeffrey@caddis.biz. And if you’d like to check out the website, it’s Caddis.biz. SHERRY: I love it. For mine, I’ll give you the caveat that you should think about how long your email address is going to be before you choose your domain! Our website is BeneficialBusinessSolutions.com, and my email is ssjohnson@beneficialbusinesssolutions.com. It’s a mouthful, but that’s where you find us. JEFF: Very good. It was great to see you again, Sherry. Thanks so much for contributing what you did on the marketing side, as well as the conversation around automation and AI agents. There’s a lot of buzz right now about AI agents, and I think you can probably help a lot of people scale.

[00:27]

SHERRY: We’ve definitely been bitten by the bug. It’s so much fun. Anything else you want to add before we hang it up for today? JEFF: Let’s hang it up for today. SHERRY: All right. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye. JEFF: Bye, Sherry.

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Podcast Episodes

The Advisors Business Hour

The Growth Curve Nobody Warns Advisors About

The Growth Curve Nobody Warns Advisors About

How to Build a Practice That Can Actually Handle Growth

Episode Overview

Why Growth Can Become a Trap

Growth Is Not the Same as Scaling

Build the Marketing Engine Before You Need It

Define Your Niche and Unique Value Proposition

Build for Scalability From the Beginning

Automation Can Give Advisors Their Time Back

AI Agents Are Changing the Front End of the Business

Educate Before the Deep Conversation

Don’t Hire Your Way Out of a Broken System

Keep the Human Element Where It Matters Most

A Practical Path to Sustainable Growth

Key Takeaways

Transcript

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