There’s no blueprint for building a great risk advice practice.
But before you start thinking this is another piece about how difficult life has become for risk advisers, it isn’t. Quite the opposite in fact. The great risk renaissance is well and truly underway, and the sector is now seeing some of the most vibrant and innovative businesses across all of advice.
What I actually mean is there is no single blueprint for success.
I say that for two reasons. Firstly, I spend a lot of time working with leading practices around Australia, both in my ‘day job’ and in my role as a judge for the Risk Practice of the Year award.
Over that that journey I’ve found that success in risk advice comes in all shapes and sizes, from hyper-focused solo risk specialists to comprehensive advice firms delivering excellent risk advice as part of a broader offering. And secondly, just as the industry is evolving, so too is what excellence looks like.
A decade ago, if you’d asked people to describe a leading risk practice, the answers would have been fairly predictable:
Success was measured almost entirely by what happened before a policy went into force, and the focus on ongoing client care was sporadic at best. But spend time with the practices setting the standard today, and that conversation looks completely different.
Take two practices I’ve come across through my award judging. One built its whole growth story on digital visibility, using social content and video to build a significant public profile. The second practice was more ‘analogue’, with hardly any public presence at all, having grown almost entirely on referral relationships and a tight process behind it.
Both are genuinely outstanding risk businesses – in fact excellent advice businesses in their own right – nailing that balance of sustainable financial success with genuine client care. But neither approach would work particularly well for the other.
However, while there is no single blueprint for success in risk advice, there are definitely traits that the best all share.
A practice that specialises in professionals, for instance, will gravitate toward insurers who actually understand that market…
Target market
Firstly, they understand who they are serving. That’s not so much about being a niche player; it’s about being crystal clear about their target market, whether that be high earning clients with complex cover needs, or the mum and dad middle market. What matters is not so much the choice, but the clarity. It’s this clarity that allows you to build your language, your content, your processes and your client experience around the expectations and needs of that demographic.
It also enables clarity around the choice of insurance partners. A practice that specialises in professionals, for instance, will gravitate toward insurers who actually understand that market and who offer product features, service, and benefit limits tailored to that segment.
Systemisation
Another shared success driver is systemisation. This is about having documented, repeatable processes – ways of working – that can be learned and executed across the business by different staff members, time after time.
Some achieve this with back-office staff who specialise purely in insurance admin and implementation, either onshore or offshore, freeing up advisers to focus on the client conversation rather than the paperwork behind it.
This not only makes the practice less vulnerable to bottlenecks or less exposed when a staff member is absent, it ensures a consistent experience for clients, regardless of who picks up the phone, or wherever the client happens to be in the process.
Ask any adviser about their life insurance ‘why’ and I can guarantee almost all of them will talk about claim time.
Claims are the ultimate moment of truth, when the promise of the advice – and the insurance itself – is honoured…
Claims services
Claims are the ultimate moment of truth, when the promise of the advice – and the insurance itself – is honoured. Claims support is therefore not an afterthought; it’s actually the central risk advice deliverable. Leading practices understand this and are investing in the claims experience.
Claims can be complex and time consuming, and the specialist knowledge and guidance required truly earns the title ‘professional’. Increasingly I am seeing some practices commercialise this, offering a claims management service to non-clients which is almost always more effective and more affordable than the law firms who tend to populate this space.
Innovation and use of tech
Specialisation itself drives efficiencies. Innovation doesn’t have to involve technology, it can simply mean reimagining processes, and the more you understand the underlying processes in minute detail, the better equipped you are to improve them.
Automating a bad process simply means doing a poor process faster…
One adviser I work with changed something as simple as the timing of letters of authority. By sending them to insurers earlier, they cut an entire week off their turnaround, meaning the client can get covered sooner. Improvement in just a few of these ‘themes’ can have a significant compounding effect and can be achieved without investing in the latest ‘whizz-bang’ tool.
Technology can be a powerful success enabler, but the best practices are those who adapt the technology to their business, not the other way around. Automating a bad process simply means doing a poor process faster, so you need to get the fundamentals right first.
In terms of AI, most of the industry is still at the stage of using it for file notes and meeting summaries, and we’re now starting to see those same file-noting tools generate Records of Advice, which is actually a big deal given how many hours firms burn producing them manually.
The risk practices I find genuinely inspiring are going a step further, building simple AI agents that pull together everything they know about a client, so an adviser can walk into a meeting already across what matters – that a client mentioned a health scare last time they spoke, that they’d flagged possibly making a claim, that they used to smoke and might be worth checking to see if there’s a loading that can be removed.
None of that requires an expensive tech build. I recently spoke to an adviser from a one-person practice who’d built exactly this himself using his own filing system and an off-the-shelf AI tool. He presented on it at a workshop I recently ran, and you could see half the room hadn’t caught up to what he was even describing!
When it comes to risk advice, the type of excellence that drives the sector forward clearly comes in many forms, and that’s exactly what the PPS Mutual Risk Practice of the Year Award exists to find. It is judged on customer excellence, commercial strategy, continuous improvement, cultural strength and industry contribution. You don’t have to be a risk only practice to be eligible – comprehensive advice practices actively recommending risk can take part too.
This year, award applicants will also get access to an exclusive invitation-only workshop I’m running. It will unpack what separates leading risk practices from the rest.
For the award winner, there’s an impressive prize on offer too, including a spot on the Riskinfocus CPD tour and a marketing package to help your practice tell its story.
Applications open on 4th August. It takes just fifteen minutes – a quarter hour that could be the best investment you make all year.
This article was originally published by RiskInfo and can be accessed here.