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In Practice July 31, 2025
Staffing Up: The When and How for Retirement Plan Advisory Firms
The timing and process of hiring new additions requires significant attention and care from firm leaders.
Reported by Mallika Mitra
Art by Silvia Casanova Fenollosa
As financial firms evolve, identifying when and how to best grow a team is a strategic decision that can define long-term success.
“This is a highly regulated and increasingly competitive business, yet there are more resources available to us today than we ever have [had],” says Brian Becker, a principal and shareholder in Becker Suffern McLanahan Ltd., which has a team of 14 people. “It requires a lot of effort and planning. A large part of that is staffing and support.”
But growing effectively can be a challenge. Leaders at top adviser firms need to recognize signs that indicate there is a need for more support. At the same time, they must balance client demands with maintaining a firm culture.
The Growth Challenge
Unlike in private wealth management—where there are many resources and studies on revenue and profit targets for expansion and job functions—the smaller margins and complex nature of corporate retirement plans make growth decisions more of an art rather than a science, says Ryan Christensen, a retirement plan adviser at Coldstream Wealth Management. He’s seen both sides, having spent 20 years working at two different recordkeepers that covered hundreds of financial advisers before joining Coldstream, which has roughly 230 employees.
“In wealth management, job roles are fairly consistent across the industry: From client service associates to portfolio managers to lead advisers, roles are fairly defined,” Christensen says. “In retirement plan advisory services, until full scale is achieved, team members need to wear many hats.”
Those hats can include prospecting and new plan growth, plan governance, investment management, employee education, vendor management and plan management.
When It’s Time to Grow
Team members may serve many functions, but they also need to best serve their clients. A leading indicator that it is time to grow the team is if the quality of that service slips, says Joe Hatfield, a vice president at OneGroup Retirement Advisors.
While it may be no surprise that another key indicator is when the existing team is stretched, firm leaders need to have a plan in place to recognize advisers are at capacity before that happens. While the team at OneGroup Retirement Advisors meets in person for three hours every month to discuss what advisers are working on, they designate time quarterly to specifically talk through what the team’s day-to-day workload looks like and if changes have to be made, Hatfield says.
The team has learned that the sweet spot for each adviser to manage is between 30 and 40 of the roughly 185 clients with which OneGroup works. The group also annually ensures it is using best-in-class technology, which can help with offloading work. But if there are not technological improvements they can make and someone is juggling more than 40 clients, it’s probably time to hire a new relationship manager.
Another lagging indicator is a missed growth opportunity to acquire a new client.
“That’s really a red flag that it’s definitely time to hire,” Hatfield says.
In short, many hiring decisions occur because companies are filling a position for someone that has left, but in a growing firm, leaders need to be thinking about when to hire the next employee to properly service and support clients, Becker says.
Hiring Best Practices
OneGroup’s key to hiring is to ensure that whoever joins the firm is going to support the team’s open communication, part of what allows team members to speak up if they feel strapped, Hatfield says.
“We don’t want to add somebody to the team who is going to disrupt that culture and sacrifice that open environment,” he adds. To do that, OneGroup makes sure most people on the team meet with each new potential candidate. “We want to get everyone’s feedback. … It’s all very collaborative, so we want everyone to feel comfortable with the person coming on.”
When leaders meet someone who may be a good fit, but the firm does not have the capacity to hire, they make note. Keeping that pipeline of potential candidates, such as someone who just graduated from college and already has their securities licenses and a year of experience at an insurance company, is an important part of the growth process.
Christensen says that when Coldstream is making hiring decisions, it factors in the limited talent pool of those who specialize in such a niche area of financial services.
“Because of this, our approach to growth has been to hire based on communication skills and culture fit,” he says. “We don’t necessarily require that new recruits come from this industry, recognizing that if they bring a strong skill set, we can train them.”
Christensen adds that since Coldstream serves both private clients and institutional clients, the firm has also utilized hybrid roles—private wealth and retirement plan services—for expanding the team.
It is also important to determine whether someone is teachable and collaborative before they are added to the team, says Michael Hudson, head of retirement plan consulting at CAPTRUST, which has more than 1,500 employees and serves more than 35,000 institutional and private clients. Hudson’s team does this in part via a 45-minute roleplay at the end of the interview process during which the prospective hire will walk though scenarios they could see in the workplace, such as the need to change a fund or run a sales play in front of a new committee member.
“If they’re not coachable, it’s an immediate ‘no hire,’” Hudson says. “The industry changes every week. … If you’re not coachable and don’t want to learn, you’re not going to last too long in sales or service.”
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