Building Codes

For many retirement plan advisers, summer is the best time to catch up on the things that you may not have had the chance to get to earlier in the year, when your schedule was consumed with conversions and client reviews.
Reported by Alison Cooke Mintzer

Hoping to help you make the most of keeping up to date on the industry, I am pleased to bring you the second PLANADVISER Adviser Buyer’s Guide. More than a mere list of tools, service, or product providers (if you are a reader of PLANADVISER or PLANADVISER.com, you already know the current offerings—or know where to find them), in this issue you will find a report of the current state and future trends relating to a wide variety of those investments, tools, services, and partnerships that are essential to the success of a retirement plan adviser. Most of the articles present multiple “things to consider” to help you get caught up with the most current thinking when evaluating, purchasing, recommending, or outsourcing each item. 

The theme of this year’s guide is “the building blocks of a successful retirement plan advisory practice.” In keeping with that theme, the issue is divided into five sections: Business Builders, Building a Menu, Building a Plan, Building with Participants, and Building a Practice. Inside each major section, you will find individual articles focusing
on key practice elements.  

For example, in Business Builders, we cover what you should consider when evaluating back-office support, such as broker/dealers or custodians (see “The Efficient Frontier“); recordkeepers (see “Filling in the Gaps“); and an article about forming strategic partnerships with CPAs and ERISA attorneys (see “Relationship Selling“). 

Building a Menu discusses plan investments, including asset allocation/default funds (see “Widening the Target“); the latest with the in-plan retirement income investment solutions (see “Sizing Up“); and investment structures—specifically, collective trusts and exchange-traded funds (see “Branching Out“). 

Depending on your individual practice, you might not be as intimately involved with some of the topics covered in the Building a Plan section, but those topics are vital to your plan sponsor clients—and, sooner or later, to most retirement plan advisers: plan benchmarking (see “Getting the Right Output“), plan documents (see “Setting in Stone“), and plan termination (see “A Needle in a Haystack“). Inside Building with Participants, we examine what should be considered when evaluating computer advice models (see “Processing Power“), as well as the most current thinking about rollovers and rollover platforms (see “Time to Move On“).  

Last, but certainly not least, in Building a Practice, we drill down on topics like insuring your practice (see “Protecting the Business“), evaluating practice management and investment analytic software (see “Tools of the Trade“), and building your online presence (see “Networking.com“). 

As always, for information about providers within any of these sections, PLANADVISER.com is a great resource. If there are any topics that you would like to see included in future buyer’s guide issues, please let me know.  

Have a great summer and, for those of you looking ahead to planning your fall calendars, we hope to see you at the PLANADVISER National Conference in September (registration is now open)—where we almost certainly will be delving deeper into many of the topics in this special issue.