I talked with a couple of MDRT friends, and a number of them said that they've tried the offshore of having no back office in their practice.

The offshore people now have the educational requirements to actually come in and know what we require of them pretty early on. The benefit of that is we can also add. So, if you needed a second virtual assistant, we'd talk to the company and they have someone already trained, ready to plug into our practice. It’s been a unique circumstance in the last number of years that this virtual assistant has actually come to light and actually taken weight off our staff in the office. And that has given us that vehicle to actually expand and grow our client base by utilizing someone who can do that. And you're not having to train them, which normally when that happens, it takes months. And with those virtual assistants, they were very well-educated. They know the computer programs that financial planners use, and we’re not having to go through those training time frames with the new person coming inside the practice.

It's difficult to find the right virtual assistant because you need to probably be referred to by someone else who’s already utilizing them. Our first run, we did a bit of that training, just like we would have done inside the office, and unfortunately that person moved on. We actually talked to another MDRT person in Australia who has nine virtual assistants.

And when I heard nine, it surprised me because that's a lot of people who are not inside your office, but helping you run your practice. So, I asked him, “Who does he talk to, and who is the business owner?” With that particular friend, he actually even goes and visits the virtual assistants’ office overseas to get to know them even on a more personal level, because of the volume that he has going through that business. So, referral by another advisor was the best way I found of getting the right practice overseas to assist us with the right virtual assistant who had the education and the training.

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Growing your financial practice without a back office

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Roy John Hall, ADFP, CCFP