Why it’s important to have a team around you
August 26, 2026 | News & Updates
Picture this.
You’ve worked with the same financial advisor for years, sharing your goals, dreams, challenges, concerns, and hopes about your future. You’ve developed a long-term plan for your family, and now it’s the exact moment you need your advisor most because…
- Your retirement day (and all the important decisions that come with it) is finally on the horizon, or…
- You receive an offer to sell your business, or…
- Your long-term employer changes ownership, and you are downsized, or…
- Your spouse tragically and unexpectedly passes away…
And suddenly you’re at a crossroads where the path forward is anything but clear. You have some big, timely questions, so you pick up the phone to call the advisor you’ve trusted all these years…
…Only to find out that they’ve retired or moved on, and are no longer with the firm.
Surprised, you’re patched through to someone new who “took over their book.” They seem nice enough, but they know nothing about you, your family, your goals, your values, your concerns, your financial and tax situation, your faith convictions, or the plan that you have been working towards for the past decade.
It’s the moment you need them most, but before you can even ask the questions you need to ask, you have to try to bring a stranger up to speed in the midst of an intensely important situation — all at a time when you have the least time and energy to do so.
This is what we call “falling off the relational cliff.”
And it’s something far too many people experience when their advisor retires, moves to another firm, or leaves the industry altogether.
Relational cliffs are so prevalent with advisors because many firms and advisors still build their businesses around the traditional “solo advisor model” where a client (or couple) is assigned to a single advisor. Even though this historical advisor-centric model creates many potential downsides for clients, our industry’s compensation and organizational structures have made it difficult for many firms to transition to a more client-focused approach.
Here at LifeGuide, we’ve built our firm from the ground up around a fundamentally different approach: a client-centric, team-based advisory approach. This approach, also known as an “ensemble advisory model,” is where clients benefit from being assigned to a team of advisors who work together to collectively serve and advise them over their lifetime.
We see this team-based model as one of the key distinctions that allows us to better serve our clients both now and, even more importantly, in the future.
So today, we want to explore these two models, what each one means for you as a client, and why we believe that more heads are better than just one.
The Traditional Way:
The Solo Advisory Approach
The solo advisory model is the financial industry’s traditional and most popular advisory model. Under this model, a single advisor oversees a group of clients. It became the norm largely for historical reasons: the profession grew out of commission-based sales, where advisors were compensated based on their own individual production and built (and personally owned) their own books of business. The structure rewarded the individual, not the team, and the industry as a whole has largely carried that inheritance forward.
While compensation concerns are certainly part of the story (one that we unpack a bit more in this post), the deeper problem with the solo advisory model is structural: your entire financial life rests on one person—their judgment, experience, perspective, availability, and their career and life choices.
And that dependence shows up in meaningful ways, including:
- Singular perspective. The advice you receive is filtered through one person’s expertise and experience—including their blind spots, personal biases, and knowledge gaps. Comprehensive financial planning and investing are vast, complex, and rapidly changing landscapes in today’s world. It is very difficult for one person to continually keep up with all that is needed to take advantage of opportunities. This often results in more generalized recommendations or advice based on the limited bandwidth of even the sharpest, most experienced solo advisor. Additionally, there’s no one else to ask the question, “Have we considered this from another angle?”
- Limited availability. In addition to being limited by their own expertise, the solo advisor has the challenge of only being able to be in one place (and do one thing) at a time. Not only do they need to meet with and respond to the requests of their other clients, but the solo advisor also often needs to:
- Monitor and respond to market and tax law changes
- Build their business and find new clients
- Perform investment research and due diligence
- Build and update their clients’ financial plans
- Construct, trade, and manage their clients’ portfolios
- Prepare investment performance reports and follow up on detailed action items
- And much more
Additionally, when an advisor takes a vacation, is sick, attends a conference, or is out of the office for any number of reasons, clients often must wait until they return to receive a response.
- Loss of continuity. If the advisor retires, changes firms, or leaves the industry, the relationship—and the institutional memory that came with it—leaves too. That’s the “relational cliff” we were talking about.
- A lack of ability to serve future generations. An advisor nearing retirement is unlikely to still be there for your children, or for the next twenty years of your own plan.
The problem with the solo advisor approach isn’t necessarily the person—it’s the structure. When an entire relationship depends on one individual, that relationship inherits every limitation of a single human being: finite hours, finite perspective, and a finite career.
It’s also worth noting how common the cliff is. According to research from Cerulli Associates, roughly 35% of financial advisors—who manage about 40% of industry assets—plan to retire within the next ten years, and more than a quarter of them are unsure of their succession plan. On top of that, books of business change hands regularly through firm moves and acquisitions. If your plan depends on one person staying put for the next thirty years, you’re making a bet with very little reassurance.
Because of the significant downside to this traditional approach, our firm was built with a fundamentally different approach.
The major downfall of the solo advisory model is that a client’s success is chiefly dependent on one person.
The LifeGuide Way:
The Team-Based Advisory Approach
At LifeGuide, we’ve built our company around a team-based advisory approach—sometimes referred to as an “ensemble practice.”
Rather than “my clients and your clients,” it’s “our clients.”
Compared to the solo model, the ensemble approach is a relatively new business model. (For the three of you financial services history buffs reading this right now who are interested in the history behind this, check out this article.)
This approach has been gaining steam, especially in independent, fee-only firms (like us here at LifeGuide). That’s not a coincidence. When advisors aren’t compensated on commissions, there’s no structural reason for a client to be “owned” by one person—and firms are free to organize around what actually serves the client best.
We’ve found over and over again that this team-based advisory approach, coupled with the fact that our advisors are paid a salary (vs. commissions), has many benefits for our clients, including:
- Broader perspective: More heads are better than one when it comes to planning and managing finances. Problem-solving complex challenges and decisions is much more effective when leveraging a team’s collective wisdom, expertise, and experience.
- More availability: Because you work with multiple team members, someone on your team is almost always available to take your call or return your email.
- Career growth and longevity: We expect our team of advisors to grow with you and your family. We’ve structured our practice with a clear career progression path so that, over the years, your Service Advisor becomes your Lead Advisor, and your Lead Advisor becomes your Senior Advisor. We’ll touch more on this below, but essentially this means your advisors’ roles are designed to be dynamic and flexible as they progress in their careers alongside you.
- Relational continuity: Your team will never leave you “high and dry.” Even if an advisor takes a new role, switches teams, or leaves the firm altogether, the other advisors on your team will still be there for you to maintain continuity and avoid the “relational cliff event” that happens too often in the solo advisor model.
- Increased accountability: With a team, your plan doesn’t live in one person’s head or one person’s inbox. Action items are documented, tracked, and visible to your whole team, so the details don’t depend on any one person remembering them during a busy season.
- Cooperation, NOT competition: One of LifeGuide’s core values is “Team success is more important than individual recognition.” And one of the ways this plays out is that no LifeGuide advisor has an individual sales quota or incentive. In fact, each of our advisors’ success is tied to client success and feedback (such as Google Reviews), and the success of the overall team. And our team’s success is directly linked to our clients’ success. Our compensation, culture, and hiring process are all focused on cultivating a spirit of cooperation among our team to bring their collective best to the benefit of everyone—especially our clients.
LifeGuide’s Team-Based Structure
At LifeGuide, we assign all comprehensive service clients to an advisory team consisting of a Senior Advisor, Lead Advisor, and Service Advisor.
- Senior Advisor — Your Senior Advisor provides oversight and wisdom for your overall relationship with LifeGuide. During the onboarding process, they help you clarify what matters most—helping you discover your unique “what?” and “why?”). They are there for you (and your advisory team) to call upon for an additional, seasoned perspective and insight along the way—especially as you navigate important crossroads.
- Lead Advisor — Your Lead Advisor is your primary, day-to-day advisor, responsible for building and implementing your plan and investment strategy. When questions come up as life unfolds, they’re your first call.
- Service Advisor — Your Service Advisor serves as your technician and “get-it-done” advisor. Behind the scenes, they perform analyses, execute action items, monitor progress, and take care of transactions on your behalf.
In addition to your advisory team, you have the collective expertise of LifeGuide’s investment, planning, and shared services teams working for you so that your advisory team can focus their time and attention on what’s most important—you, their clients!
LifeGuide’s Team-Based Structure
At LifeGuide, we assign all comprehensive service clients to an advisory team consisting of a Senior Advisor, Lead Advisor, and Service Advisor.
- Senior Advisor — Your Senior Advisor provides oversight and wisdom for your overall relationship with LifeGuide. During the onboarding process, they help you clarify what matters most—helping you discover your unique “what?” and “why?”). They are there for you (and your advisory team) to call upon for an additional, seasoned perspective and insight along the way—especially as you navigate important crossroads.
- Lead Advisor — Your Lead Advisor is your primary, day-to-day advisor, responsible for building and implementing your plan and investment strategy. When questions come up as life unfolds, they’re your first call.
- Service Advisor — Your Service Advisor serves as your technician and “get-it-done” advisor. Behind the scenes, they perform analyses, execute action items, monitor progress, and take care of transactions on your behalf.
In addition to your advisory team, you have the collective expertise of LifeGuide’s investment, planning, and shared services teams working for you so that your advisory team can focus their time and attention on what’s most important—you, their clients!
Now, think back to that phone call at the top of this post.
In a team-based model, that call goes very differently. Let’s say one of your advisors decides to leave LifeGuide for whatever reason. While you’re sad to see them go, you can rest in the confidence that you’re still in great hands with the rest of your team—people you know and trust. They know you, your family, and your plan. After all, they worked alongside you (and the advisor who is leaving) to design your plan, meet and make adjustments regularly, and help you navigate the major crossroads that life has thrown at you over the years.
It’s your team’s primary responsibility to bring the new advisor up to speed and make sure that you don’t miss a beat—especially when it’s the time you need us most.
So, why is it important to have a team of advisors around you? Beyond every reason we’ve covered here, perhaps the most important one is this:
It’s because the biggest or most challenging moments of your life shouldn’t be the moments you have to start over with an advisor.
If you’re currently working with an advisor, it’s a fair (and important) question to ask them: “What happens to me if you’re not here?”
And if you’d like to talk with a team that’s built its answer to that question into the way it works, we’d welcome the conversation!