The plan is the product. Advisor calendars haven't caught up

Financial planning has shifted in nearly fifty years from a sales prop to the product itself, but the profession's calendar has not made the same trip. The first class of CFP certificants entered a world where the plan was a demonstration tool that showed prospects the gaps in their finances and established a need the advisor could then fill with a solution; the plan opened the sale. Over the decades it became a value-add, a reason to stay attached to a relationship already in motion, and now, as Kitces Research describes the industry's own evolution, the plan is increasingly the purpose of the relationship, the reason it exists at all.

That trajectory is what makes the second Kitces Research study of how financial advisors actually do financial planning worth watching. The 2018 survey looked inside the process — how many meetings it takes to build and deliver a plan, how client data is collected, what software and tools build the plan, how planners are compensated — and the follow-up, now announced, revisits the same questions and adds an explicit one: how the delivery of plans is changing as planning software, business models, and proposed regulations shift at once.

Kitces Research's 2018 findings are the benchmark any follow-up will be judged against, and they are uncomfortable: financial planners spent 26% of their time preparing financial plans and other meeting preparation, just 19% meeting with clients at all, and nearly 17% on business development. Most planners already used planning software interactively during client sessions, yet still reached for Word and Excel to assemble the final plan. Set those ratios against the plan's changing role and the strategic problem is plain. When the plan was a sales prop, heavy preparation and light client contact made sense because the artifact was the pitch, and the pitch was the business. When the plan is the product, the same allocation is much harder to defend. A practice that spends a quarter of its hours preparing and a fifth in front of clients is running the operating model of a sales organization inside a profession that has made the client relationship the product.

The client-facing number is the one that should worry practice owners most, because it is the share of time that produces loyalty, referrals, and retained relationships; preparation supports the meeting, it does not replace it. And while the 26% figure includes plan creation, a large share of it is meeting preparation that in many firms could be delegated, templated, or otherwise compressed. The persistence of Word and Excel alongside planning software suggests the preparation limit is less a matter of calculation than of communication: assembling an analysis into a document a client can actually read.

The second survey's value will be in showing whether the ratio has moved, and in which direction. New software releases and interactive planning tools could have compressed preparation time, freeing advisors to spend more of the week with clients, or the same tools could have deepened the analysis, making the plan richer and the preparation share larger. The 2018 data suggests a practice problem rather than a technology problem, and the second survey will put that to the test.

Practice owners do not have to wait for the results, because the survey works as an audit template: run the same questions against your own calendar and team. If a client-facing advisor is spending 26% of the week on preparation, that is a staffing and process problem worth solving before the next software upgrade; if client-facing time is under 20%, look first at the division of labor and the design of the planning process. The best practices the study promises to identify will be less useful than the habit of running your own numbers now.

The first survey captured a profession midway through a transition; the second will capture it again. The interval between them has been filled with new planning software, proposed regulations, and shifting business models. A benchmark taken in that churn is worth more than a snapshot from a stable year, because it shows which old habits are surviving contact with new tools. When the second survey arrives, the number to watch is the client-facing share. If it has moved meaningfully above 19%, the process is following the promise; if it has barely moved, the profession has changed its marketing, not its model. The line is 19%.