Pros
Stable, solid income. Good place to gain more experience and training. Helping so many clients gives you training that could take 3x as long somewhere else. No prospecting, leads are sent to the advisor by the prospecting team Good benefits-while they have decreased over time on the health care side, I do have to give them credit for the 401k match of 4% + 10% profit sharing. That has stayed consistent over time and I am not aware of them reducing that.
Cons
Salary is relatively fixed while taking on significantly more clients each year as required by management. Started with 0 clients, “full book” started at around 125 clients, took on an average of 25 new ones each year as the full book number went up almost every year mandated by management, ended with almost 300 clients/households. While leads are sent over, the quality is mixed and the metric to convert led me to taking on clients who were not a good fit. Then the retention metric forced me to do whatever it takes to keep them. This is a tough dynamic to sustain long term, on top of management setting a new, higher number of clients to take on almost every year, which compounds the issues. Failing to meet the conversion and retention metrics put my job at jeopardy. My first 2 years were my best in terms of work life balance. After that I stopped having any time and energy for life outside work. I got burned out trying to take care of my clients to a fiduciary level, but it’s not possible without putting in extra time and energy outside of a normal work day/week. Balancing taking care of my family with this role was extremely difficult. This is the first place I worked where the majority of managers and up had never done the role or something peripheral to it before, as opposed to other places I’ve worked where people work their way up through the levels of the role/space so that my manager used to do my role and could truly understand my experience.