Quora Answer: How Many Clients Can a Financial Planner Manage?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “How many clients can a financial planner manage?”

Personally, I limit my client list to 200.  I have never had 200 clients because I drop the bottom 10% who are either uncontactable or difficult, over time, and tend to hover around 150 to 160.  More than 200, it becomes impossible to adequately service them.  It takes a lot of homework to manage their portfolios, both insurance and investments.  These 150 or so, among themselves, have more than a thousand individual policies or investment plans.  One person may be the policy owner of his as well as his immediate family’s policies.  Additionally, many of them are business owners, meaning policies related to their staff hospitalisation.

All that is enough for one financial planner.  I must also point out that I do not manage them all by myself.  We all need an administrative team to follow up on claims and underwriting.  Otherwise, even a hundred clients is way too much.