Many advisors often struggle with determining when to hire a new employee, and it can be difficult to decide if the costs—whether it be money or time—are worth it. Is it better to be proactive and add someone to the team ahead of time to avoid disaster, or to save money and wait to see if existing employees can handle the additional work?

While changes in the financial services industry are occurring at breakneck speed, so too are changes in human resources best practices as we face new regulations, increasing human capital needs, and other outside pressures. Firms of all sizes that have a strong HR strategy at their center are poised to hold onto talented employees for the long term. But that strategy needs to evolve with the times and the firm’s growth.

If I asked you to define partnership, what would you say? It’s a challenging question because partnerships mean different things to different people. For many advisors I speak with, a partnership is a structure that provides certain benefits. Specifically, it allows them to expand scale and capacity, maximize operational efficiency, create economies of scale, foster redundancy of skill sets, and establish a firm identity rather than one based solely on the personality of the founder.

With summer underway and your clients on vacation, you book time to tackle the projects you had set aside during busier months. But when that Monday after a summer weekend arrives, you have to muster up the energy to begin working on the jobs you’ve been putting off. Whether you have a simple list of tasks—such as updating client reports—or a longer-term project—such as rewriting website content—getting started can be a challenge.

If you google “client advisory board + financial advisor,” you’ll end up with more than 3 million results from a host of sources you’re probably familiar with: Michael Kitces, Financial Advisor magazine, sponsor companies, and others. Many of these results speak to the power of an advisory board in giving strategic insight on how you can better position your services and grow your firm.