Publish Date: August 18, 2026
Brian S. Hoffman, CRPC®, CEPA®
We have all heard the phrase, ad nauseam, “Do what you do best.”
Focusing on what we are best at seems almost impossible as the business of being a financial advisor grows more complicated every year.
It begs the question, with so much to do, how does each of us actually get to do what we do best? It’s a question I’ve been forced to think about for years, because I tend to look at every situation as a problem to be solved. In this article we are going to lift up the hood and do some real thinking and reflecting, because asking “how” may be the wrong question entirely.
I do not believe you get to be a long term, successful financial advisor without knowing how to change hats. We have all sat quietly, red faced and annoyed, in the middle of opening a ninety page life insurance case when a client walked in or called. We had to go from super admin mode to advisor charm mode in the time it took to pick our head up. If you have ever seen Wolf of Wall Street, it is akin to when Jordan Belfort’s dad answers the phone. Top notch rage and annoyance the second it rings, then suddenly a calm, gentlemanly “hello, cheerio!”
It is a business that requires you to use every facet of your personality, sometimes in the same minute. You may be a psychologist one hour and a market analyst the next. It means being the rainmaker who can walk into a room, entertain, and earn trust in twenty minutes, then sit down an hour later to do the quiet, careful work of building a financial plan. It means being a relationship manager who remembers a client’s grandson’s name, and it means being disciplined enough to get the paperwork right every single time, because compliance does not care about the baritone of your phone voice.
We all do a good job of developing and highlighting those skills when they are needed. But I do not believe all of that can fully thrive in one person. As a matter of fact, I think it is impossible. We have all watched the advisor who was the life of the party and brought in streams of new clients, and the other advisor with the strongest performing portfolios, and the strategist who never picked up the phone enough, and the advisor who never got much done because they spent too much time talking about a client’s grandson’s t-ball game. We have all moved between these personalities, but if you dial one of them up to ten, something else has to give.
The old saying holds true, you cannot be everything to everyone and form a real connection with every client. For too many years I did not have the language to explain why, but experience and examination is a great teacher.
The Theory Behind It
Advisors fail for plenty of reasons in plenty of degrees, and I am not pretending personality fit is the only one. But there is a quieter version of failure that never gets talked about enough. It is not the advisor who flames out. It is the advisor whose business never reaches full potential and never really knows why. Part of it comes from spending so much energy on work which was never suited to their personality in the first place. That is where burnout actually starts. Not from working too hard. From working hard at the wrong things, the things that cause the emotional drain.
I will use myself as an example. I am not a great networker. Standing in a room, moving from person to person, collecting business cards, it exhausts me. I know for a fact my business would have gotten to where it is today a lot sooner if I could turn that part of my personality up, or if I had a partner early on whose entire job was making it rain.
We all have those missing pieces, the stuff we are just not great at, or better yet, just not our forte. As a numbers and mechanical person, I have always needed to measure and quantify things. Being able to admit I am better at some parts of the job than others, quantifying it, putting a real name to it, would show me and everyone in my office where we naturally fit. When I went looking, I found the tool already existed. The thing I could never quite put my finger on already had a name. DISC.
I am sure plenty of you already know DISC, maybe you have even taken the assessment yourselves. If not, it is worth taking a few minutes and getting into some background, for the sake of leveling the room.
What DISC Actually Is, and Where It Started
DISC traces back to 1928, to a Harvard psychologist named William Moulton Marston, in a book called Emotions of Normal People. Marston was a strange, interesting character, he also invented an early version of the lie detector and created the comic book character Wonder Woman, but the piece that matters here is the theory itself. Marston proposed that behavior could be understood through four core styles, and that people shift between them depending on the situation in front of them. Later researchers built actual assessments on top of his theory, and DISC has been refined into the workplace tool advisors use today.
Four core styles, and once you see them, you start noticing them everywhere in your own office.
• D is for Dominance. The director. The strategist. Someone with a D style sees where the business needs to go and has the drive to move it there. They are comfortable making bold calls. What they often lack is patience for the details underneath the vision.
• I is for Influence. The connector. The rainmaker. Someone with an I style builds trust fast, brings people into the room, and makes clients feel good. They are usually not the ones who want to spend an afternoon buried in a spreadsheet.
• S is for Steadiness. The relationship manager. Someone with an S style protects continuity. They remember details, they are patient, and clients trust them because they never feel rushed or dismissed.
• C is for Conscientiousness. The analyst. Someone with a C style is data driven, process oriented, and allergic to sloppy work. They are the ones who make sure the numbers, the paperwork, and the compliance are actually right.
Read that list again and ask yourself honestly which one describes you.
Maybe more importantly, take note of who you are not. Now let’s go back to the question that brought us here.
Do you do what you do best? If not, how can you get there?
The “How” Is the Hangup
There is a book called “Who Not How,” by Dan Sullivan. The title alone captures something I had been circling for a long time without naming it, and it perfectly addresses the many hats issue.
My wife, Jen, started reading that book a while back and stopped, looked up, and had to tell me about a few of the concepts. A few of them rang a bell. She was right, and I felt targeted. The entire book’s concept is based on the chronic “do-it-yourselfer.” I am that person. I am usually really good at noticing something that needs to be built or fixed. I then plan it out in my head, and dig in. That can create real friction when I also have goals around being efficient, being time effective, and getting things done right. The rub is I have never been great at relying on others, and it is nearly impossible to hit all of those goals while doing everything myself.
Instead of hiring someone to build the website or the cabinets, I spent my own time learning how to do those things myself. Efficiency and productivity are usually the whole point of running a good office, but stopping everything to go learn a brand new skill runs completely contrary to that. If time and efficiency equal money, then we have to admit we cannot do every facet of this job alone.
Nobody can. The advisors who figure this out early save themselves years of frustration. The ones who never figure it out spend a career wondering why the business feels harder than it should.
What Changed When I Stopped Trying to Do It All
A number of years ago I started working with my relationship manager. The industry has always called that position an admin or assistant, but the people who fill those roles are so much more than that. One addition, one person, one partner, and it changed how I run my business more than almost anything else I have ever done.
I did not always want to be in control of every detail, but I was used to it. I had built years of habit around doing everything myself, and letting go of that was not easy. I knew logically it needed to happen for the business to move forward. Then something strange happened. My RM proved to me, fast, that she was far better at admin, follow up, and remembering details than I ever was. That made the whole transition easier than I expected.
Suddenly I was not the one remembering every detail of every account or fielding every small service request. I was able to let the director in me breathe and actually direct. I had space to think about strategy instead of just reacting to whatever the day threw at me, and wherever it threw my emotions.
That single addition showed me something bigger. If one relationship manager freed me up that much, what would happen if I filled in the rest of the picture too? What if I had more whos? What if I also had someone whose whole job was data, analytics, and a well managed array of portfolios, a genuine C style who lived for the details I do not have patience for? What if I had a true rainmaker, a high I, a marketer, whose entire function was getting our name out there and bringing new clients through the door? What would that do for ease of business and client relations?
Every Client Is Attracted to a Different Communication Style
Getting the right who matters. But there is another part that became obvious quickly. This is not just about making my own week easier, or letting me and my team do what we do best. This business always comes back to the client. When the office becomes a better run machine, it has a massive effect on the people it serves. You can feel it in the interactions and the onboarding.
Clients all have distinct personalities and are individuals. Not every client wants the same thing from an advisor, or hears what an advisor tells them the same way. This is part of why advisors sometimes lose clients, or never close them in the first place. The disconnect is felt, even when it cannot be named. Taking the time to actually see your own communication style, and how it lands on different people, can close that gap.
The piece most advisors never see is that their own personality naturally attracts a certain kind of client and quietly repels others. A high I advisor tends to build a book full of warm, relationship driven people, because that is who responds to them. A high C advisor tends to build a book full of analytical, detail oriented clients, for the same reason. Over time, without ever noticing it, your roster starts to look like a mirror of you. The clients who needed a different style may have walked before signing, or quietly drifted after. That may all work if it is organic growth. But what if you acquired clients? What if your personality did not match your new clients? How can you mitigate that personality risk?
A team that lets each person work inside their own natural style tends to produce two things at once, a workplace people actually enjoy, and clients who feel genuinely taken care of.
No single advisor covers all of that. But the right team can.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Picture the office as a set of seats rather than a stack of tasks. There’s a concept from Jim Collins in Good to Great that gets quoted often, get the right people in the right seats. It applies just as well to a four person advisory office as it does to a Fortune 500 company. The director sets the strategy and makes the bold calls. The connector builds trust and brings the referrals in the door. The relationship manager protects continuity and remembers what matters to every client. The analyst and operations side gets the numbers, the portfolios, and the paperwork right. Four different jobs, four different people or teams, each one doing the piece they were actually built for.
When an office has that real mix, something changes. Clients feel it, even if they could never name it. They feel like every part of them is being taken care of. Emotionally. Financially. And, honestly, psychologically.
That is not an accident. That is a team built on purpose.
When we look at the personalities and communication styles laid out this way, it all sounds great on paper. But so many of us have been exactly where you might be right now, thinking, I am a one man shop, how am I supposed to afford three other people, let alone whole teams?
That question is not really about affordability. Some advisors already have more of these players in their office than they realize. Others could bring in the right hire tomorrow if they knew exactly which seat to fill. And some genuinely need a partner who already has these pieces in place. The only way to know which one is true for you is to stop and take a real inventory.
Take a Step Back
“An unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
Taking a step back is what lets you actually marshal your resources, to see whether you already have the right players in your office, whether you can afford to bring in new ones, or whether you need a partnership to fill in what is left.
Most advisors never get the chance to lift their head out of their books, or walk away from the conference table, long enough to really examine their own strengths and weaknesses. They are too busy calling clients, running analytics, and trying to market to ever ask themselves honestly which of these roles they fit and which ones they are quietly failing at.
And even fewer advisors ever get someone from the outside to look at their business and tell them the truth about where the gaps are.
That outside perspective is rare. It is also one of the most valuable things a growing advisor can get.
Where This Points
I did not arrive at any of this from a whiteboard exercise while getting an MBA. Gladstone Wealth Partners and Built By Advisors exist the way they do because the people behind them are advisors first. We hit these exact walls ourselves. We were the ones missing the marketing piece, or the operations person, or the analyst, or the relationship manager, and we learned the hard way how much that gap was costing us and our clients.
That experience is what shaped the platform. Not a corporate strategy session. The collective experience of hundreds of advisors who have lived the problem and looked for the fix because they needed it themselves, long before anyone else came asking. We knew DISC was needed before we knew what to call it.
All these roles and responsibilities can be aided with the right partnership. The right experience, partnership, and resources can help fill the seat that is missing. Maybe that is marketing. Maybe it is a relationship manager, an analyst, or a second set of eyes on strategy. Fill that seat, and the whole office finally reflects the full range of what your clients actually need. And you get to actually do what you do best.
The Real Question
Take an honest look at yourself and your business. Which of these roles are you? Which ones are you not? Once you can answer that, the next question answers itself.
Which seats in your office are empty?
Once you know the answer, you can see the next step. And that is worth a real conversation.
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Built By Advisors | Brian S. Hoffman, CRPC®, CEPA®
www.builtbyadvisors.com | [email protected] | 908.888.0007
Securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Gladstone Institutional Advisory, a Registered Investment Advisor. Built By Advisors, Gladstone Institutional Advisory LLC and LPL Financial are separate entities.