Advisor Compensation: How to Pay Your Team the Right Way (Ep. 34)

Most advisory firm owners know they need to pay their people well. What's harder to figure out is whether they're paying them the right way; and in a market where the go-to compensation benchmarks have largely disappeared, even knowing how much to pay has become its own challenge.In this episode of The Fine Print, David Grau Jr. sits down with Julia Sexton, CVA, Director of Team Solutions at SRG, to unpack the full picture of compensation design for advisory firms. The conversation covers why production-based compensation quietly undermines team-based goals, how farmers and hunters on your team require fundamentally different compensation structures, and why the grid-based payout model creates a margin problem that only gets worse over time.Julia walks through the BBP model (base, bonus, and profit) and how eligibility criteria can protect against fee discounting and other behaviors that erode firm value. The episode also covers how to back-test compensation changes before rolling them out, how to create a career path that frees up capacity without recruiting expensive lateral hires, and why future-proofing your compensation model now means fewer headaches every year down the road.