The great architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe left a rich heritage of buildings, among them the TD Centre in downtown Toronto. Another legacy is the expression "Less is more", which summarized his minimalist approach to design."Less is more" also has application to the way financial advisors think about their business. For example, less is more applies to the amount of time advisors spend talking in meetings and the length of emails and letters we should send to clients.

Very often, it also applies to the number of clients who advisors choose to serve. At the recent Top Advisor Summit in Toronto, a number of the speakers talked about the evolution of their businesses - and the positive impact of raising the minimum asset threshold for clients and in several cases reducing the number of investors they work with in order to focus on larger clients.

Advisors talked about three benefits to having a well defined minimum for clients:

• 1. It enables you to offer a consistent, streamlined service offering, providing higher standards of service and proactive communication to all clients.
• 2. By paring back your book, you maintain focus and avoid smaller clients siphoning off time and energy which your best clients need and deserve. Sometimes the number of support staff and investment in infrastructure can be reduced as a result.
• 3. It positions you with prospective clients as the kind of advisor who serves successful investors like them - and also frees up time to focus on meeting with prospects, one of the highest and best uses of times for successful financial advisors.

The right minimum will vary with advisors - the point is not what your minimum should be, but rather that you should have a minimum. One guideline is to rank clients by asset level and look at the assets of the client half way down the list - and consider using that as your threshold. (Typically, the assets of clients above the median level will account for well over 80% of your assets).

Even advisors just coming into the business should consider having a minimum asset threshold for new clients - at a time when the priority needs to be on building a client base, small clients can suck up lots of time with little prospect of reward.

There are two steps to establishing a minimum asset threshold in your practice.

The first is to adopt a minimum for new clients - while there will always be exceptions for referrals to family members by your best clients, this is comparatively easy. All it means, in the words of the advice to teens on drug use is: "Just say no". Saying no doesn't mean having to leave prospects out in the cold - you can always refer them to other advisors who aren't as far along in their business and have lower thresholds as a result.

More difficult is cutting the cord with existing clients. Life is full of choices - you may prefer to avoid having those sometimes difficult conversations, in which case you risk smaller clients undermining your ability to move your business forward as quickly as you'd like. For those who are interested in pruning back their client base, the May 1 post "Parting company with difficult clients" provides some guidelines and a model letter.

The Top Advisor Summit gave those in attendance lots of food for thought - high on the list was applying the "Less is more" maxim when it comes to managing an advisor's business.