Most advisory firms pour an immense amount of resources into hunting for new clients—refreshing their branding and implementing new marketing strategies to capture new households. That’s not a bad approach to business development—but it’s also probably not the optimal one.

Instead, your biggest growth opportunity is very likely to be found among the top existing clients you’re already serving.

The reason: The average advisor today manages only about 44% of their clients’ investable assets. That means more than half of the wealth belonging to people you already work with—and who presumably like you, trust you and pay you fees—is being managed by someone other than you or sitting in accounts you don’t know about.

Our advice: Ease up on hunting for new clients and put more effort into harvesting the opportunities that are right in front of you through your existing relationships.

4 gaps to close

Why is advisors’ wallet share so low? Cathy McBreen, managing principal of wealth management research at CEG Insights, identifies four gaps in advisors’ approach that results in clients not getting what they want from their advisors.

1. Communication. Advisors are communicating with clients more than ever, but clients are tuning out. Example: 85% of investors never want to receive a blog from their advisor. 88% never want social media posts. And more than half never want text messages. Instead, 55% of clients want quarterly phone calls and 49% went annual in- person meetings.

2. Critical services. Many clients either aren’t getting many of the critical services they want from their advisors, or those clients don’t recognize that they’re getting those services. One example: While 76% of clients say estate planning is an essentially important service, just 39% of advisors say their clients value that service. That’s a 26 percentage point gap!

The implication for wallet share is obvious. If a client has an estate planning issue that’s not addressed by you, they go find someone to handle it. Every unmet service need is an open door for a competitor—hurting your wallet share.

3. Technology. A full 74% of advisors are enthusiastic about using AI, but only 16% of investors share that enthusiasm. That’s a five to one gap. While firms are investing heavily in cutting edge technology, clients are asking for something much simpler—such as easy site navigation, fewer clicks and account aggregation that actually works for them.

4. Intergenerational. Advisors believe 35% of heirs are heavily involved in family financial planning, but it’s actually around 9%. That's a four to one misperception. A quarter of wealthy families report that the heirs have zero involvement, no conversations, no planning, no engagement whatsoever.

The impact of these gaps could be tremendous. Consider a practice managing 150 households with an average of $2 million in assets under management per household. That’s $300 million under management. And say they’re managing 44% of the available assets. That means those same 150 households collectively have approximately $677 million in total investible wealth. So the advisor is capturing $300 million of that, leaving potentially $377 million more held by other advisors or self-managed or sitting in accounts that the advisor doesn't even know about.

Action steps

To get started on closing these gaps and capturing more wallet share, consider two action steps you can implement right away:

1. Shift to a quarterly value communication model. Stop your blogging and social media posting, and replace them with substantive quarterly calls and an annual in-person review. This will free up a great deal of your time while also communicating with clients as they tend to prefer.

2. Deliver the high-value services that clients actually want. Review your clients’ estate plans, tax planning and other key issues of importance to them beyond investments. If necessary, coordinate with trusted experts in those areas of specialization. What’s more, make that work visible. You may already doing more than your clients realize—so let them know the results and the impact of that work on their financial lives. Spell out the bottom-line benefits you’re delivering, clearly and compellingly. When clients see and understand the comprehensive work that you're doing, the case then for consolidating held-away assets becomes obvious.