In my humble opinion 1% of $3mm sounds too high for an advisor fee just for setting up an asset allocation of mutual funds, which I think the general wisdom of this board advocates. I thought I would provide 2c worth of thoughts as to how I personally am getting value from an advisor.
At the beginning of this year, I felt my education could benefit from a professional financial advisor mainly because I needed to learn quite a lot: I had a no bonds, v.aggressive almost 100% small stock w some gearing and REIT mutual fund allocation and they would be focussed on our specific situation (current net worth allocation, priorities, goals, real estate and other biases) and be able to help me optimize return/risk and prevent me from making big mistakes. Unfortunately, I felt none of my friends or family (husband so totally not interested) were appropriate, so I yelped for a fee only advisor $700 per year... but I later find out he charges 1% total for funds he actively manages.
It is too soon to tell yet - I have not suddenly been transformed into an investment guru (despite my avid reading of this and other forums), but so far I feel I have received a lot of value meeting almost monthly for 1 to 1.5 hours. As previously mentioned - a good financial advisor checklist (not necessarily performed by them) includes many life aspects e.g. advanced health care directive, wills, tax, refinance of line of credit. However, the main benefit for me is it helps me work out how to make decisions - he addresses (ongoing) my thinking errors. I am a spreadsheet/numbers driven person, but find a lot of investment decisions involve crystal ball guestimates that cannot be answered by a simple spreadsheet e.g. will beach front property or cashflowing property or mortgage payoff or stock allocation return more over the next decade? I definitely treat him as one advisor (also accountant, forums) and have said no and deliberately delayed acting on some of his advice, but was quite happy to see how he handled $100k kinda like one portion of my as yet informal asset allocation - I expect him to come out better than some of my other choices, but not as well as my best returners.
On his side - he has $700 plus $100k under management since Mar. It has single stocks as well as funds I would never have purchased. I intend to watch and compare for a while - years (he was down until recently but so were/are some of my other investment choices).
In summary, I think I get value from my financial advisor because he fills in some of my many financial management gaps... your mileage may vary.... especially if you are like the top posters on this board who have no obvious gaps.