I am the president and CEO of Willow Creek Wealth Management, an RIA in Sebastopol, California. It is about an hour north of San Francisco. It's a delightful place in the wine country of Sonoma County.
My background has always been in technology, operational efficiency and security. I have been here for about 10 years, but I have 18 years in financial services. I started here in 2014 as director of operations. In 2018, I became a partner. We then completed an important phase of our succession plan in 2021. That's when I stepped in as president and CEO.
CRM: AdvisorEngine
For CRM, we use AdvisorEngine, which was formerly Junxure Cloud. We are long time user of Junxure the product in all its iterations. We used Junxure Desktop before I came to Willow Creek. We moved to the cloud version in 2015. It was early. It was in beta then.
I look at our technology group as a hub and spoke configuration. I see CRM as the hub. We drive everything we do through CRM. We rely heavily on AdvisorEngine to run all of those processes. We have about 100 workflows in the system. We are constantly building and fixing them. We have been working on them since 2014, when we moved to their cloud version. This handles everything from simple check deposits to more complex tasks like full customer onboarding and everything in between.
The biggest game changer on the technology side for us in terms of efficiency and delivering consistent customer value has come through the effective use of CRM. We have well-documented back-office processes and are driving it through workflows. We ensure that things are done the same way in the same time frame by everyone involved. This helps you drive your consistent value proposition to your customers. It makes it more efficient if you're not jumping around trying to figure out how to do something every time. It is automated as much as possible.
Reporting, Portfolio Management, Trading and Rebalancing: Orion Advisor Solutions
We have gone through all the changes Orion has been seen over the past decade plus. Orion has always been a leader in the technology space. They have always put a lot of focus on their platform in building new functionalities and features. They continue to do so, which is one of the reasons we love Orion. We use many different features within Orion. In use Orion for reporting, billing, customer portal, trading, rebalancing and some of our compliance. We try to use everything we can on the Orion platform.
It's essential to make sure you're using it as fully as you can when you're looking to buy technology. Often, I talk to other firms and they are not fully utilizing all that is available to them through these platforms. All of these software platforms keep getting more expensive and they are always changing. We constantly look at the software we are using from a critical perspective. You need to make sure it is the best choice for you. Many firms take the shotgun approach of buying software and using 10% of it. It takes effort to look at the software and make sure you are using 90% plus of it. Get the value of the software you're paying for.
It is expensive. Of course I wasn't happy Orion raises their prices recently. Portfolio management is likely to be the most costly part of any firm's technology stack. It is for us too. It becomes more of a matter of alternatives as prices continue to rise. Am I getting the right value out of this platform as the price goes up? Am I getting all I can out of this software? Am I getting all the value I can out of it? These questions get murkier as things get more expensive. Orion is a perfect example of this. On the other hand, we are like that integrated in processes that the switching cost is high. I'm sure they know that too.
Financial Planning: Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro
We've been using MoneyGuidePro for over a decade. Our advisors love that system. It is straightforward and goal-oriented. It fits well with our investment philosophy and our approach to financial planning.
We integrate MoneyGuidePro with Orion. We can enable customers to provide basic information about their financial plans. This is fed by MoneyGuidePro into a tab on their client portal in Orion. Conversely, we also feed holdings data and account information from Orion to MoneyGuidePro. It makes it easy for advisors to update data in the financial plan with a few clicks from Orion.
Document Management: Laserfiche
Laserfiche is a great platform that does a lot of different things. Essential document management is one of them. It gives us additional functionality in document automation. We can build workflow processes within Laserfiche to drop files into a hot folder. These files will be read and filed correctly in client or reporting files. We can build these workflows to do different things. Depending on the type, we also capture many types of metadata in the files. It allows us to be creative things in search and automation.
We also connect Laserfiche back to CRM. It is one of the points of our CRM center. You can log into a client's record within AdvisorEngine. You can press the documents tab there. You see the customer document folder within Laserfiche. You can add and open files directly from AdvisorEngine, which is nice. We also link it to various record numbers within our system so we can extract, combine and query data in files.
Cyber Security: KnowBe4
In use KnowBe4 for ongoing cyber security training. They have an extensive library of videos and documents that we can put together into training packages that go out to our team quarterly. We can track that they have taken and passed the quizzes. It also has phishing testing. It uses real phishing emails that they have in their database. Can randomize them and hand them out to employees throughout the week. We do a full round of this every week for all of our employees. This goes back to our diligent thinking about phishing and email scams because it has become more sophisticated in the last years.
As told by reporter Rob Burgess and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of WealthManagement.com.
Want to tell us what's in your fortune? Contact Rob Burgess at (email protected).