I am a 32 year veteran of the financial services industry. I spent 25 years at TIAA, 22 of them building and managing their independent advisor distribution channel. I worked with firms like StraightLine Group.
In 2022, I left corporate America and started my own consulting business. One of the first firms I worked with was StraightLine. I was helping them with some strategic projects. This eventually led them to offer me an opportunity to come on board full-time as their Chief Growth Officer and Financial Advisor a year ago. I continue to do some consulting work on the side.
StraightLine Group was founded on the concept of providing retirement education and counseling to clients. They had a traditional retail advisory business. They also worked with several record holders, primarily in the tax-exempt business and 401(k)s. They worked directly with participants to help manage their retirement plans and assets.
CRM: Salesforce Classic / Salesforce Lightning Experience
The firm has used Salesforce for a long time, long before I was here. We use the Salesforce Classic product. We also have access to their Salesforce Lightning Experience version, but it's tailored for our business.
We use it not only for tracking customer interactions, but also for email marketing and mass customer communications. This has been helpful. We've built a lot of functionality into Salesforce to help calculate our invoices and fees.
Customization is a big part of what we love about it. There are two sides to this, and other CRMs are better designed for independent consulting businesses. The way we've adapted Salesforce, we're tied to it now for better or for worse. But it works for us and we are happy with it. Now we're looking at other ways to use it, including its AI capabilities for building marketing campaigns.
Reporting and Portfolio Management: Private Wealth Systems
We are in the early stages of change from BridgeFT THE Private Wealth Systems.
When we first signed with BridgeFT, the owners of the firm found the interface simple. They felt at the time that they didn't need the cost and bells and whistles that come with more complex systems. BridgeFT had fantastic interoperability for creating our families and billing groups because we had multiple fee structures. This was helpful.
But we are unique in that we have three guardians, two of whom are record holders. This requires us to integrate our data collection system. And not necessarily your traditional data, because it's mostly on the tax-exempt side of those firms' business. It's a different structure, different map. It requires a good understanding of how to map that data to get the right reporting and performance numbers for your customers.
Next, we started talking to Private Wealth Systems. They mainly work in the family office space, which makes their capability more powerful than BridgeFT. Private Wealth Systems was in the process of looking to expand its business and begin serving the traditional RIA space. For lack of better terminology, they are trickling down the market to firms like ours. In the early stages, we felt comfortable talking to their leadership because of their understanding of data.
When advisors look at technology, you can do all the care you want, but you don't know what you're going to get until you get into bed with them. They can all say they can do a thousand things. Then you find you get into a relationship and find out it's not what they said it would be. It's the nature of the beast. I was comfortable with Private Wealth Systems because of the clientele they served. Family offices are certainly more complex than we are.
Trading and rebalancing: At home
We do most of our trade development in house and then process it directly through our bulk custody relationships.
Financial Planning: Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro
We are about a year into our relationship with Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro. We like it because it's from a goal-based perspective rather than a comprehensive planning perspective. For many of our clients, comprehensive planning is overkill. It's not like you can't do comprehensive planning with MoneyGuidePro. You certainly can. It's fabulous. Before I joined the firm, they had NaviPlan. I have nothing negative to say about NaviPlan. When we decided to go with Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro, we felt their software and interface was more user friendly for clients. It is a much more collaborative, continuous and iterative process. Twenty years ago, people would make a financial plan and get a big book with 100 pages. It was a static financial plan. We don't see it that way. This data evolves and becomes more accurate and reflective of their ability to achieve their goals. Objectives vary.
Document Management: Salesforce Classic / Salesforce Lightning Experience (custom) / AllCom
For document management, we use Salesforce. We do not use anything other than our cloud based system through our technology support firm for documents AllCom Global Services.
One challenge with Salesforce is that the more data you have out there, the more it costs. This led us to connect Salesforce to our data storage functionality through our shared drives.
Compatibility: RIA in a Box from COMPLETE
We work with RIA in a box BY COPE, which is relevant to advisors today. This is not just about your compliance process and risk management. RolloverAnalyzer is critical when we are working with clients and helping them complete a rollover from a retirement plan to an IRA. We are happy with that. We have recently received good feedback from several legal consultants on this.
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 possession? Contact Rob Burgess at (email protected).