I’m the president and CEO of Willow Creek Wealth Administration, an RIA in Sebastopol, Calif. It’s about an hour north of San Francisco. It’s a cool spot within the wine nation in Sonoma County.
My background has all the time been in know-how, operational effectivity and safety. I’ve been right here for about 10 years, however I’ve been in monetary companies for 18 years. I began right here in 2014 because the director of operations. In 2018, I grew to become a companion. Then we accomplished a major part of our succession plan in 2021. That’s after I stepped in because the president and CEO.
CRM: AdvisorEngine
For CRM, we use AdvisorEngine, which was previously Junxure Cloud. We’re long-time customers of the Junxure product in all its iterations. We used Junxure Desktop manner again earlier than I got here to Willow Creek. We transitioned to the cloud model in 2015. That was early. It was in beta then.
I take a look at our tech stack as a hub-and-spoke setup. I see the CRM because the hub. We drive all the pieces we do by CRM. We rely closely on AdvisorEngine to drive all these processes. We now have about 100 workflows within the system. We’re constantly constructing and tweaking these. We’ve been engaged on these since 2014, once we moved to their cloud model. That drives all the pieces from easy verify deposits to extra complicated duties like full shopper onboarding and all the pieces in between.
The most important sport changer on the tech aspect for us by way of effectivity and offering constant worth to shoppers has come by the efficient use of CRM. We now have well-documented back-office processes and are driving it by workflows. We guarantee issues are achieved in the identical manner in the identical timeframe by everybody concerned. It helps you drive your constant worth proposition to your shoppers. It makes it extra environment friendly in case you aren’t bouncing round making an attempt to determine the best way to do one thing each time. It’s automated as a lot as potential.
Reporting, Portfolio Administration, Buying and selling & Rebalancing: Orion Advisor Options
We’ve been by all of the modifications Orion has seen over the past decade-plus. Orion has all the time been a pacesetter within the know-how area. They’ve all the time put lots of give attention to their platform in constructing out new performance and options. They proceed to try this, which is among the causes we like Orion. We use lots of totally different options inside Orion. We use Orion for reporting, billing, shopper portal, buying and selling, rebalancing and a few of our compliance. We attempt to use all the pieces we presumably can on the Orion platform.
It’s important to be sure you’re using it as absolutely as you’ll be able to when you’re taking a look at buying know-how. Usually, I discuss to different companies and they’re not absolutely using all the pieces they’ve accessible to them by these platforms. All these software program platforms proceed to get costlier and they’re all the time altering. We continually take a look at the software program that we’re utilizing from a crucial perspective. It’s essential to make certain it’s one of the best answer for you. Many companies take the shotgun strategy to shopping for software program and utilizing 10% of it. It takes effort to have a look at software program and make sure you’re utilizing 90%-plus of it. Get the worth out of the software program that you just’re paying for.
It’s costly. I definitely wasn’t joyful about Orion elevating their costs lately. Portfolio administration is probably going the most expensive piece of the know-how stack for each agency. It’s for us, as effectively. It turns into extra of a query of options as the costs proceed to extend. Am I getting ample worth out of this platform as the value rises? Am I using all the pieces I can from this software program? Am I extracting all the worth I can out of it? These questions do grow to be cloudier as issues grow to be costlier. Orion is an ideal instance of that. Alternatively, we’re so built-in into processes that the switching value is gigantic. I’m certain they know that, too.
Monetary Planning: Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro
We’ve used MoneyGuidePro for over a decade. Our advisors like that system. It’s easy and goals-based. It aligns effectively with our funding philosophy and our strategy to monetary planning.
We combine MoneyGuidePro with Orion. We will allow it for shoppers to provide primary details about their monetary plans. That feeds from MoneyGuidePro right into a tab on their shopper portal on Orion. From the opposite path, we additionally feed holdings information and account data from Orion into MoneyGuidePro. It makes it straightforward for advisors to replace information within the monetary plan with a few clicks from Orion.
Doc Administration: Laserfiche
Laserfiche is a big platform that does many various issues. Important doc administration is a kind of. It provides us extra performance in automating paperwork. We will construct workflow processes inside Laserfiche to drop information right into a sizzling folder. These information can be learn and filed accurately in shopper or reporting folders. We will construct these workflows to do various things. Relying on the sort, we additionally seize many sorts of metadata on information. It permits us to be artistic issues in looking and automation.
We additionally tie Laserfiche again into the CRM. It’s one of many spokes of our CRM hub. You possibly can go right into a shopper’s document inside AdvisorEngine. You possibly can hit the paperwork tab in there. You see the shopper’s doc folder inside Laserfiche. You possibly can add and open information immediately from AdvisorEngine, which is sweet. We additionally tie it into totally different document numbers inside our system so we will pull out, mix and seek for information in information.
Cybersecurity: KnowBe4
We use KnowBe4 for ongoing cybersecurity coaching. They’ve an intensive library of movies and paperwork we will put collectively in coaching packages that exit to our workforce each quarter. We will monitor that they’ve taken and handed the quizzes. It additionally has phishing testing. It makes use of actual phishing emails that they’ve of their database. It could actually randomize these and ship them to workers all through the week. We do a full spherical of that each week for all our workers. That goes again to our diligent mindset about e mail phishing and scams as a result of that has grow to be extra subtle up to now few years.
As advised to reporter Rob Burgess and edited for size and readability. The views and opinions aren’t consultant of the views of WealthManagement.com.
Wish to inform us what’s in your wealthstack? Contact Rob Burgess at [email protected].
