Bang for your buck

What I have found for our firm when we're looking for new technology is the best way to make it successful is really to have it be a collaborative effort. So, we learned early on that if we bring in all of the people involved and that means anybody who's gonna be using the technology that we're looking at, when we bring them in on the decision making progress, we get a lot more buy-in and we get really great feedback from the beginning. So, I think, talking with other people from other firms, sometimes it's, you know, one or two-person decision and what I have found really worked great for me as to open it up and get perspectives from a number of people in the office. And not only that that help us, think of things that maybe we wouldn't have considered but it helped me really get buy-in from the advisors and from our professional staff and our support staff, they feel like they were part of the process and so they tend to wanna use it more. -Well, if I was considering their next purchase decision, there's a lot of things they should consider. One, I think that they should start with a plan. They're very good in creating financial plans for their clients, they should also create a technology plan for their own business and determining what exactly, you know, they're trying to creat with their client service experience. And based on that, what do they need to have in place to be able to make that experience whether that's a high touch environment or is it online automated? You know, what is their core service delivery and then work backwards from that? And I think it'll be very cleared to them that they need several pieces of technology just to get going. For example, like a CRM to keep track of their custom information, some sort of reporting mechanism to be able to provide information to their clients. And then some sort of content managing system to keep track of it all and be able to search and retrieve it to solve compliance processes. I think within those three and then partnering with their custody and their broker dealer to fill in the gaps, they should have a very highly efficient type of office. It's just a matter of having a vision, creating a plan and then going out to find the best in breed to make it happen. And of course, this is a great conference to do that because there's literally, really 100 vendors here and I think they'll find more than what they're looking for. -The process for understanding if we got we were getting and if we're using it the right way, that can be challenging. That's a top one. What I have found works is I have a lot of open discussion with everybody at our firm. I spend a lot of time face-to-face. I always joke that being in operations, you're partly a therapist because you sit down and you ask how are things working, how are you feeling and just doing what you wanted it to do. Do you-- you know, I ask people all the time, is this certain tool making your life easier? Or is it making your life harder? And then, you know, when answering that question we get into specifics. So, I think just having an open dialog and then internally I do a lot of auditing, so I run reports and I look at usage and I look at-- are we collecting the data that we think we're collecting? And then we are using it in a way that's gonna be the most powerful? We've also started really talking with our clients, you know, or is this having an impact on you? Because ultimately that's why we're, you know, buying this technology so that we can offer more and better service for our clients, so we ask them.