At the ripe old age of 31, Blair duQuesnay already is both a certified financial planner and chartered financial analyst.
She also epitomizes the new breed of adviser who is highly mobile and can conduct all of her day-to-day work from a securely connected wireless laptop.
“All my software systems are cloud-based, and the whole business runs on my Mac,” said Ms. duQuesnay, founder and chief executive of Ignite Investments and Planning.
While she does have another of Apple Inc.'s most popular devices, an iPad, she tends to use it only for client presentations — when the spirit moves her.
“With all the data input we have to do, touch screens tend to slow me down more than a mouse and keyboard do,” she said.
That said, she does have a subscription for the tablet-oriented screen-sharing application Join.Me that she uses with prospects and clients. That application is especially suited for mobile workers because it is so easy to start meetings — just a couple of clicks on the part of the initiator and a simple ID number entered by the client or prospect.
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And while most of her client base is local and visits her in person in her New Orleans office, she has a handful of out-of-state clients whom she has never met and with whom she works only via the ether.
Documents don't slow down Ms. duQuesnay much, either. She scans everything and then offers the originals back to the clients, transmitting the e-version to her custodian, Scottrade Inc.
All of her devices are social-media-enabled, as well.
TWITTER SAVVY
A fan of Hootsuite, she can tweet (Twitter is her favorite network) from her HTC smartphone, running the Android operating system, or from either of her Apple devices.
“I have a system. It's not perfect, and I have no targeted number of tweets per day, but it all tends to flow from my blog, which I write entries for once a week,” Ms. duQuesnay said.
Early morning or lunchtime are her preferred times to write or tweet, and she does have Hootsuite set automatically to tweet her latest post no matter where she is, and repeat the process five to 10 times to ensure the word gets out on what she has written.
“Then I have several sites that syndicate my work, and it will also get sent from there,” she said. Sites that pick up her tweets include Business Insider, TheStreet.com and Morningstar Perspectives.
“I get a lot out of my conversations on Twitter and have even met clients there, though [the network] is more about spreading the word or listening” than true two-way communication, she added.
