How a disaster sparked a business turnaround

In 2007, advisor Michael Fox took a trip to Disney World he’ll never forget. It’s not what he discovered in the Magic Kingdom that was so memorable — it was what he found when he returned to his Cinnaminson, N.J., home: a flood in the basement office of his firm, Financial Planning Work$.

While he was away on vacation, the water line to his refrigerator had burst, sending a cascade into the basement and submerging all the records of his advisory firm. Given his credentials as a Chartered Financial Consultant and a Chartered Life Underwriter, Fox had made sure his business continuation insurance was more than adequate. But while paying for the recreation of all his documents wouldn’t be an issue, how to go about actually doing it was a puzzle. All his files, which had filled 100 bankers’ boxes and 15 four-drawer cabinets, were sitting in garbage bags piled 4 -feet high in his garage.

As he explained in a session at the recent Laserfiche Empower 2016 conference in Long Beach, Calif., Fox says he wasn’t coming up with any answers. Then he remembered a past conversation with Zaheer Master, president of Accelerated Information Systems, a content and document management firm that specializes in wealth management. Fox asked for Master’s advice.

Rather than recreating another paper-based recordkeeping system, Fox and his insurance company agreed to follow Master’s suggestion and go electronic with content and document management software from Laserfiche. The first step in the process involved converting the damaged paper documents, so Fox turned to a company that uses freeze- drying to restore soaked historical documents for museums. Unfortunately, when the salvaged documents came back, they were too dog-eared, wrinkled and moldy to be photocopied in any kind of reasonable time frame by Fox and his team of temps. So he sent everything to Staples and for $17,000 the mountain of freeze-dried paper was converted into 37 bankers’ boxes of single-sided copies. From there, Fox was able to enter the documents into his new Laserfiche electronic system.

“Zaheer knew our pain and helped us every step of the way,” Fox said. “And since he is so familiar with all the possibilities of the Laserfiche software, he helped us in ways I never could have imagined.”

Today, Fox uses the Laserfiche Enterprise Content Management system as the backbone of his business. Like the advisers featured in a previous column, Tips for Successfully Implementing Adviser Technology, Fox scans every document into the system and uses templates for all his business processes as discussed.

“Let me give you an example,” he said. “Finra requires a folder for all incoming and outgoing correspondence. I was scanning everything we sent out, but Zaheer suggested that we create electronic stationery and use a template for outgoing correspondence. Now we create all our outgoing correspondence in the system and have a record of everything, which is easily searchable and accessible. Using a template, we can designate correspondence as either incoming or outgoing as well as whether or not it is securities related.”

Fox says he is working toward a completely paperless office, and credits Master and his team for helping him think through and improve his processes, which is making his firm more efficient and profitable. In July, Fox completed a transition from using a server based at Master’s firm (where he had been storing data temporarily after deciding not to buy a new server of his own) to Laserfiche’s new cloud-based offering.

“Laserfiche and Zaheer both bent over backwards to help us with the transition,” Fox said. “By going to the cloud, I’ve eliminated another IT headache and the cost of backups.”

Because the flood led to the total makeover of his operations, Fox says it inadvertently turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to his business, helping improve not only efficiency and profitability, but also compliance and resiliency. And to prove his point, he recounts what happened when he was away on vacation in 2014.

“This time, my washing machine overflowed, and there was another flood in my basement,” he said. “But this one was only 3 inches deep and we were prepared. In renovating after the first flood, we moved the power and communications lines up to chair- rail level. And with all our records being stored and maintained electronically, the second flood was nothing.”

For more information on implementing adviser technology, watch the video Keys to Combatting Compliance Constraints. and visit the Laserfiche Enterprise Content Management microsite.