How to leverage workflow automation to maximize efficiency and enterprise value

The best two-person teams in the wealth management business are those in which partners have different strengths and set up business operations to play to those strengths. Semper Augustus Investments Group LLC is just such a business.

President and Chief Investment Officer Christopher Bloomstran, a Chartered Financial Analyst, takes a value-driven approach in his fundamental equity and industry research at the firm, which was founded in 1998 and now manages $175 million in assets. He is based in St. Louis.

In Highlands Ranch, Colo., partner Chad Christensen, a Certified Public Accountant, is responsible for the daily operations of the firm, which includes oversight of compliance, security trading, the firm’s systems and managing its two employees.

Wanting to stay small yet be able to add clients and assets under management, the partners decided to automate their processes. They quickly realized, however, that they really didn’t have any processes.

“From one time to the next, we didn’t remember how we did anything,” Christensen said. “We needed consistency across time, and we decided the simpler we made a process for the end user — whether that person is one of us or a client — the better, because simpler makes it faster and speed is perceived as high quality.”

Speaking at the recent Laserfiche Empower 2016 conference in Long Beach, Calif., Christensen explained how he and his staff took a long, hard look at how they did things in order to create the step-by-step processes that ultimately were automated.

“We tore apart the way we worked,” he said, noting the irony of having to use hundreds of sticky notes in order to eventually get rid of paper. “By applying objectives to our processes, we were able to systematize more work. We wanted to automate recurring processes in compliance and reporting, of course, since a lot of that work lends itself to efficiencies. But we looked at what we had always thought were ad hoc processes, and the more we analyzed the more we came to see that many of them were recurring processes in hiding. Most were customer service-related issues and responses to client requests. There were more of these processes that could be automated than we originally thought.”

As Christensen put it, and we discussed in an earlier column Tips for Successfully Implementing Adviser Technology, taking a hard look at process was essentially about discovering the pain points in the firm.

“When you see clutter, that’s pain. When we hired our first employee and I was explaining specific job tasks, I started to recognize the breakdowns. If you ever want to delegate, you need processes, which essentially are ‘if, then’ steps in moving work along. Going through that forces you to think and make decisions,” he said.

Today, the firm has automated all its key business processes through Laserfiche Workflow. Now, every document the firm enters into its Laserfiche system carries information about the document — so-called metadata — that includes three essential components: the date, the document type and the client’s name. That information is placed in white type in the upper right hand corner of letters and other documents, making the coding invisible to the recipient yet enabling all documents to be easily searchable.

“As documents move through the system, we send notification emails telling our people what has to be done next,” Christensen said, adding that the firm estimates that a one-time, eight-hour investment in planning saves one hour of labor a month in perpetuity.

Aside from building greater efficiency and enabling the firm to grow without adding staff or overburdening them, Christensen believes that automating his advisory business not only has empowered him as a manager, but also has helped build a scalable business with greater enterprise value.

“Our scalable business comes from workflow process improvements,” he explained. “Before, we had a pile of one-off jobs. But after creating the building blocks of approvals, routing, metadata assignment and notification emails, we had workflows that could be automated. By investing in process, we now can accept new clients and avoid hiring; we’ve built a scalable business.”

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