Leveraging real-time insights for business owners

Within the wealth management industry, a holistic approach is gaining prominence. Over the last decade, advisors have moved toward a more comprehensive understanding of their clients’ financial landscapes and away from one-size-fits-all approaches to wealth management.

Mike Boroughs, managing partner at Fortis Capital Management in Bellevue, Washington, says that for a long time the industry was plagued with myopia, with advisors focused narrowly on investment accounts and looking at nothing else.

Now the times are a-changing.

“I think the industry is [becoming] more and more holistic, which is awesome. And so, as we integrate that approach with business owners and founders, a big piece of it is understanding their business, its impact on their net worth, and helping them make real-time decisions about their business more effectively,” he says.

As an example, Boroughs cites a business owner who’s also a contractor. They build custom homes and just landed a really big contract. While they were in negotiations, they wanted to be able to make real-time decisions in terms of concessions – either through Zoom or Teams or even a phone call – to understand how any changes the client wanted would affect their profitability on the contract.

Boroughs says it begins with understanding the project and having a cash-flow model built for it so the contractor can make data-backed decisions.

“We can build out a custom model just for them specifically for this project, with the key inputs linked throughout the rest of the model. This allows our client to update his model in real time, and he’s negotiating with his client,” he said. “They could have this model up on another screen and just change those key inputs to understand whether they were willing to give that concession or not in the negotiation. Being able to give those types of real-time insights and tools for business owners to be able to use so they can make decisions faster, we think is super-important.”

It’s also reflective of the way the industry is moving in general. More tailored approaches to asset management are seeing advisors use tech to build out comprehensive and wholly unique plans for individual clients. Recognizing that businesses often have data scattered across various platforms and formats, Fortis has also invested in a developer who creates custom dashboards and software products.

"We find that people do better when they don’t look at their investment accounts every moment and aren’t getting emotionally charged by seeing the swings in the market,” Boroughs says. “However, when it comes to making decisions about your business, having custom reporting and real-time data is so important.”