Why does your firm buy new technology? 

It could be for a whole list of different reasons, right? 

You might add a new client portal because you want to enhance your digital client experience, and making sure you have an easily accessible online portal is a great place to start.

You might purchase trading and rebalancing software so you can help your staff get hours back every quarter by rebalancing with one click instead of manually updating hundreds of spreadsheets. 

It’s common for technology companies to talk a lot about efficiency and saving time when you use their software. But the key element of implementing technology that doesn’t get talked about often is that technology should help you establish—and stick to—repeatable business management processes. 

Adding technology and then continuing to follow a different process every time a different client asks for something doesn’t save time. It just makes you inefficient with technology instead of inefficient without it.

So in today’s blog, we’ll talk about how to use your technology to structure better business management processes so you can organize your practice and grow with confidence.

5 Ways Business Management Processes Improve Your Firm

There’s not a single business on Earth that can grow well if it’s disorganized behind the scenes. If you can’t quickly onboard new employees and new clients, that initial first impression is difficult to overcome. And if you can’t track when your last communication with a long-term client was, it’s highly likely they won’t be a long-term client much longer.

By creating business management processes that allow you to check off items as you work, or schedule new actions based on other actions being completed, your team will quickly know how to handle just about any client situation with the click of a button.

At one point in time, business processes were almost exclusively tied to a firm’s CRM, but that is no longer true. Financial planning applications, dictation software, and other types of advisor-purpose solutions allow for the creation and tracking of unique processes within their systems. You simply have to know what’s available to you so you can make the most of the technology you have.

With all that said, here are five specific ways your firm improves when you implement process-driven technology.

• Your entire organization follows the same flow whenever the same situation repeats itself
  Your team can’t become more efficient when every person is following a different process when a client makes a request. Recording your processes keeps everyone inside your organization on the same page so you can deliver exactly the same service to every client.

• You can more easily train new staff
  Ever start a job with little to no training? Or maybe even have one coworker tell you how they like to do something, only to have another coworker give you their own (different) way to do that same thing? As a business owner, you want to avoid those situations in your advisory firm. Recorded and automated business management processes allow you to standardize your firm’s culture for everyone who joins.

• You know who owns each action in a given situation
  Client service suffers when one person expects someone else to do a task—and that other person either is unaware or forgets to do it. Processes bring clarity to every scenario so your team doesn’t accidentally overlook something that needs to be done for a client.

• You can prove to compliance (and auditors) that you’ve done your work
  It’s a simple fact: You need to record client communication, and prove that you’ve done what you tell auditors you’ve done. Having processes in place gives you an embedded record-keeping system so you can prove that work is being done and being done according to the right standards.

• Your team can stay ahead of due dates
  There’s no worse situation than to come into work, look at your task list for the day, and realize that a large item that’s due in five hours hasn’t even been started yet. Automated, technology-based processes allow you to track items and tasks by due date so you don’t get those kinds of nasty surprises.

Business Management Processes Built by Advisors

Even with all their advantages, we know that building those processes into your firm can be a daunting task.

When you partner with WealthPlan, though, you don’t have to build your processes on your own. In addition to walking the walk for the last several decades through our RIA, we’ve also built advisor-specific processes based on feedback we’ve sought from advisor assistants all over the country, and the industry’s leading custodians as well.

When you want to get started, chances are many of the processes your firm needs to follow are already created and can be immediately plugged into your business when you start using our recommended technology suite. 

So, ready to start? 

Click here to schedule time to learn more.

By Sarah Mclean, Director of Strategic Development