It’s Friday.

Unlike most Fridays, on this one we know much more about how vital NVIDIA is to the future of technology — at least from a shareholder perspective.

In my world, this week has felt like the calm before the storm as I gear up for a busy few weeks on the road.

Here’s what I’ll be covering in this week’s Connected Advisor.

1. The Future of Firm Operations - Automation, Integration and Introspection

2. The Wealth Management Growth Formula - Brett Bernstein

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3. The Past, Present, and Future According to NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang

4. Stanford's Hackathon Showcases the Promising Future of AI

5. Milemarker on the Road

Here we go.

The Future of Firm Operations - Automation, Integration, and Introspection (Part 1)

“If we can scale to X of clients, we will be able to Y.”

In this age-old fill-in-the-blank equation, firm leaders look to elevate their firm.

Advisory firms now exist in the data-driven, automation era, but the sad truth is that most don’t live in this era.

Things are still clunky.

Systems are too complicated to use.

Support is, at best, spotty and at worst infuriating.

The new order of business has turned dependable solutions into providers focusing more on turning your clients into their clients.

On top of all this, your team, inspired when they joined you, often spends their days doing increasing amounts of administrative work that can steal the joy out of even the most meaningful tasks.

Hopefully, not all of this rings true for you.

Regardless, the future remains ripe for disruption.

So, what can your firm’s operations actually look like?

This week, I’ll walk through three short-term things we can do to transform our firm today that will set us up for a more effective operating model.

Get Serious About Modern Workflows

There seems to be a lot of talk about workflows but much less work to establish or adopt them. Like so much of our work life, there is a gap between the idea of what workflows can do for you and how your workflows truly, well…work.

Theories are a great place to start. Evaluating how your team is operating today is worthwhile. Building a bridge between your ideal and reality is a difficult process. Change management is no joke. You want to take a long, hard look at what you can do to make your advisors actually follow a usable workflow.

What will they choose over emailing, calling, or texting you?

What will give your advisors the confidence to follow the path that you have created for them over how they’ve been getting work done?

Here are three characteristics of great workflows:

Speed - If you always need to open a manual to go hunting for how to do something, humans will inevitably throw out the manual and do it their own way. The greater the success they achieved doing work their own way, the harder it will be to leave their old ways behind.

One way to measure the speed of your workflows are against the e-commerce checkout experience.

Even in a world built for the fastest transaction experience, here are the facts:

• The average cart abandonment rate is 70.19% as of 2023.

• The average e-commerce conversion rate is 2.04% as of August 2023.

• Mobile cart abandonment was 12% higher than desktop cart abandonment as of 2022.
  

  https://boldist.co/marketing-strategy/ecommerce-checkout-best-practices/

While your team is incentivized to push through to the end of their tasks by something other than a package arriving at their house, they are still operating with similar levels of workflow fatigue while they attempt to open an account, prepare a proposal, place a trade or invite your clients to the next event. Remember to keep it simple, streamlined and speedy.

Integration - Your workflows are at their worst when they require people to leave a session and go gather details. The best workflows pull data in from the key systems that advisors rely on when they are needed and allow the team to get their work done with ease. Having integration on lock allows you to graduate to automation, which can help you find scale.

The best systems automatically inform all interested parties if a request is received and assigned. If an issue is stuck, it sends notifications automatically. You’ll probably never be able to program a workflow to resolve every issue, but they should help eliminate the frustration of uncertainty and put your advisors and support team members in the driver’s seat of expectation management.

To get the most out of your integrations, you (or your most operations-minded team member) need to understand what data is available and how you can start working with it. For many of us, we have to more information about how robust our integrations are so that we can create the best possible outcomes.

Personalization - Advisory firms are the poster-children of personalization.

From how you get paid to how you pay your advisors and every report you like to view to keep tabs on the health of your business, no two advisory firms do anything exactly the same. Nearly every advisor has their own unique way of viewing each aspect of the business.

The best workflows help you acknowledge this unavoidable fact without creating constant exceptions. You want, and I’d say need, to keep at least 80% of your work following common, normative workflows.

You can absolutely use data to help support the fastest way from point A to point Z and, where unavoidable, create isolated workflows that are only ever visible to the exceptional cases where there is no alternative.

This is some of the heaviest lifting of running a business. If you’re looking for a guide, my team is happy to discuss how to do this well with you.

Next week, I will turn my attention to the future state - How the work we can do today will compound as we enter the time to come.

On the Pod

Episode 030: In this week’s episode of Milemarker’s The Connected Advisor Podcast, Kyle talks with Brett Bernstein, CEO & Co-Founder at XML Financial Group.

Brett talks with Kyle about the importance of technology and innovation in wealth management and the need for firms to invest in people, compliance, and marketing. Brett shares his insights on the industry's future, including the consolidation trends and the shift toward growth. He also emphasizes the value that financial advisors bring to clients and the need for firms to adapt to the preferences of younger generations.

Key takeaways from this week’s episode:

1. Wealth management firms must invest in technology and innovation to meet the expectations of younger clients.

2. Mergers and acquisitions will continue to be prevalent in the industry, driven by the aging advisor population and the need for succession planning.

3. The future of the wealth management industry will require firms to invest in people, technology, compliance, and marketing to stay competitive and capture new opportunities.

The episode is available now on your favorite podcast platform as well as a video version on YouTube. While there, please don’t forget to Download, Like, and Subscribe.

The Past, Present, and Future According to NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang

Hopefully your week went really well.

Jensen Huang just had a week for the ages.

The Acquired podcast recently did an episode on NVIDIA, and the record earnings of Jensen’s company may merit a listen to see how this company has become one of the most relevant companies in the world today.

Stanford's Hack-a-thon Showcases the Promising Future of AI

I came across this feed of some of Stanford’s student hack-a-thon highlights.

From a robotic arm controlled by natural language that provides medicine to the elderly/physically disabled to an AI storyteller who live-generates photos while the story is being told, many of these projects leverage AI.

It’s fun to see the creative ideas that students at Stanford and worldwide come up with that seamlessly integrate AI to address real-world challenges and push the boundaries of technological innovation.

Check out the feed below on X:

Milemarker on the Road

Catch our team on the road at the following events or cities:

1. February 26-27 — NYC

2. February 26-28 — Scottsdale, AZ

3. February 28-March 2 — Omaha, NE

4. March 11-12 — Naples, FL

5. March 12-15 — San Diego, CA

6. March 18-19 — Tampa, FL

If you’re in any of those cities and want to arrange a meeting time, reply to this email, and we’ll get something on the calendar.

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Enjoy your weekend! See you next week.

Written by Jud Mackrill

Edited by Amy Simpson