Crowdsourcing Success

Happy Saturday!

This past week, when I received the email that Josh Brown and Michael Batnick had invited Jason Pereira to join them on “The Unlock” to talk about tech stacks… I was interested to say the least.

This post is going to be a little different - kind of a play-by-play commentary on the video. If you’d like to watch for yourself, I’ll link it at the bottom.

• The video kicks off with an ad for Wealthbox. Call it influencer marketing or audience hi-jacking, this is good marketing. To get one of the top voices in the industry to read that “Wealthbox is the #1 rated CRM software for advisors…” including calling Redtail and Salesforce “clunky”, smart.
  

• If you don’t know Jason Pereira, I first heard about him called “The Kitces of Canada” and he’s becoming more well-known in the USA too for a masterful knowledge of advisortech in both countries, including when it makes sense to cross the border and pursue a new market.
  
  Also, I don’t really know that much about how the code under the hood really works, including APIs and all the other stuff. I get the impression Jason does.
  

• How are advisors spending their “tech budgets”… Do you have a tech budget? At what size do firms have an actual budget/limit on what they’re willing to spend on tech? I think the % of revenue a firm spends on tech actually decreases the larger it gets. So its the little guys getting suckered into buying all these specialty offerings. No offense. I’m included. :)
  

• A lot of the origin stories in our space start at the big bad broker/dealer or selling insurance, and eventually lead to the purer, freer, more fiduciary independent RIA model… Or is there something else going on?
  

• Jason: “I left that world, despising it, quite honestly…”
  

• Josh goes on to say, “so now you’re an independent advisor & content creator… like us.” It’s interesting how technology, the internet, the PC and mobile phone - have made content creation accessible to everyone, a way to have 1-to-many conversations with… listeners, readers… an audience.
  

• Josh: “It’s really not until the last 10 years that financial advisors have started to think of themselves as technology-buying entrepreneurs.”

Jason: “You have better odds of finding the thing that best fits your offer, and your philosophy, and your belief and what you want to do for clients…”

Aka - Tyrant

He goes on… “You can still run a very bare bones business with only 3 or 4 pieces of software”

Some might argue this is better.

Now financial advisors spend half their time demoing, implementing, and fighting their technology. So how much time has technology actually saved?

• To which the conversation now turns to all the issues integrating all these solutions.

• Brief discussion on data lakes and firms managing their own data. I think its important to pick one solution as the source of truth for data. Preferably one that has lots of integrations… It could be your CRM, your financial planning tool, even your data-gathering tool:

And now a word from our sponsor, PreciseFP.

Something unique they offer is giving each client a data completeness score:

And they have a lot of integrations (for a data hub, this is important).

If you’re struggling to gather and move data around, check it out: www.precisefp.com

Back to the show, I mean… map:

…485 companies to which Josh says: “I blame zero % interest rates”

So why are there so many companies on here?

1. First off, you have to be on here

2. The needs of the industry have matured… moving away from commoditized investment management… to specialized planning value props.

• I would also love to see this map by revenue size, and make some lists. Those would be interesting lists.

• And on to “tech debt”. Now here is where I don’t totally understand coding and software, but I’m going to pretend.

An advisortech foundation built 20 years ago is moving its data around in like… Model T’s. A solution built in 2024 is using the SpaceX X1. Ok, now that’s an exaggeration, but the point is, new tech has a lot better foundation for speed, UI, integrations, etc.

Kind of like what you see here:

And also you can see, Wealthbox isn’t the #1 CRM, Less Annoying CRM is. 🙂 Or maybe more likely, Advyzon.

Ok, I’m 15 min into a 49 min video and we haven’t even gotten to AI yet. Better stop here and get to the point.

With all these options, and the many different demos, comparisons, and time spent to truly understand each one before making a decision… there’s a hack.

a Crowdsourcing hack

I used it at least twice this week. I leveraged my network to save time, to save money, to save heartache in possibly choosing the wrong solution, implementing the wrong solution and all the stuff.

• “What are you all using for fee-based annuities?”

• “Who are you all using for E&O broker?”

• “Are you doing due diligence on your vendors?”

• “What are you doing for Client events?”

The pros & cons, the pricing, the legwork, the comparisons…

It’s called leverage. And a community, network, your peers can save you a LOT of time and money and hassle. And also can increase your success.

Think about how you found your last job? Doctor? Book to read?

Now this is starting to sound like an ad for advisor testimonials…

Anyway, it’s called:

Crowdsourcing Success

And there’s a new community for advisors to do this exactly. It’s being announced next week at this webinar. So attend the webinar, come join the community, and see if you don’t save some time, money, and frustration while becoming a tyrant.

Oops, I mean successful.

Sign up for the webinar here.

or click the picture:

And if you want to take it a step further, check out Conneqtor.

The OG course on running a virtual practice.

It’s also on Skool.

Watch Building the Best Advisor Tech Stack on Youtube

Until next time,

Joe