I’m the president and CEO of Willow Creek Wealth Management, an RIA in Sebastopol, Calif. It’s about an hour north of San Francisco. It’s a cool spot in the wine country in Sonoma County.
My background has always been in technology, operational efficiency and security. I’ve been here for about 10 years, but I’ve been in financial services for 18 years. I started here in 2014 as the director of operations. In 2018, I became a partner. Then we completed a significant phase of our succession plan in 2021. That’s when I stepped in as the president and CEO.
CRM: AdvisorEngine
For CRM, we use AdvisorEngine, which was formerly Junxure Cloud. We are long-time users of the Junxure product in all its iterations. We used Junxure Desktop way back before I came to Willow Creek. We transitioned to the cloud version in 2015. That was early. It was in beta then.
I look at our tech stack as a hub-and-spoke setup. I see the CRM as the hub. We drive everything we do through CRM. We rely heavily on AdvisorEngine to drive all those processes. We have about 100 workflows in the system. We’re continuously building and tweaking those. We’ve been working on those since 2014, when we moved to their cloud version. That drives everything from simple check deposits to more complex tasks like complete client onboarding and everything in between.
The biggest game changer on the tech side for us in terms of efficiency and providing consistent value to clients has come through the effective use of CRM. We have well-documented back-office processes and are driving it through workflows. We ensure things are done in the same way in the same time frame by everyone involved. It helps you drive your consistent value proposition to your clients. It makes it more efficient if you aren’t bouncing around trying to figure out how to do something every time. It’s automated as much as possible.
Reporting, Portfolio Management, Trading & Rebalancing: Orion Advisor Solutions
We’ve been through all the changes Orion has seen over the last decade-plus. Orion has always been a leader in the technology space. They’ve always put a lot of focus on their platform in building out new functionality and features. They continue to do that, which is one of the reasons we like Orion. We use a lot of different features within Orion. We use Orion for reporting, billing, client portal, trading, rebalancing and some of our compliance. We try to use everything we possibly can on the Orion platform.
It’s essential to make sure you’re utilizing it as fully as you can when you’re looking at purchasing technology. Often, I talk to other firms and they’re not fully utilizing everything they have available to them through these platforms. All these software platforms continue to get more expensive and they’re always changing. We constantly look at the software that we’re using from a critical perspective. You must make sure it’s the best solution for you. Many firms take the shotgun approach to buying software and using 10% of it. It takes effort to look at software and ensure you’re using 90%-plus of it. Get the value out of the software that you’re paying for.
It’s expensive. I certainly wasn’t happy about Orion raising their prices recently. Portfolio management is likely the costliest piece of the technology stack for every firm. It is for us, as well. It becomes more of a question of alternatives as the prices continue to increase. Am I getting adequate value out of this platform as the price rises? Am I utilizing everything I can from this software? Am I extracting all the value I can out of it? Those questions do become cloudier as things become more expensive. Orion is a perfect example of that. On the other hand, we're so integrated into processes that the switching cost is enormous. I’m sure they know that, too.
Financial Planning: Envestnet | MoneyGuidePro
We’ve used MoneyGuidePro for over a decade. Our advisors like that system. It’s straightforward and goals-based. It aligns well with our investment philosophy and our approach to financial planning.
We integrate MoneyGuidePro with Orion. We can enable it for clients to give basic information about their financial plans. That feeds from MoneyGuidePro into a tab on their client portal on Orion. From the other direction, we also feed holdings data and account information from Orion into MoneyGuidePro. It makes it easy for advisors to update data in the financial plan with a couple of clicks from Orion.
Document Management: Laserfiche
Laserfiche is a large platform that does many different things. Essential document management is one of those. It gives us additional functionality in automating documents. We can build workflow processes within Laserfiche to drop files into a hot folder. Those files will be read and filed correctly in client or reporting folders. We can build these workflows to do different things. Depending on the type, we also capture many kinds of metadata on files. It allows us to be creative things in searching and automation.
We also tie Laserfiche back into the CRM. It’s one of the spokes of our CRM hub. You can go into a client’s record within AdvisorEngine. You can hit the documents tab in there. You see the client’s document folder within Laserfiche. You can add and open files directly from AdvisorEngine, which is nice. We also tie it into different record numbers within our system so we can pull out, combine and search for data in files.
Cybersecurity: KnowBe4
We use KnowBe4 for ongoing cybersecurity training. They have an extensive library of videos and documents we can put together in training packages that go out to our team every quarter. We can track that they have taken and passed the quizzes. It also has phishing testing. It uses real phishing emails that they have in their database. It can randomize those and deliver them to employees throughout the week. We do a full round of that every week for all our employees. That goes back to our diligent mindset about email phishing and scams because that has become more sophisticated in the past few years.
As told to reporter Rob Burgess and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of WealthManagement.com.
Want to tell us what’s in your wealthstack? Contact Rob Burgess at [email protected].