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In this episode, Todd Darroca and David Kakish explore the often-overlooked financial benefits of owning your IT hardware. Understanding the difference between owning and renting IT hardware can significantly impact your bottom line.

Join us as we break down the pros and cons, help you avoid common pitfalls, and provide you with actionable insights on why owning your IT hardware could be the smartest move for your RIA.

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In this episode, we explore:

The Concept of Hardware as a Service (HaaS)

What is it, and why some IT providers promote it?

The Real Cost and Downsides of Renting Hardware

Understand how much more you might be paying when you rent your IT equipment, the potential pitfalls of being locked into contracts, and the limitations on flexibility when you don’t own your hardware.

Benefits of Owning Your IT Hardware

Learn about the flexibility, customization options, and long-term savings that come with owning your equipment.

Listen To The Audio:

Read The Transcript:

Todd Darroca:

Hello and welcome to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. I’m Todd Darroca, and alongside me is David Kakish. Together we’re on a mission to simplify the complex world of technology for our ias just like yours. Now in the podcast, we’ll be your tech guides breaking down those often confusing tech topics into plain old practical terms. So join us on each episode as we dive into the latest tech trends, share our expert insights and help you navigate the ever-changing world of RIA technology. So let’s get started. David, David, David. We’re talking about why owning your own IT hardware could save your RIA money. So why is that important in today’s world?

David Kakish:

Well, sounds good. Well listen, Todd, I want to welcome you. I want to welcome the listener and yes, why as an RIA, when you own your own IT hardware, it’s going to save you money and it’s going to save you a lot of headaches and things like that. And here’s the story. I was working with a prospective client recently and they were considering working with us, but then they were just really confused because we don’t do what’s called the hardware as a service where you quote rent the equipment and they had another proposal. And in that proposal, the other IT provider included a network firewall, a switch and a wireless access point, but then it was a monthly payment and they would lock him into a two or a three year contract because of that. And I looked at that and she was confused like why don’t we do it and why the other guys do it and what’s the advantage and what’s not. It’s a great question. That’s really what we’re going to dive in today. And the big question is should your RIA buy this network equipment or is it better to get it as a service from your IT provider? And yeah, that’s really what we’re going to dive in. And by the end of this session, you’re going to know the pros and cons of whether or not you buy it or you get that as part of the service with your IT provider. But yeah, that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Todd Darroca:

I’m not going to lie, I never thought you could rent. I know in the AV world you can rent camera equipment and lighting and all that stuff, but I didn’t think you could rent servers or switches and all that stuff. I always thought you had to buy those outright. So this is definitely something new for me to learn. So let’s start with hardware as a service orp.

David Kakish:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So I want to be careful with the acronyms. This is an acronym that’s well known in our industry, but it’s not well known for the RIAs, right? The RIAs have their own acronyms and this and that and stuff like that. And you’re going to laugh at me, but I still get IRA and RIA A mixed up and I’m like, which one is which? But anyways, so I want to be careful with unquote renting. What a lot of IT providers will do is say, Hey listen, we’re going to provide you a network firewall. We’re going to provide you a switch and we’re going to provide you the wireless access points. That’s just part of our service and then you’re going to pay us X per month or something of that sort. So they stay away from the word rent because there’s a lot of negative connotation with rent. But for a long time in our industry in the IT industry, there was a very popular acronym, HAAS, Haas is what they would call it, hardware as a service.

And our organization, we never philosophically bought into it at all because it didn’t make any sense. But the whole idea there is you go and you work with a new RIA client, you give them new computers, you give them new network hardware, you give them new everything and then they pay you X per month and it’s all included. And they were actually even doing it at the laptop and the desktop level. And that’s such, it was crazy because that’s such a private thing. I like to use a Mac or I like to use a Windows or a Dell or an hp, and then it just becomes a total nightmare. The next evolution of that was like let the people buy their computers, but then you can do hardware as a service for the network equipment and the servers and all that fun stuff. Still, in my opinion, it’s a scam.

It’s a really bad way of doing that. I can understand the benefits for the IT provider. The benefit is you get one standard, which makes a lot of sense. You get new equipment instead of outdated old equipment and then you’re supporting one tech stack. So anyways, so the whole idea, again, whether you’re renting it or it’s part of their service or it’s hardware as a service, what we see now in the RIA space, some IT providers are saying, yes, we’re going to support you, it’s X dollars per employee per month, and then we’re going to provide you the network infrastructure and it’s going to be X dollars for the network infrastructure and we’re going to provide you. And it largely contains the three things, the network firewall, a switch or multiple switches depending on the size and then wireless access points. Now anyways, that’s just to kind of explain what that is, right? Not everybody does that. Some people do it. There is some perceived benefit to it, but not really. And I’ll kind of dive into that and maybe I’ll talk about the downsides first and then I’ll talk about the benefits of owning the hardware. So Todd, going back to you right at the beginning, you were surprised that people were doing that, but it is there, it’s fairly common with some providers.

Todd Darroca:

Yeah, I mean I’ve worked with IT pros for almost 10 plus years in the trenches with them, and I’ve never even my own IT guy, his name’s Jeff. I’ve never heard him say, we’re renting this or you can rent this. I’ve always, and maybe he did and just didn’t tell the team, but that’s very new to me because I would think that with technology you would want to own it just because of the security with it. And again, it’s like an iPhone, I guess it’s the planned obsolescence, but I don’t know if that’s the same thing for all hardware where yeah, you’re going to have to buy a new one. But yeah, it’s new for me. I didn’t realize that was happening. Yeah,

David Kakish:

Yeah. Well listen, lemme talk a little bit about the upside, right? Again, the upside for the RIA and the upside for the IT provider, let’s start with the upside for the RIA. It’s simple. You get all new equipment, right? It’s one monthly fee and you just pay it. The really big downside is you pay a lot more than what it’s worth. And I’ll kind of get into that in a little bit. The upside for the IT provider is like, look, it’s a standard. This is a tech stack we support, it’s standard. And then this way it’s a guaranteed way to sort of eliminate all the old outdated stuff that might be sitting there seven years, 10 years, five years and so on. So that’s kind of the upside. So I mean there is a little bit of an upside, but really the downside is much larger for the RIA and that’s really what I want to focus on.

So, okay, got it. Cool. So number one is again, a network firewall, a switch and a wireless access point. Again, let’s just pretend you’re an RIA with 10 employees, 10 total employees, something like that’s going to cost you under $5,000 without getting into too much detail. So you can buy a network firewall, you can buy a switch and a wireless access point with three year subscription so that you’re covered for three years, it’s going to cost you less than $5,000. Our model is if you already own it, we’re going to work with what you have and with time sort of replace that so you don’t have to buy everything brand new. Obviously if you don’t have any of that, we’ll work with you so you can get that. But I think the big downside of renting this IT hardware or having it bundled with the IT service provider is you’re going to pay a lot more money for it over a two or three year period. And so what the IT provider will, because it’s a risk for the IT provider to provide all that for you, they’re going to want to lock you into a two year, three year, or maybe even a five year contract. So what happens is, look as an RIA, you’re probably not living paycheck to paycheck. You can afford to put $5,000 down and then have that work for the next three to five years for you. By the way, if you’re a financial advisor and you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you’re probably in the wrong business.

Todd Darroca:

I don’t want to know who you are because I haven’t gone yet.

David Kakish:

So ultimately what happens is, again, if you pay for it upfront, it’s five grand. You’re done, right? I’ve seen the numbers where if you pay for it over two years or three years and they bundle it in their services to make it confusing for you, you’re going to pay, I’ve seen five x, I’ve seen 10 x, I’ve seen three x, you’re going to pay significantly more for that hardware. And it’s just insane because what you ultimately need that IT provider to do is to manage, monitor, and maintain the hardware, not to resell it or sell it and things of that sort. And so I just kind of wanted to put that out there. Regardless of how you spin it, you’re going to end up paying more for it. So that’s a big downside. The other piece is at times that equipment is in the name of the IT provider, not in your name.

So you actually don’t own that. And so I won’t get into how you expense that, right? In the first model, it’s just a monthly expense, and the other, it could be a capital expense. Financial advisors know this much better than me, but the key here is you unquote are renting that so you don’t own it. Whereas if you buy it, you own it and then it’s yours. Now, the one that I really think is a huge negative for you as an RIA, when you don’t buy your own equipment, you’re really dependent on that IT provider. So you enter into a contract, you’re into it, it’s not working out for whatever reason, and you want to leave, well, guess what? Now you’re locked into a three year or even a five-year contract depending on that vendor and that IT vendor will sometimes say, oh, you want to leave us?

Great, well let me come in and take my network as a scare tactic and intimidation tactic. But anyways, so that’s kind of the downside for you as an RIA. And again, what’s interesting, and I don’t understand why IT providers do that, it’s a really big risk for the IT provider to buy all this gear and then give it to you as a rental or as part of their services because now it’s a big risk for them. So it’s a philosophical thing. They’re trying to make money on reselling hardware and doing it as a subscription. And it’s just silly because it’s like, look, just pay for somebody’s services, not like some piece of hardware or anything like that. So I think for an RIA, if you’re working with an IT vendor and you like them a lot and you want to move forward with them, but their model is like, yeah, hey, we just have it as a subscription for this network equipment or rent.

Just say, Hey, look, we’ll happily pay you whatever it is, but let us just tell us what this equipment is. We’ll go out and we’ll buy it, and then you can manage it. We understand you want to have one tech stack, we understand you want to have this no problem. We just want to go ahead and buy that. And then you guys can manage that. That’s what I would respond. I’d be very hesitant to enter into contract, into a contract or some kind of an agreement where the hardware is just bundled in. There’s many downsides to that, and I’ve kind of touched upon that. So

Todd Darroca:

Is there any, I guess protection, the example you gave of the IT guy saying, fine, I’m going to come take my network. Is there anything to prevent that IT provider from literally doing that and just saying, fine, this is all mine and you’re screwed since it’s his equipment without?

David Kakish:

So it’s a great question. It’s a great question. So I spent a lot of time inside of IT circles, and ever since day one, we launched our business back in 2007. Philosophically we never sold hardware. We just like guys, the margins are low. There are people that do it significantly better than we do CDW, Dell Insight. I mean there’s so many of them. Why are we trying to make a couple of points? So these are the internal discussions, right? And RIA wouldn’t know about that, but internal discussions when I’m talking with other IT providers, I go, the margins are so low, it’s just not worth it. And then the complexity of a return and then what if that laptop is registered in the IT vendor’s name instead of the end customer? And so there’s just so many complexities since day one. We’ve made a decision not to be doing any of this at all.

And I got to tell you, in these mastermind groups and things like that, people harass me all the time and I go, guys, it’s a philosophical thing. I don’t want to discuss it. Our clients love that we don’t resell hardware and software and bundle it in, but they’re like, but you’re not locking them in. You’re not making money off of hardware, you’re not. And I go, that’s not where we make our money and we’re not interested in making that. So the big thing in these circles, they’re like, yeah, you want to get a client in, you want to lock ’em in. And hardware as a service or bundling in the network hardware is a great to lock ’em in for two years, three years. And our philosophy is, look, we want our clients to work with us because they want to, not because they have to or some contract.

And to answer your question, depending on how the contract is structured, if the client wants to break it early and they’re renting the hardware, the IT provider can come in and they can take that. Not only can they just come in and take that, they can remotely bring it down for you too. So I mean it’s a step further. So usually what’s happening in those scenarios, it’s just kind of getting a little bit ugly with lawyers and stuff like that. But yeah, I mean I would be careful. You want to be able to say, Hey, we want to pay you for the service, not some piece of hardware and pay three x the price of the hardware over three years when I can just afford pay it upfront.

Todd Darroca:

So what’s the argument then if you could say, well, if I rent this, then I’m always going to have the latest technology. Technology is always advancing super fast. So why it would seem like a good thing to just rent it and then continue updating it. So why would that not, I mean is that even wash in this whole thing or is that kind of like

David Kakish:

Yeah, well, what you’re saying is perfect because in theory, that’s what should happen in practice. What happens is this network equipment can last three to five years. Let’s just go with a three year mark. You’re paying for it over the course of three years, and then after three years they’re going to come in and they’re going to put new network equipment. But over these course of the three years, you’ve already overpaid for the cost of that hardware. I can tell you, I’m not exaggerating. The cost of the hardware, let’s just say is $5,000 over three years, you’re probably paying anywhere from 15 to $30,000 for that same hardware, right? It’s crazy, right? But you don’t see it that way because it’s part their services and it’s insane. I go, guys, clients, RIA, clients are happy to pay for your service, just don’t mark up this hardware and try to make money off of something that it’s just anyways. But do you see, it’s a philosophical thing.

Todd Darroca:

So let’s switch then into why owning it. It’s kind of renting or owning a house kind of deal, it sounds like a little bit. So why owning the IT hardware is the better bet? Obviously because you’ve said 5,000 versus 30,000,

David Kakish:

It’s not always that much, but I can tell you at minimum it’s two x and above from what I’ve seen. So obviously benefits of owning your own IT hardware, computers, networking equipment and things like that, cost savings, you’re going to save a lot of money. Yes, you might pay that $5,000 upfront, but it’s better. And I haven’t done the math in my head, but it’s better than paying $700 a month for three years or something like that. That’s number one. Number two is you just have a lot of flexibility and customization because I don’t know, there’s a better wireless access point that’s out there and you want to go out and you want to buy that in the future, you can do that. And then the third thing is you actually own the asset rather than having it as an ongoing expense. And then the other thing, and this is key, is the independence from the vendor, the IT vendor not being locked into that IT vendor. You can switch without a lot of complications or anything like that. Those are kind of the typical things that we see.

Todd Darroca:

And do you see any IT or what should somebody do if they’re looking at an IT vendor and they say, well, until you get all that hardware, we’re not going to touch you. You can buy hardware, but you have to buy these. And customers like, well, I already have these, and IT guy’s like, well, I’m not going to work with you then. Is that where huge red flag run or is that something where it’s like, well, he may be actually suggesting something that’s smart to do or

David Kakish:

Yeah, I wouldn’t run from that. I would work with that IT provider. And I’ll tell you why. Because it’s also, again, it’s a philosophical thing. Some IT providers have a very specific tech stack. They’re going to say, we’re going to support a Cisco Meraki firewall, whatever. We’re going to support SonicWall firewalls, going to support Cisco switches and Meraki wireless access point. They want to have the same tech stack across all of their clients. That doesn’t scare me at all. And actually in some ways, they might even be doing you a favor because you’ve got maybe consumer grade products in your office or outdated or whatever. So that doesn’t scare me saying, Hey, here’s the hardware that we need you to buy. Right? That’s perfect. I mean, you want that in an IT vendor because they understand it, they understand it well, I just don’t like when they bundle it in their services or you pay for it over three years.

Because at minimum, and all the math that I’ve seen, at minimum, you’re paying two x the price of that hardware at minimum. And I’ve seen it where it’s like five X and even 10 x, and it sounds crazy, but I’m telling you because that network hardware isn’t that expensive, but it’s a way for the IT provider to have another profit center that’s never been a profit center. For us, our philosophy is, Hey, let’s work with what you have, and then what we’re going to do is with time, we’re going to have strategic technology reviews with you and with your team, and we’ll suggest to go ahead and replace that. Now, if you’ve got something that’s really bad or very outdated, we’re going to tell you to replace it during the onboarding process. We’re going to be pretty transparent, but we don’t necessarily dictate a very specific tech stack because here’s the reality in the RIA space we work with.

I mean everybody thinks they’re fundamentally unique, but it’s the same four or five vendors we see across the board, and we’re well versed with all of ’em. And so it’s fine. That’s our approach. But no, it doesn’t scare me when an IT provider comes and says, Hey, listen, we need to have, especially on the network side, on the computers and the Mac, a lot of flexibility because people have their preferences and things like that. But on the network hardware, it doesn’t scare me. What would scare me is only if they’re trying to lock you into a subscription or a three-year contract again to rent that equipment just significantly cheaper to just go ahead and buy that upfront. So

Todd Darroca:

Besides the big concerns or the big elephant in the room, what are some common concerns that you hear from your clients or in the industry when somebody says, I want to buy the hardware?

David Kakish:

Yeah, kind of like what you said, right? There’s a little bit of some of these things where people say, well, I got to pay upfront. And I go, yeah, it’s okay. You’re probably not broke. You’re not living paycheck to paycheck, so you can afford to pay that five grand upfront. So that’s kind of a big one, but again, it’s not like 50 grand upfront or anything like that. And what scares a lot of clients sometimes is that they’ll see that monthly subscription from that IT provider and they’re like, wow, it’s a thousand dollars a month over three years. If I were to buy that, that’s going to be like $36,000. No, I’ll just pay a thousand dollars per month. The reality is the cause of that hardware is not $36,000. It’s much closer, again, much closer to $5,000. And I’m sharing some numbers with you where I’ve recently seen that, right?

Last week I saw this, just so you know, the cost of the network equipment that they would have to buy for their size. I think they were like nine employees. I’d have to go back and look, but they were nine employees. I priced it out for ’em. It was under $5,000. They were going to be paying around, I think $1,100 a month for 36 months. Let’s just say it’s a thousand dollars. So either you could pay $5,000 upfront or $36,000. Now to be fair, the $36,000 also included some services from that IT provider, but you don’t have a way of breaking that out, right? Yeah, it’s crazy. So yes, the common concerns is upfront costs. The cost is going to be a lot less than that. It’s not going to be $36,000, it’s going to be $6,000. That’s number one. Number two, the maintenance and the upgrade.

What we love to do with our clients, so they have a sense of how much does it cost to really own this is to get the three year subscription on this network hardware and that subscription is directly with a manufacturer like SonicWall, Cisco, and so on. And then that way you know what your cost is, and we generally break out the line items so they know the hardware and then the SonicWall subscription or Cisco or whatever. And then the other concerns, well, what happens when the technology’s obsolete? Kind of like what you said, Todd, or hey, the monthly subscription is kind of nice because they’re going to come in and they’re going to replace that. Well, a typical IT provider is going to replace it every three years, but so what? At the three year mark, you go and you buy the new network equipment, and then it’s the same process. You’re just saving a lot of money by not renting it or by not having it part of their subscription. And again, Todd, I’ll go back and say it’s a philosophical thing. We have never, never resold hardware, and it’s always been a conscious decision because we want the best interest for our clients and we don’t want to have a conflict of interest because the easy thing to do is, yeah, go buy all this stuff and we’re going to mark it up and make some money and stuff like that.

And to be fair, in the IT vendor circles, I get harassed a lot. It’s like, David, why don’t you guys do that? There’s a lot of money to be made there. I go, we have our trust with our clients. We will never do that. We have never done it, and we’re never going to change that because we don’t want to lose that trust. We don’t want to have that conflict of interest. Yeah, I think now that, so Todd, you’re smiling because you’re like, oh, yeah, philosophically it makes sense, right?

Todd Darroca:

It does. I could see why they’re like, oh, that’s a good revenue stream. But I do, I dunno, you’ve always said you’re vendor agnostic, so this just kind of falls in line with all of that where if you start reselling something, you’re going to be biased toward that. So that’s nice.

David Kakish:

Yeah. And by the way, on a last note, a last note, there are certain things where there are manufacturers and distributors that will only sell things to IT providers, not even end consumers, and I don’t want to say vendor names, I am sure some, but again, their customer, if you think about that, their customer is the IT provider, not the end customer, which is crazy. At the end of the day, we’re here to serve you as an RIA client and sorry, I get a little too passionate about this, it bothers me. There’s just something fundamentally wrong when people are doing that. And with prospective clients that I talk to, they’re scratching their head. They’re like, David, are we missing something here? And I go, no, I have to sort of explain this. So I think in the future when I talk with these clients, I’m just going to say, go listen to this podcast. You’ll know more about it because the math, right? So Todd, you looked at the math right now, you’re like, wow, $5,000 and $36,000. It’s crazy. You’re

Todd Darroca:

Like, that’s crazy. Yeah,

David Kakish:

They’re like, even

Todd Darroca:

If you were to upgrade in three years, you’re still only spending $10,000 instead of $36,000. So you’re still ahead and even on the tax breaks, if you make it as an asset or whatever, you’re still going to break there. So that’s wild, wild, wild.

David Kakish:

Yeah. Well, before we wrap up, this reminds me of there’s an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer’s like, oh, it’s a tax write-off. It’s a tax. You know what I’m talking

Todd Darroca:

About? Well, I am not a big Seinfeld fan, but I have watched Schitt’s Creek. Have you ever watched Schitt’s Creek before?

David Kakish:

A little bit. Not much, but yes.

Todd Darroca:

Okay. There’s similar to what you’re talking with Kramer, there’s that character named David and he keeps buying things for his own small business and his dad goes, well, how are you paying for it? And David’s like, it’s a tax write off. I just write it off. And he’s like, well, you have to pay for it. No, it’s a write off dad. So if that’s kind of what Kramer the same situation. But yeah,

David Kakish:

So Jerry Seinfeld asks, Kramer looks at him and he goes, you don’t know what a tax write off is,

Todd Darroca:

So what should somebody walk away with today? What can you tell somebody once they click power off on their iPod or their radio and listen to us? What should they be going to do?

David Kakish:

Yeah, I think, listen, I think the big takeaway is work with IT providers that actually allow you to buy the equipment, even if you have to buy new equipment for them to work with you. I think the ones that are really bundling in the IT infrastructure as part of IT or service, I think there’s just huge markup in your overpaying for something that you’re not using. And so have that honest discussion with them and say, Hey, I know you will support one tech stack and that’s fine. We support you with that. Philosophically, our organization is we want to own our IT assets, and so we’ll buy that. Whatever it is, give us a quote and we will buy it. And it’s okay. They can make money off of the markup of buying that IT provider, the markup of the hardware. You just don’t want to be paying over two years, three years, five years, because again, you don’t want to overpay and then you don’t want to be locked in. If for whatever reason, it doesn’t work out and it necessarily doesn’t work out because it’s a bad relationship. There’s an acquisition, there’s a merger, something fundamentally changes in the business. Now you’re really stuck for that two years, three years, and so on. So I would just have that honest discussion with the IT provider, what do we need to buy? We’ll buy it so you can support us. We just don’t rent equipment. That’s kind of how we’re set up. That’s what I would do if that was my company or my business.

Todd Darroca:

Nice. So big message, takeaway, own don’t rent.

All right. Well David, if there’s nothing else, are you good? Anything else? Okay, awesome. Well, hey guys, we are at the end of the show here. So we want to say thanks so much for listening to us and of course, listening to the RIA Tech TikTok podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. And so for more podcasts and resources, go to riaworkspace.com and check out the Learning Center. All of our current and past episodes are up. And feel free to reach out with us with any questions or topics you’d like us to cover. And of course, want you to stay tuned for more RIA Tech Insights in our next episode. So for David Kakish, myself, thanks so much for listening and have a great day.

In this episode of RIA Tech Talk, David and Todd are again joined by Christopher Johnson of TrigaByte Technologies, to discuss the ideal technology stack for new RIA firms with a small team.

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About the Guest:

Christopher Johnson: Founder of Byte Technologies with over 30 years of experience in financial services, specializing in operations, technology, and compliance. He offers unique expertise in helping RIAs optimize their technology choices and implementation.

Key Takeaways from Christopher:

1. Choosing the Right Platform: Microsoft vs. Google

• Microsoft 365 is recommended for new RIAs due to its comprehensive suite of integrated tools that support IT compliance and security without needing multiple third-party tools.
• Google Workspace requires additional third-party tools for compliance and security, which can complicate setup and increase costs.

2. CRM Options for New RIAs

• Redtail: Highly popular among new RIAs due to its ease of use and extensive integrations. Ideal for firms that prioritize simplicity and functionality.
• Wealthbox: A close competitor to Redtail, offering a user-friendly interface and good integration capabilities.

Christopher joined us in a previous podcast episode: What’s The Best CRM For Your RIA And Why  which you may also want to check out.

3. Portfolio Management Software

• Best in Class: Black Diamond is a top choice for firms looking for comprehensive portfolio management and performance reporting.
• All-in-One Solution: Orion offers an integrated suite of services, making it ideal for firms looking for simplicity and ease of use.

4. Financial Planning Tools

• eMoney and MoneyGuide Pro are the dominant choices for financial planning, known for their robust features and ease of integration with other platforms.

5. Custodian Selection

• Charles Schwab is highly recommended for new RIAs due to its supportive onboarding process and comprehensive services tailored to RIA needs.

6. Communication Archiving

• Microsoft offers built-in archiving capabilities for emails and Teams, providing a cost-effective solution that meets SEC and FINRA compliance requirements.
• MessageWatcher is a budget-friendly option for archiving social media and text communications.

7. Compliance Solutions

• A robust compliance tool is crucial for monitoring employee activities and ensuring regulatory adherence. AdvisorAssist and Smartria are popular choices.

8. Managed Service Provider (MSP)

• RIA Workspace is recommended for its specialization in providing IT services tailored to RIAs, offering better understanding and support than general IT providers.

Starting a new RIA firm requires careful consideration of the right technology stack to ensure efficiency, compliance, and security. By selecting the appropriate tools and platforms, new RIAs can build a strong foundation for growth and success.

Get in touch with Christopher

Christopher Johnson, TrigaByte Technologies

Phone:  612-817-7767

Email:  chris@trigabytetech.com

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David Kakish:

Hello and welcome to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. My name is David Kish and I’m here with Todd Darroca. Together we’re on a mission to simplify the complex world of technology for RIAs just like yours, the title of today’s session. Are you starting a new RIA? What’s the best tech stack for a five person team? And I’m excited to have a special guest with us today. His name is Christopher Johnson, and Chris is the founder of Byte Technologies just outside of the Minneapolis St. Paul area. He’s been in the financial services world for over 30 years. He looks a lot younger than that. He started when he was five years old. Anyways, he’s got a boutique tech consulting firm where he also focuses on working with RIAs just like us. And so we compliment each other really well. We actually, ironically, we don’t compete at all, but we compliment each other really well.

We focus on managed IT, cybersecurity, IT compliance, and the help desk and the tech side of things. And then Chris really focuses on the operations and best practices and things like that. So Chris, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself, share with the listener a little bit about you, your company, and then Yeah, I’m really excited to talk about the best tech stack for a new RIA firm because we’re agnostic, right? We don’t care what vendor or what partner to choose. So we don’t represent Redtail or wealthbox or e-money or any of that right there. So we can really talk to what’s best for that team and share some nuances in depth. But Chris, introduce yourself, talk a little bit about yourself, your company, and then we’ll get right down the business.

Chris Johnson:

Absolutely. Thanks David, and thanks Todd. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. As David said, Chris Johnson with Trigger Byte Technologies, been in the industry for over 30 years. Really grew up in the operations, technology and compliance side of the business. Most notably was a chief operations officer and chief compliance officer of a large RIA broker dealer that managed about 3 billion in assets and had almost a hundred people in the shop. So really know a lot about the infrastructure, how things work, what technology you use. After that role, actually ran a wealth management practice for about six years. So really got the client side experience. So when you look at my background and history, I’ve done almost every job in the industry or at least have a good knowledge base of what happens with anything that really goes on within a practice. So from there started Tri By Technologies, really looking to focus on RIAs and their practice and how they do things, why they do things, what they do, and the tools that they use it because there’s a real need in the industry for advisors to have someone to consult with that can help them with that.

There are so many options out there and it really comes down to what fits you best. And advisors have a difficult time figuring out really what is going to be the best tool for them. So that’s where the value of my background comes into play. I can really help them in determining what is going to best suit them and then how to implement and get it working.

David Kakish:

Pleasure to

Chris Johnson:

Be here.

David Kakish:

Yeah, great to have you on. And Chris and I, we were joking before we recorded. We’re like, man, we’re so happy to be able to geek out together and talk and go into this not too many people in this world that want to geek out about the tech stack for RIA. So we’re really excited. Absolutely. And I’ve used the analogy where we’re kind like we’re the peanut butter and then Chris and Bite is the jelly and that we’re so much better together as a peanut butter and jelly. I mean we’re great separate, but together it’s even that much better. And before we get to business, I’ll share a funny story and then we’ll get down to business, but when I was in college, I used to paint houses and so I had to take my food with me and outdoor, it had to kind of sit well anyways, for an entire summer when I was working, the only thing that I took with me was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day. I knew how to make that right by the end of the summer, I did not want to touch a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for many years. Even now I’m like every once in a blue moon, I want a peanut butter and jelly, but that one summer ruined it for me. So anyways, a little side story for a PTSD TD

Chris Johnson:

From the PB and J, huh? Exactly.

David Kakish:

Yes. Yes. So alright, so I think Chris, let’s maybe start out with a problem. So a new RIA, whether you’re a breakaway or whatever, it doesn’t really matter to me at all. I think the big challenge is all this stuff was provided for you as an advisor when you’re working at a larger firm. And so when you go out on your own, it’s kind of overwhelming and you’re like, oh my goodness, what’s the right tech stack? Or what do you use? Maybe Salesforce where you worked, but hey, if you’re starting out, is that the best thing for you to use starting out as an example? So I think the challenge is all this stuff was provided for you and you were able to focus on the core competency of what you did. But once you go independent or once you start a new RIA, you’ve got to solve these problems. You’ve got to come up with what’s the tech stack that we’re going to use?

Chris Johnson:

Absolutely. Your back to figure it out. That’s a problem I see.

David Kakish:

Yeah, and I don’t know if you’ve seen other things when people first start out.

Chris Johnson:

No, I mean that’s the big question and really why people come to me it’s like, well what do I even use? Do I just stick with what I know or is there something better? And the answer is, it depends because it really comes back to what you do, how you do it and why you do it. You could have one RIA shop that does investment management through Ts where another one builds their own models and does everything in-house where they’re not outsourcing stuff. So it really, the question is, well what do you want to control? What don’t you want to control? How much control do you want to have? What’s your budget look like? So there’s a lot of questions that go into a needs analysis to help an advisor determine what tools even will work for me or what should I even be looking at? Right,

David Kakish:

Exactly. And this is a pretty common scenario where people reach out to us and they’re like, Hey listen, we’re starting a new RIA seven people, whatever the case might be. We’re going to say, look, new RIA five people. One of the big foundational questions is, do I go on the Microsoft Suite or do I do Google Workspace or do I do something else? This comes up a lot, I’ll talk about that. And then we’re going to talk about CRM and portfolio management. I’ll give you the opportunity to talk there and it’s going to be, what we’re going to talk about is very practical, not we’re not professors at some university talking about things. In theory, this is going to be really hands-on and real practical. So the Microsoft versus the Google suite, this really comes up a lot. I’m going to say in this space, just to be very blunt, the Microsoft Suite is much more dominant than the Google workspace.

And I say this, my brother works for Google, and I think Google is great, but I think what’s different here for RIAs is a lot of people are already familiar with the Microsoft Suite and then B, Microsoft has a lot more IT compliance and security safeguards that are sort of built in or you could easily implement them without third party tools. Whereas with Google Workspace, it’s a great platform, but you have to get a lot of third party tools to archive to be compliant, to do many, many other things. And what happens is, and it’s kind of funny because last week I was talking to somebody where they had to go with what their broker dealer forced them to go with and it was the Google suite and he was complaining to me about all the different things that third party tools that they had to do.

And when I sort of showed him how it works inside of the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s sort of all consolidated in one place. It’s like, yeah, it’s exactly what we want because they don’t want to have Citrix login, they don’t want to have this and that. So I’ll make it easy for the listener unless there’s a good reason for you to go with Google Workspace. Microsoft is the dominant player and frankly we’ve made the business decision that we will only be working with RIAs that are on the Microsoft platform if they want to be on Google, great. That’s not something that we’re supporting. So that’s a business decision we’ve made. Doesn’t mean the other one is bad, it just means that we’re an RIA with five people. You’re going to end up buying a whole bunch of third party tools to achieve the IT compliance and what I would call the enterprise security where with Microsoft is out of the box. So Chris, that’s kind of my assessment of that. I don’t know if you have other thoughts or even if you see the things differently from your perspective.

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, no, I a hundred percent agree. Generally, if a client is using the Google workspace as a platform, I will probably not work with them because there are so many different components that even when you’re looking at the rest of the tech stack that come into play with where you put your documents, what are you doing with them? And as you know with Microsoft, you’ve got SharePoint and all of those things that come into play that have the security built in and the things that the client needs to keep things safe. And I grew up with Microsoft, I’ve dabbled in Google and looked at it and I agree it’s there’s so many different components that you then have to wrap in to make things work that the Microsoft one-stop shop from a infrastructure standpoint for me makes a hundred percent sense.

David Kakish:

And did I catch that right? If somebody’s on the Google workspace, you typically won’t work

Chris Johnson:

With ’em. I try not to. Yeah, I try not to. It’s just very challenging to work with. Well I want to now save all my DocuSign documents into my Google workspace, and it’s like I don’t even know really how to help them with that. So yeah, I tend to shy away from it. Not that I won’t take it, I’ll help do assessments and stuff and do things like that, but a lot of the implementation that comes into play, the operating system and your infrastructure impacts that. And I just don’t know enough about it to really be able to help someone that’s in that space.

David Kakish:

And from our perspective, we know a lot about it and we think it’s really good, but there’s just so many third party tools to get to where Microsoft is. And that’s fine because Google was built that way and Microsoft was built differently. So anyway, absolutely in our space. So alright, so winner is Microsoft Suite, but Todd, you wanted to say something? Yeah.

Todd Darroca:

What about cost? Again, if I’m just starting out, is Microsoft more expensive or is Google the same once you start adding in the third parties? What kind of budget am I looking at for both of these?

David Kakish:

Yeah, I mean Chris, you want me to take that or you want

Chris Johnson:

Take? Yeah, I’ll let you take that. Okay. No, that’s more your space on the licensing and all of that. I mean I know it, but that’s your

Yeah, no, but this is why we partner together because the expert in that and the things that I do you don’t deal with. So I have knowledge in it just from working with you and clients that have it. But yeah, I mean you’re the expert on it. So

David Kakish:

Take it. So Todd, I think I’ll set the pricing aside for a second. Kind of like what I talked about in the Google world is to accomplish what we’re doing in the Microsoft world, you have to go get these third party tools, right? I’ll give you a really simple example, right? Archiving to meet SEC compliance, I can do the email archiving inside a Microsoft platform. I can do something called data loss prevention or DLP in the Microsoft email where if I send out an email with a social security number or account number, it’ll automatically detect it encrypted and send it out. I could do encryption inside of the Microsoft ecosystem. I gave you just three specific examples where in the Google world can you do it? Of course you’ve got to go and you’ve got to find that third party tool that’ll do it for you.

And where we see people using the Google platform is if they’re really much larger organizations and they want to have all these platforms and even then the value proposition isn’t there. So I think what happens is the pricing is kind of hard to compare apples to apples because Microsoft’s got a lot of different suites. There’s the enterprise and there’s a business premium, and that’s my one criticism of Microsoft. They make it really hard to know what licensing package you want. But once you figure that out, by the time you start adding not just the cost of the third party tools, but the cost of the integration and the cost of learning, it just doesn’t make sense. Microsoft becomes the clear winner. And then even setting aside these third party tools, the integration and having to learn them, when you look at the cost, it doesn’t add up. You actually end out coming out ahead in the Microsoft world then in the Google world, that’s kind, it works.

Chris Johnson:

And if those integrations change, right David? I mean if an integration changes and now you’ve got to adjust and adapt, that could be a lot of work for someone.

David Kakish:

And I’ll say this, a lot of the financial applications do a really good job of integrating with Microsoft all the criticism that Microsoft get. Microsoft is pretty partner centric and they work really well with partners with integrations and stuff like that. So at a really high level, without getting into the details, that’s kind of what that is. Now, if we’re talking about a different vertical, like maybe education or healthcare, it would be totally different. But here we’re focused on specifically an RIA that’s starting out that’s got five employees, so Got it. Cool. Alright. Yeah. And again, we don’t get any money from Microsoft or Google, we’re just kind of talking what’s on our mind. And I should put the disclaimer, nobody is paying us not Red Tail, not Orion, not e-money, not Microsoft. We’re not getting anybody, we’re just having fun and we’re chitchatting. So alright. Absolutely. The second category, Chris, that we want to talk about is the CRM because that’s one of the core things for a financial advisor.

Chris Johnson:

Absolutely.

David Kakish:

Why don’t you talk a little bit about that and what are you seeing and what would you recommend for a new RIA with a five person team?

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, so I mean the CRM as you said, it’s kind of the core of your day-to-day operations and where you live and where your assistants and people live every day, that’s where client information is. That’s where you maintain stuff, that’s where you put notes, that’s where you have meetings. So that’s really the core from a small RAA, it depends. There isn’t a perfect one that I can say is this is the go-to for sure because it really depends on what you do, how you do it, why you do it. Those are the key components that I really get deep into with my clients in order to determine what is going to be their best solution. Now there’s a lot of people that use Redtail, have used Redtail for a long time, they love it. A lot of my clients use Redtail great tool, but there’s limitations with it.

There’s only so many dropdown lists you can create in there and ways to organize your data. They have it kind of built a certain way, whereas something like Salesforce, you can customize a hundred percent on your end or you can have a firm come in and build an overlay that overlays onto Salesforce that really has very unique and specific ways of integrating your data, using your data, integrating with other systems that may be do. So there isn’t a perfect silver bullet. We’ve talked about that. If you shoot and say this is what we’re aiming for, it’s really about the needs of the firm and how you get to that.

David Kakish:

Yeah, and we should let the listener know that our previous podcast we did record was just taking a deep dive and just CRMs and we covered the six main ones. But I think the two that come up in a new RIA lot, for me at least is Redtail and Wealthbox Wealth.

Chris Johnson:

Absolute. Those are the two

David Kakish:

Big ones that kind of come up. Redtail probably by far number one. And then Wealth Box. So again, we’re not talking about a team of 20, 30 people, we’re not talking about an established team, we’re talking about a new team. What would you say maybe are the primary ones where we want to kind of keep it simple, right? Hey, if they grow and their A UM and their people grow later on, that’s cool. But in the beginning, what are you seeing out there? And if it was your RIA, what would you run with and why?

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, I mean Red Tail is definitely the dominant one with wealthbox in a very close second. You’ve got between the two Red Tail’s very simple to use. It was built by financial planners. For financial planners. It really has the tools that a small team can utilize. The workflows are pretty easy to build, but they can clunky as you get bigger. So that’s why a small team, you can build very simple, straightforward workflows that a user can learn and use to help automate and create a flow where they don’t forget different steps in a process. Wealthbox has similar tools. I like Redtail a little more just because I think it’s a little more common. So there’s a lot of people that have maybe already used it in their prior firm and now this new firm, it might be easy for them to just step into. But Redtail has over a hundred integrations where I think Wealthbox doesn’t have quite as many.

So some of the integrations, how they link with custodians, it’s pretty straightforward. So I think it’s really Red Tail’s really easy to use. It’s not complicated, it’s not really crazy. Salesforce can get very complicated and sophisticated in how things work. So I like Redtail, but I like Wealthbox too. So again, it really comes back to what are the needs. There may be a firm that says, well, I need this. And so Red Tail’s not an option where Wealthbox is because of something. Or you look at Redtail and they go, well, we use it at a prior firm and it’s really easy, so I like it. And then you dig into, well, why do you like it? What about that do you like and how it really help your new firm in practice?

David Kakish:

From what we see, and again, our view is very limited, I think we see Red Tail quite a bit. And then distant second is Wealth Box, and then occasionally we’ll see advise on and then Advisor Engine, which I think used to be Juncture,

Chris Johnson:

Right? Juncture. Yeah, I see that in bigger firms because bigger firms are what had juncture in the past because that was an in-house, you had to have a separate server before and a desktop application before they had to get into the cloud and built out their cloud application.

David Kakish:

Do you see many, I’m seeing some, but a distant third advise on are you seeing that too? I

Chris Johnson:

Personally haven’t come across that one really that often. It’s really Red Tail Wealthbox, Salesforce a lot with some of the bigger firms that I work with. But yeah, in the smaller space, everybody that I come across, it’s usually Redtail, Wealthbox and sometimes Tamarack or their whole product, the Microsoft Dynamic product, their CRM that’s kind of integrated with their trading stuff.

David Kakish:

Well, it’s kind of funny. Red Tail seems to be sort of a safe one, right? It’s safe. There’s

Chris Johnson:

Cost effective. Yeah,

David Kakish:

There’s a great quote. I think it used to be for in the tech space that nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM, right? And so their competitors would say, well, nobody ever got promoted for hiring IBM either.

Chris Johnson:

So yes,

David Kakish:

True. I feel like Redtail is that safe one, right? Dominant one,

Chris Johnson:

Absolutely well known. When you’re at conferences, there’s a lot of people that you can network with that use and you can have conversations, well, what do you do for this? And that was something that back when I was running the RIA at conferences, we had best sharing practice groups that we would get together and talk about these things. And back then I was using Juncture at that point, it was the desktop app and all of the big firms that we met with were also using Juncture. So it was a great way to network and talk about, Hey, what challenges do you have? And

David Kakish:

Speaking

Chris Johnson:

Common, that’s what happens at conferences.

David Kakish:

Yeah. Well, and Juncture was the very dominant one when it was a server

Chris Johnson:

World. Absolutely. And

David Kakish:

I think they missed the boat on the cloud and I think Redtail,

Chris Johnson:

They were late to that game for sure, very late to that game, I think. But to their credit, they had built a product that really, for larger firms, even though it was very deep into your infrastructure, its own server desktop application, a lot of that kind of stuff, it worked really well with workflows and how advisor, big advisor teams needed to function every day. Yeah, exactly. So yeah,

David Kakish:

So cool. All right, so we talked about CRM. Thank you, Chris. We’re going to talk about portfolio management software and there’s a lot of them out there. There

Chris Johnson:

Is,

David Kakish:

And I’ll let you, I’m out of my area of expertise, so I

Chris Johnson:

Hand the

David Kakish:

Mic over to you.

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, so portfolio management, an ever-changing landscape. Orion, and let’s see, Orion and Riskalyze have announced just here in August that they are decoupling their whole one-stop shop and going to be offering slices of the pie for their different services because they found that if the one stop shop for everything is limiting their growth ability, Kitsis, actually Michael Kitsis actually wrote a lot about this in his August article about how they’re going to start offering, you can buy just the trading piece, you can buy just this slice. So that’s going to change the landscape a little bit for options for advisors, small advisors that just need portfolio management, they don’t want the trading, they don’t need all these other tools that come together with an Orion. Whereas a black diamond, most people know Black Diamond Advent, the old advent combined a few years ago, and Black Diamond’s one of the big go-tos.

Well, some people don’t realize they have a rebalance also where you can do your trading through that, not just portfolio management in the, when I say portfolio management, I’m talking about performance reporting, the billing aspect. So black diamond’s a big, I think the really the other dominant one has, I mean in investnet is huge, right? But it costs a lot because you’ve got, again, all of the components that are built into it. Orion again was expensive because you had all of these other components. We’ll see what they do with their pricing as they start separating things out. It might become much more cost effective to do something like Orion in the near future. And then there’s other ones that people probably have heard of but aren’t as prevalent. Adipar Digit, westmark advisor, arc, I mean there’s a lot of different portfolio management, TRE investment, they’ve got their product. So a lot to choose from. Again, it comes back to the needs of the client and really what they want to do with it. Are they doing just billing? Are they just doing portfolio accounting and performance? Do they need trading? Do they want it to integrate with their CRM? So there’s a lot of questions that you have to ask to drill down to what’s really going to be the best solution for em. Yeah.

David Kakish:

So I’m going to jump in. I think you kind of touched upon this that there’s two approaches to this, which is hey, best in class and then sort of level one and you have to think about that and that’s sort of a philosophical decision that, hey, no, we want to keep it simple and we kind of want to have an all-in-one and

Chris Johnson:

Absolutely,

David Kakish:

Hey, that’s great and that makes a lot of sense. Or no, we want to have the best of class in this category and stuff like that. And what I see, what I see, but take what I say with a grain of salt. When we talk about best in class, I see Black Diamond Advent quite a bit, then one sort of all in one. I see Orion,

Chris Johnson:

Orion,

David Kakish:

Those are kind of the two that I see. But let’s sort of talk about best in class first and then sort of an all-in-one. So from your perspective, best in class portfolio management, again, we’re not talking about the bigger RIAs team, five people. What are you seeing and what do you think would be, because trying to be very practical too. I’m like somebody is clueless

Chris Johnson:

Or

David Kakish:

We use this at this big firm and now I want to figure it out myself. So best in class, what are your top choices? I’m curious.

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, so between Black Diamond Tre’s a good one, but again, cut very expensive. Those are the most common that, I mean people use Morningstar office. I see that once in a while. I’m trying to think. Tamarack, Orion, Morningstar office, black Diamond, those are the most common that I come on advise on now as they continue to gain a little market share. They’ve got a portfolio management piece that also is integrated with their CRM, so that’s something to look at and watch. Redtail, however doesn’t, right? So Redtail have portfolio accounting built in. You can link your accounts so that you can see them all together in Redtail, but it doesn’t do your performance reporting or your billing or any of that stuff. So that’s one question that I get a lot. Well, if I have a CRM that doesn’t integrate, how does that work? And so the best in class stuff comes into play when you start talking about that.

David Kakish:

Sure. Okay. And now the flip side of that is sort of an all-in-one. I’m like, I don’t want to have the complexity. Yes, I know I might pay more, but we’re starting out where five people, maybe when we grow or when we’re more established after a couple of years I’ll start looking at best in class and sort of get this piece and this piece and this piece. But for now we’re starting out. I want to get an all in one for a new RIA with five people. What are you seeing and what would you recommend?

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, that really, Investnet is probably the biggest between in Investnet and Orion are the two top that are considered an all-in-one. And Riskalyze is in there too, but they’re an interesting thing. They’ve dabbled in a lot of different places and I don’t, in my opinion, have never really been able to pull it fully together like Orion has, Orion’s been a long for a long time. And I mean now you have all of your other held away assets too that you have to consider, right? And ER has really come into play with 401k. And so I think really Orion and TAC are the two kind of all in one that I see most office or most often in that space.

David Kakish:

Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. And for me, what I see a lot, and this is what we see, but it doesn’t mean what’s best or why I actually see Black Diamond quite a bit. And then I see Tamarack and Orion, those are kind of the two big ones that I see and it’s, it’s almost like the choice is like, Hey, here’s what you’re going to do and here’s why. Or maybe these are the safe ones. I don’t know where the dominant players, but that’s what I see from our perspective. But because we don’t get into the level of what you do, we never get into the nuances. And I’m so glad that you’re sharing the nuances because that’s what matters

Chris Johnson:

For the listener. Absolutely. Well, and the part about when you start thinking portfolio management, a lot of it does come back to, well, what do you do? Are you managing the assets yourself or are you farming it out to a third party? And if you’re farming it out, let’s say you have, I’ll just use in investnet as an example, there are so many separate account managers that you can get on the in Investnet platform. Same with Orion. But so if that’s how you do business, that’s probably what you’re going to be looking for, especially if you’re using an asset marker and SEI, right? All of those managers are out there and available through in investnet and you’ve got that whole new account opening, you’ve got billing, you’ve got portfolio accounting, so performance reporting and trading and all of that built into one component. But it’s expensive. And so if you’re a small five person shop, you have choices to make as you build out your tech stack on, well, where can I really afford to spend and how much can I afford to spend and does that fit within my budget? Whereas a black diamond less expensive, not as quite extensive is what you can do. They don’t have separate account managers connected to it the way or the way investment Tamarack does.

Todd Darroca:

Yeah, interesting. Okay, cool. Are you seeing a lot of, in the space, a lot of the tools are being either acquired or they’re consolidating it into one company and it sounds like the one you were talking about, they did consolidate, now they’re splitting back up. Are you seeing more consolidation and that’s just an outlier or are you seeing these guys stay separate from each other?

Chris Johnson:

Well, I think there’s a lot of consolidation and in Investnet, I think here just announced they’re actually going private. They’ve got a big investor that came in and Investnet now is going private, which is interesting because they’ve been public for a long time and a big player. And so I was surprised to see Orion say that they are now allowing or offering separate services. You don’t have to buy the whole thing in one, but it makes sense because market share, there’s so many advisors out there and everybody’s trying to gain market share. Well, if you’re an all-in-one solution and you’re expensive, these smaller firms and there’s a lot of firms breaking away or starting up their own RIAs because they want that revenue that they’re paying another firm to be in-house. And so if they can’t afford you, you’re not even an option right out of the gate.

Well, if you start allowing or offering separate pieces of your solution as an offering, you can gain more market share. And I think the idea maybe is well, if they get in on this piece, they’ll see that we can go all in one and maybe eventually they become an all-in-one client because now they know us and they’ve used us and they like our service and all of that. But it was interesting that both Orion and Riskalyze are separating and starting to offer individualized services. Yeah, great question though. I mean, it’s been a consolidation game for a long time. I mean, look at what investment has done the places they bought in Orion. I mean Orion owns Redtail. What’s going to happen there? They bought them out, what was it, a year and a half ago or so. So we will see what sort of integration they come along with their all in one solution with Redtail as the core CRM, we haven’t seen a lot yet, but I would guess that’s on the horizon

David Kakish:

When you think about it. It’s a smart business decision to say, Hey, yes, use this tool because now, oh, we have this other tool and it’s a lot easier to cross sell than not to, and I think that’s part of what’s happening in the market. So alright, so financial planning tools, and this kind of plays into what we talked about before, maybe let you talk a little bit about that and then yeah, there’s a couple of other things that we will quickly talk about, but yeah, financial planning tools from your perspective, Chris.

Chris Johnson:

Sure. I mean the ones I come across most often and Money Guide Pro, those are the two FC Coke. Yeah, you got it. And then NMA plan running in third usually. I’m

David Kakish:

Sorry, what was the third one you said?

Chris Johnson:

NaviPlan. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. So those are the three that have been around from what I know for a long time. But when you look at financial planning, the other pieces that are out there now that has really grown, and I don’t come across a lot of them because many of the clients that I work with have been in business for a long time and already have been using E-Money or Money Guide Pro or NaviPlan to convert off of a planning tool to another planning tool is very, very painstaking. And why do it unless there’s something that you have to have in another tool that your current tool doesn’t have.

David Kakish:

So I’m going to use an analogy here and Chris, you’re going to laugh because you’re going to know this because you’re from Minnesota Ney and Money Guide Pro is the Pepsi and the Coke and NaviPlan and the others are Chasta Cola and the other very distant third. But yes, e-money and Money Guide Pro is what I hear all the time. Those are the big ones. So

Chris Johnson:

NaviPlan was there, they were kind like juncture. They were an in-house desktop app for a long time and they were slow to getting to that web-based solution where e-money really almost has always been a web-based offering. And Nava plan is very complicated. You can get very sophisticated if you have very extremely high net worth clients that need the real sophisticated planning stuff. NaviPlan is really your go-to because they have that depth E-money is getting there, but E-money is more of like a cash flow. They’re all about cashflow. And when you’ve got big estate things that these very large high net worth people have, maybe NaviPlan is better option for you.

David Kakish:

Okay, cool. And then custodian, I think you and I were big fans of Schwab. There are others,

Chris Johnson:

Schwab, there are others. So in my experience, I’ve been on Schwab NFS or Fidelity, Pershing Prime Vest, which was a small self clearing firm. And so I’ve touched a lot of different TD Ameritrade, all of those. Now Schwab, Schwab’s my favorite. I know a lot of people there. I’ve used them for a long time. They do a great job. They had some challenges with the merger with TD and their service levels, but I think they’re kind of through that and getting that, but they really understand our business. They started their RIA channel a long time way back in the nineties. So they’ve really been a part of their market for a long time.

David Kakish:

Well, and what I am really impressed about Schwab that I haven’t seen the others do is that they really help the new RIAs get up and running. Yes, absolutely. And it’s very white glove service and they go above and beyond. And even though technically they’re just the custodian, there are so many other things that they provide for them or at least introduce them to people like you and me and absolutely others and things like that. I think I have not seen that with other custodians. I think there’s just so much value add in the beginning that they provide. So again, there are many others, but if I were starting my RIA, I would definitely go with Schwab over anybody else.

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, that’s my top choice for sure. Again, depending on needs too, you still have to look at the needs of the firm and maybe Fidelity’s because have a certain niche and maybe alternative investments or something like that where you’re really big on I’ve got to have this as part of my offering where maybe Schwab doesn’t have it. That would be the reason to look elsewhere. But actually a lot of the, my larger clients, they’re multi custodian. They don’t just have one that’s pretty common. The small one, usually

David Kakish:

There’s a primary, but they have a couple of clients that are with

Chris Johnson:

Somebody they do or something like that. Absolutely.

David Kakish:

Which is very common. Okay, cool. Alright. Communication archiving. So I’ll talk a little bit about that and then I’ll turn it over to you if you want to add to that or not. But the idea there is, hey, from a compliance perspective, you need to archive your email. You need to archive your instant message on teams and maybe social media, maybe text. You definitely need to talk to your outsource compliance company, whoever your compliance officer is and say, Hey, if we’re using texting with clients, do we need to archive that or not? Right? So I’m not going to answer whether or not you need to archive that, but the companies that do the communication archiving, again, because you’re on the Microsoft platform, Microsoft has the ability to archive and it drives me crazy because not a lot of people know this. You can archive your email and you can archive teams inside of Microsoft and it’s SEC and FINRA compliant, but so many RIAs do not know that. So many consultants do not know that. And that’s something we just set up for our clients by default. Now when it comes to archiving social media, text messages and stuff like that, really, I mean again going back to the Pepsi and the Coke, right? It’s Marsha Global Relay. Absolutely. And then the RC Cola or the Chasta or whatever, there’s a company called Message Watcher that’s pretty good. I like those guys a lot. But those are kind of, Smarsh is kind of the premium one, a premium platform and a premium price.

Chris Johnson:

Global Relay is not cheap either.

David Kakish:

Yeah, exactly. We’ve had a lot of people pretty happy with Message Watcher by the way. So those are the ones that would be there. So I don’t know if there’s more you wanted to add to that or

Chris Johnson:

I have a client that uses pre results, which has been decent, but they had a couple of their senior people leave recently and start another firm. And so the new firm, I’m looking at that to see what they look like. But yeah, I mean Smarsh Global Relay pre results message, and if you really look, there’s another one, let me think. Hold on. I can’t remember the name that I’m seeing a little more with. Oh, smart. RIA is a compliance, well that’s not really archiving, I guess they’re more infrastructure

David Kakish:

That leads us into the next topic when it comes to compliance. We don’t want to get too much to do it, but from a compliance perspective, you want to have an in-house chief Compliance Officer, a CO, but you still want to work with an outsourced compliance companies and there’s just so many of them out there are, man, I guess let me ask you that question. I didn’t even think about that, but because so many out there, I personally don’t have a preference. Do you have a preference for a new RIA with five employees?

Chris Johnson:

No, I mean Advisor Assist is good for small, small, they use Advisor Cloud 360 and the tool is decent. It’s just very, it’s a little clunky and it doesn’t really integrate that well with much, but it’s very reasonable from a cost standpoint point. So I mean, I like them. You’ve got Red Oak, you’ve got SMART RIA, there’s so many different providers out there that can do that for you. Yeah,

David Kakish:

And it’s interesting, what I find here is many new RIAs already have a relationship with some kind of a compliance company and they generally bring ’em on. And I feel like there’s just so many, many out there. And this is not a scenario where it’s a Pepsi and a Coke. I feel like this is more like, there’s literally probably hundreds of them out there

Chris Johnson:

Are.

David Kakish:

And generally speaking, they’re pretty good. But it’s difficult for me to go in and say, oh yeah, here’s one or here’s two. We’re happy to refer people when they ask, but it’s

Chris Johnson:

Absolutely,

David Kakish:

It’s very rare that they ask because they already typically have these established relationships

Chris Johnson:

Because you need that. Usually you need that right from the onset to even form the SEC registrant. You need a compliance consultant or someone to help you with that because form A DV in filing, that is not a simple thing to fill out. And if you do it wrong, you might not get approved. So yeah, you’ve got someone that’s behind the scenes helping you with that and you’ve met them through your custodial relationships or other relationships in the industry. I mean, I’ve got someone that I’ve worked with for years that’s fantastic. Smart guy attorney knows compliance back of his hand and I’ve referred clients to him when they want to break away and start their own shop. The challenge with that is he doesn’t have a tool. He does the legal work and that piece of it and your infrastructure, but now how do you do the management and monitoring of all your quarterly transactions for your people that need to be supervised and all of that. You need a tool that can help you with that. And that’s where those other players come into focus on, I need a software that can do this work for me.

David Kakish:

And then I want to talk about a managed service provider, but I want to say that last, is there anything else we need to talk about? Maybe performance reporting, trading, rebalancing, or maybe any other category that maybe we didn’t touch upon that you would say, yeah, hey, from a tech stack perspective, let’s talk about these things.

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, I mean one of the things and why Schwab is they’ve got ibel now as part of the TD merger, and I rebel from a trading and it’s a trading platform, portfolio management trading platform. I really like what Ibel offers in the integration with Schwab. Whereas some of the other ones, they have integrations. Of course all trading has to be as automated as possible. But I’m really beginning to what I rebel that offering has because of its connection with Schwab. We didn’t talk a lot about trade management tools, but you’ve got Tamarack in Black Diamond has their own. So there’s a lot of options out there. And again, it comes back to what your needs are. But yeah, I’m really liking I rebell with Schwab.

David Kakish:

Okay, cool. And then maybe the last thing, and then what I want to do is recap and say if this was my RIA, this is who I would hire for each category, but I want to talk about managed service provider, which is the space we play in RIA workspace. Absolutely. I think our number one competitor is a local IT provider. And generally what we see a lot of new RIAs do is because they’re comfortable, they hire a local IT provider, there are five people, there’re seven people starting out. And then within a year, if not sooner, they realize, oh my goodness, this local IT provider can’t service us. Because the fundamental problem is you’re small from a headcount perspective, you’ve got five people, seven people, employees, but you need what I would call an enterprise platform and enterprise security. And that local IT provider just doesn’t get that because to him you’re just a small business, you’re a small company, he wants to work with clients that have 30 plus employees.

We see this challenge all the time. So when they reach out to us, I always tell ’em, you’ve saved one to two years of your life because you reached directly to us rather than having to wait going through a local IT provider. Now outside of that, there’s two people that we come across. So we’re RIA workspace, just to be transparent outside of that, there’s Ven, which used to be OS 33. They used to be a pretty big player in providing outsourced IT services or managed services for the RIA vertical. But since then they’ve kind of moved into becoming more of a software platform and they just don’t focus on RIAs anymore. And then there’s a company called Advisory, which is owned by a private equity firm. This they bought out true North Networks, they bought out size solutions and those were really great companies. And now people come to us leaving Visor like customer service is terrible, just like nightmare stories.

And that’s what happens when you get owned by a private equity firm that also focuses on RIAs and accounting firms and construction because at the surface of it, an accounting firm in an RIA looks the same in practice. They’re so fundamentally different. And so absolutely that’s one of the big problems that’s happening there. And then there was a company called Itegria that got bought out by RIA in A box and then buy Comply. And they had a really good, what I would call an Amazon cloud workspace solution or a cloud computer, but that technology is way past due. And so a lot of people are leaving that because Comply really focuses on compliance and not tech and Ms P and stuff like that. So that’s kind of like if I were starting being objective and it’s hard for you to be objective. If I were starting out, I would choose RIA workspace as my MSP. But again, I’m a

Chris Johnson:

Little bit biased. No, I would too. I’m a little biased too, but I would too.

David Kakish:

Yeah, so cool. So what I want to do, so we covered a lot. We covered a lot, and I’m going to pretend I am starting a new RIA with a team of five people. I would choose the Microsoft Office suite as a platform, and I could use, by the way, windows computers or MacBook computers, it doesn’t really matter, but I would definitely use the Microsoft Suite instead of the Google Suite. Personally, if you were to ask me what CRMI would use, I would probably start out with Redtail in terms of portfolio management and software. If I wanted the best in class, I would probably choose Black Diamond. If it was an all-in-one, I’d have to really vet out Tamarack and Orion, and that’s sort of a tough one.

Chris Johnson:

Absolutely.

David Kakish:

I would probably do Tamarack since they own Redtail, right?

Chris Johnson:

Orion owns Redtail,

David Kakish:

I’m sorry, I’m sorry I got that wrong. I’d probably do Alliance since they own is what I would do for financial planning, custodian, definitely Schwab communication archiving. I would maximize Microsoft. I would probably get message watcher. I want to be budget friendly. And then an MSP, like I said, RIA workspace, and then what am I missing? What am I missing? So I just went through a tech stack of my RIA, what am I missing, Chris?

Chris Johnson:

Well, so really, so you’ve got the CRM component with Black Diamond, you’ve got portfolio accounting, billing and trading if you want trading, they have a rebalance your product that’s part of that on the compliance side. So the compliance side, you’ve got all of your employee monitoring that you have to do, not just their social media accounts, but you have to capture all of their account activity if they’re required to be supervised. So all of your advisors have to be supervised and you have to monitor their trading activities so they’re not doing front running and all these other things that advisors can do. So the compliance tool, I think is where there’s an open space there, whether it’s advisor assist or some of the other tools out there, that’s a plug that needs to be filled in how you manage and oversee all of your, because you’ve got your cybersecurity certifications, you’ve got your procedure certifications, you’ve got all of those pieces that every year or every quarter that you have to have people recertify. I haven’t done any trading in our list of securities that you can’t trade in and all of that. Sure, some of that’s dependent on the type of activity that the advisor does too, and what requirements you have to follow, but you need a system in a way to capture and manage and monitor all of that.

David Kakish:

Yeah, I missed that one as I went through the summary. Thank you for bringing that up. And I’m kind of pretending like this is a figment RIA, right? I kind of quickly listed like, Hey, here’s the tools that I would use, and hopefully the listener can look at that and get a sense of what makes a lot of sense. Todd, I know I’ve been asking a lot of the questions because geeking out with Chris. Anything on your end that you wanted to ask or you wanted to add?

Todd Darroca:

No, no, I think that’s great. It’s just you two best friends at recess who gossip up and I just kind of like watching, so No, it’s good. No, I got no other questions for Chris. Yeah,

Chris Johnson:

I think I’d actually add one more piece to this that I think maybe is more perceived, or maybe it’s when you talk CRM document management, Redtail has imaging, but there are other management systems in Microsoft. You’ve got SharePoint and OneDrive and that kind of stuff, but where are you maintaining your books and records, client files? And that really comes back to your document management tool. And if you’re using Redtail, of course you should use Redtail Imaging, but there are other solutions out there. You’ve got got docu Pace laser app, which is form filling. You’ve got quick forms. There’s other things that can help you automate stuff from an operation standpoint. And that’s one of the other components that I don’t think advisors think about when they are setting up their own firm is how do you automate some of the work that gets done every day? And one of the big things is in auto-populating your forms, and we didn’t really touch on that at all, but Schwab has integrations with DocuSign, docu pace, laser app, all of those pieces. But that’s a component that I think you need to also remember when you’re looking at this,

David Kakish:

Well, there’s document management, there’s document management automation, right? Yes, absolutely. What we generally see is when we talk about Red Tail Imaging and Laser Fe and some of the other ones, these are sort of at advanced stages and is, once people sort of understand the power of SharePoint, they end up doing a lot of things inside of SharePoint. But the document management automation, that could be just a separate podcast in and of itself.

Chris Johnson:

Absolutely.

David Kakish:

That could save a ton of time for RIAs and

Chris Johnson:

Definitely.

David Kakish:

Yeah,

Chris Johnson:

And I think one other piece too, sorry David is No, no, go for it. Client facing client portal, that’s another piece that we didn’t talk about at all. We were talking more internal, what does the advisor do, but how do they present to their clients? And client portals a big part of that in how you deliver your quarterly performance reports. E-money has a portal for uploading documents from an estate planning standpoint. So there’s different tools and ways that you also need to interact with your client. And a client portal is a big part of that.

David Kakish:

Yeah. Well, since you brought it up, I mean, what are your favorite ones? What are the ones that you

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, black Diamond has a great portal, and again, if you’re doing portfolio management where you’re producing quarterly performance reports, most of your tools are going to have a client portal. E-money has a client portal, investnet has a client portal, Tamarack, they all have client portals, but I don’t think that advisors think that much about it when they’re starting to set up their own shop. And it’s something that the question needs to be asked as you’re vetting out these solutions is, Hey, do you have a client portal where it’s going to be easy for me to push out my reports to so I don’t have to email them, or I don’t have to print and mail, which hopefully advisors aren’t printing and mailing things today, but some still do because there are clients that don’t even have email addresses.

David Kakish:

Yeah. And by the way, I’m glad you brought it up because it’s a subset of many of the other tools, but if it were you, what is your favorite client portal? And I know I ask interesting questions, I’ll call ’em interesting to put you on the spot, but what’s your favorite or why? Favorite client portals?

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, I like both. I mean, I like emos and I like Black Diamonds. Those are the two that are very, they’ve really spent a lot of time and energy building them out to work well for the advisor. Okay,

David Kakish:

Cool. Well, I’m glad that was part of my tech stack that I chose for my new RIA. That’s good. So cool. Well, listen, Chris, I’ve been asking a lot of questions. We’ve been going back and forth before we wrap up this call. Anything else you wanted to add? Again, new RIA, the best tech stack for a five person team. Anything else you want to add?

Chris Johnson:

No, I think we’ve covered a lot of different places that advisors need to think about what do they even need to have their own firm and yeah, great conversation. I mean, we could get into a lot of other stuff, digital marketing and sales enablement and scheduling client meetings and all. I mean, that’s one, right? Calendly, onehub, all of those. So there’s a whole realm of other things that as I work with my clients in helping develop out what does their tech stack look like, what are their needs? It all comes back to the needs of the advisor. And that’s really how you get into, well, what should you even choose? And do we even look at a calendar schedule or if 90% of your clients are 70 plus and they don’t use computers, well, no, you don’t need a calendar scheduler because why pay for it if nobody’s going to use it? So yeah, that’s that whole needs analysis, that’s really important.

David Kakish:

Yeah, I think what we tried to accomplish here is, I know there’s a lot more to this, but at least kind of cover, Hey, what are the primary things that we want to cover that maybe people don’t even think about or that they have a lot of questions around. I think generally people say, yeah, we want to use Zoom versus teams. They have a sense of that maybe we prefer Calendly over booking. And you’re right, there’s other components. But I think what, listen, if you’re a new RIA, you’re starting out or you’re going to start out, or you’re thinking to go on your own, you definitely want to listen to this and then take notes and say, yeah, hey, here are the different components, and then I would strongly encourage you to reach out to Chris and reach out to us too. But Chris is probably your first point of contact because Chris knows this and knows this really well, and kind of guide you through based on your requirements. And Chris, what’s best way for people to get in touch with you?

Chris Johnson:

Yeah, really best way is either email or phone. And email. It’s chris@tech.com. So sounds like gigabyte, but gigabyte. And then phone is eight one seven seven seven six seven.

David Kakish:

Okay, perfect. And we’ll include that in the show notes so you guys can see that. And if it’s a new RIA thinking about starting out or they just started out, what’s your process? Do you initial schedule like a discovery call or just walk through the process a little bit?

Chris Johnson:

Yep. Yeah, yeah. Initial, I do basically a discovery call to see how I can help them, what they’re really looking for. And the initial call is free, it’s just I spend whatever time is needed to get to know and understand what they’re looking for and how I can help. And then from there it’s engagement, putting together that engagement letter and coming up with what pieces I’m going to be involved in. And we go from there. Usually the beginning is the needs analysis really, and talking through what they do, how they do it, why they do it. And that starts helping fill in the gaps of, well here’s the components that you need and if you want to go best of breed, the ones that we should look at.

David Kakish:

Yep. Perfect. Yeah, I would strongly encourage you to reach out to Chris if you are going on your, after you listen to this, reach out to Chris. We are definitely happy to help on the MSP side or the IT consulting IT services side. And our process is usually there’s a discovery call and then 30 minute discovery call and then we take it from there. So now with that being said, Todd is our dj, so I will turn it over to our DJ to do the outro and the music mixing and all that fun stuff. So Todd.

Todd Darroca:

Alright, well thank you Allall for listening to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. For more podcasts and resources, go to staging-riaworkspace.kinsta.cloud and check out the learning center. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions or topics you’d like us to cover. And stay tuned for more RIA Tech Insights and our next episode. See you later.

In this episode of RIA Tech Talk, we welcome Christopher Johnson of TrigaByte Technologies to the show.  He brings insights into CRM options for RIAs and answers some of our FAQs for each.

Listen To The Audio


Read The Transcript

We cover some of the top CRMs used by RIAs including:

• Redtail
• Wealthbox
• Salesforce
• Tamarack
• AdvisorEngine
• Advyzon

Christopher answers our top questions to help you make the best decision about a CRM for your firm.

• What are the pros and cons of each CRM?
• Are some CRMs better suited for a smaller advisor vs a large RIA firm?
• From your perspective, what are the top 3 CRMS for the RIA industry?
• If you were running your RIA firm, which one would you use and why?
• Which ones do you get the most complaints about?

 

Get in touch with Christopher

Christopher Johnson, TrigaByte Technologies

Phone:  612-817-7767

Email:  chris@trigabytetech.com

Listen To The Audio:

Read The Transcript:

David Kakish

Hello and welcome to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. I’m David Kish and I’m here with Todd Roca. Together we’re on a mission to simplify the complex world of technology for RIAs just like yours. The title of today’s session is What’s the Best CRM for your RIA and why? I’m really excited. We have a special guest, Christopher Johnson, and he specializes in this area. And what we’re going to talk about today are the different CRMs on the market today that are specific to different RIAs and which would be the best one for your RIA. And here’s the deal. I love covering topics like this, and I should put a quick disclaimer. We’re not getting paid by Wealthbox or Redtail or Salesforce or anybody else like that, but I love these things because it’s a great way to get an objective view because sometimes there is a right CRM for the right type of company and some nuances and stuff like that.

But again, excited to have a special guest with us today. His name is Christopher Johnson. He’s the founder of Byte Technologies. He’s just outside of the Minneapolis St. Paul area, has 30 years of experience in financial services, and he has a boutique consulting firm where he also focuses on the tech. Now we focus on cybersecurity IT compliance, help desk manage it. He focuses on operations, and the analogy I like to use is it’s like peanut butter and jelly. We’re the peanut butter, here’s the jelly, and together we’re better together. So without further ado, Chris, I want to welcome you. Thank you. Feel free to introduce yourself and we’ll kind of get down to business after that.

Chris Johnson

Yeah, thanks David. So I appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast and really looking forward to digging into CRMs and what they can do for financial advisors. Like you said, I’ve got 30 plus years experience in the business. I really grew up on the operations, technology and compliance side. Most notably my role of chief compliance officer and chief operations officer for a large RIA broker dealer in the Twin Cities area. Was there for a long time. And from there jumped out to the client side actually and ran a wealth management practice for about six years prior to forming trivi. And really during that six years, started recognizing my passion for technology and what it can do for an advisor and how they serve their clients. And with my background, having the ops technology compliance and then client side, I think I have a unique position with experience and knowledge that can really add value to my clients and what they’re trying to do and accomplish in using the technology that they have. And really part of it is I have a six background also. So that process improvement, elimination of waste, utilizing your resources and getting more value out of the tools that you already pay for and that you have in the firm, it’s really a good conversation in trying to understand and find additional value in those tools and how they can help the advisor grow and serve their clients. And in the end, it’s really about what they do for their clients and creating that unique experience.

David Kakish

Sounds good. Well listen, I am really excited because I have a lot of questions. Well, Todd, too, I have a lot of questions and hopefully I’ll give Todd an opportunity to ask questions too. And you said you’ve got 30 years of experience, so do you start working when you’re five? Is that the deal?

Chris Johnson

Yeah, I was pretty close to that. Yeah, 1989 is when I started in the business. I’m fortunate to have my father’s gene in the youthful look, don’t let that fool you. I used to get, when I was younger, even more people saying, Hey, wait, did you just come out of college? How long have you been in the industry? When I was in a role of Chief operations officer, chief compliance officer, and people would look at me and go, are you sure? So yeah. All right.

David Kakish

We’ll have a separate podcast on aging, but for now we’ll kind of pull it back in and talk about CRM. And by the way, just the listeners know, we’re not going to talk about every CRM under the sun. We’re going to talk about six different ones, and I’ll kind of list them alphabetically, advisor engine, advise on Red Tail, Salesforce, Tamarack, Wealthbox. Those are kind of the big six in this space. And maybe there are others that Chris, you’ll talk about. But from our perspective, a lot of times what we’re doing with our clients is like, well, hey, what’s the better CRM? And a lot of times our answer is like, look, this is not our area of specialty. We’re happy to have you talk to another client that’s using a certain CRM and why and things like that. But that’s kind of why I’m excited, Chris. So the first question at the top of the hour, just a one minute question, one minute answer and then we can wrap it up. What’s the best one and why?

Chris Johnson

Yeah, that’s a great question. I get that question all the time from my clients, and really the answer is it depends. I mean, there’s so many different ways that people do this business and the tools that they use, and it really, the way you drill down into what is the best CRM is, it really depends on who you are as a firm and what you do and how you serve your clients and what features you want and need in order to do that. And that’s where we get into really deep conversations with my clients on really, who are you and what do you want to be and what do you want to look like and how does that present out to your clients? So I can’t give you a specific one answer, quick answer for that, but that is the question I get all time. It’s not Salesforce, come. I mean, if you’re a one person shop and you’re paying for Salesforce and you need to customize that, really, do you have the resources and Yeah, exactly. Financial stability to do that, probably not. Yeah.

David Kakish

Yeah. For the record, I was being sarcastic with that question. Absolutely. So by the way, really quick, out of the six that I mentioned, are there any that I missed that we want to add to this or

Chris Johnson

No, I mean, yeah, I think those are the ones that I come across most often that people are using. You’ve got some of the more captive people. I mean, we could get into Client Works, which is LPLs homegrown system, and if we got into, oh gosh, now I’m losing their name, another firm that does their own, so those are some of the other ones.

David Kakish

Yeah, we’re talking more about the independent. Yeah,

Chris Johnson

Exactly. And even independents that are with LPL don’t always just use Client works. They may have their own CRM, like Redtail or Wealthbox or whatever that they use on top of that. So yeah, these are the main six for sure. Yeah.

David Kakish

So which ones do you have experience working with or do you have a background in? I’m curious. And then we’ll maybe go into more specific questions from there.

Chris Johnson

Sure, absolutely. So lots of experience in Redtail, lots of experience in Tamarack, lots of experience in Salesforce. wealthbox a little bit, advise on not a whole lot. I really haven’t come at least my clients that are using a lot of advise on. And then advisor engines, lots of experience in that too. In fact, that’s the old juncture. And the firm that I was chief operations officer for, we actually used Juncture back in the day when it was juncture and an in-house database solution. So yeah,

David Kakish

Yeah, yeah. I forgot. Yeah, juncture. That’s right. And they were the dominant one for quite a while. They were,

Chris Johnson

Absolutely. Yeah. Back then that was best of breed and everybody was going best of breed, and you didn’t have the integrations that you did today and you had all these silos out there, your CRM, your financial planning tool, your trading tool, and all of these now are really pulling things together and really trying to be that one-stop shop of here’s where I go to do my daily business. And I think advisors, that’s what they’re looking for. Sure.

David Kakish

So out of the ones that I mentioned, larger RIAs and they’re smaller RIAs, and I kind of say that with a grain of salt, but depending on the size of the RIA and generally, it’s kind of funny a lot of times, and I don’t know if you do the same way or not, but when we look at a size of an RIA, right, they all like to compare a UM, and that’s a metric and that’s an important metric as assets under management. But we tend to look, I’m like, well, the number of employees, the number of full-time employees that they have, absolutely. That’s a key metric for us regardless of a UM. And so that’s kind of when we say a larger RIA versus smaller RIA, I’m curious, do you look at it the same way? Is that how you’re looking at it?

Chris Johnson

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because it’s about process and how many people are involved in that process when you’re using these tools. And if you have one person that does everything, a really simplified solution is the way to go. If you have multiple people that are involved in a process, you need a system that can handle that workflow and being able to automate the passing of tasks and things that need to be done. So yeah, absolutely. Number of people is a big part of determining what system fits you best. Yeah.

David Kakish

So vaguely speaking, what’s your definition of a smaller RIA in terms of headcount and what are the CRMs that you typically see in?

Chris Johnson

Yeah, so I really kind of look at 10 and under, and I think Red Tail’s the predominant one that is for the smaller independent, maybe they’re an advisor out doing their own thing, 1, 2, 3 people, and maybe they’re their own RIA. But yeah, red Tail’s really the predominant for that space. And then as you get upwards into the 20 plus, you’re looking at advisor engine, Salesforce, and when you’ve got really large enterprises, Salesforce is the predominant one for those larger when you start getting into 50, a hundred people because of the complexity of the business and how many people are involved in what happens every day.

David Kakish

Yeah, I generically say that our sweet spot is five to 25 employees, the RIAs we work with. And what’s funny with these RIAs, once they hit 20, 25, 30 employees, the big question is, Hey, how do we increase a UM without increasing headcount? Right?

Chris Johnson

Absolutely.

David Kakish

They’re all trying to tackle that, and that’s where we see a lot of that. It’s kind of interesting. I mean, I think Wealthbox has also been making some inroads.

Chris Johnson

They have absolutely

David Kakish

A lot lately, and I think if I’m not mistaken, they’ve been taking some market share away from Red Tail in that space.

Chris Johnson

They are. I think they just hit how many clients. I remember seeing them kind of promoting them, hitting a thousand clients or something, 1500 clients. But yeah, Wealthbox is definitely taking market share from Redtail. I specifically don’t have any clients that are working with Wealthbox right now, and I haven’t helped anybody move from Redtail to Wealthbox. But yeah, I’m hearing that in the marketplace that Wealthbox is really making headway.

David Kakish

How about, I’m curious, and I don’t know if you have good numbers on that or not, but RIAs with around 10 to 30 employees, what are you typically seeing the CRMs in that space? I’m curious.

Chris Johnson

Yeah, I mean, again, predominantly I’m seeing a lot of Red Tail and there is some tamarack in there. The people that are using Investnet with that whole merger that took place a number of years ago, people are starting to look for that fully integrated platform that really does everything for them. And Tamara is one of those. It’s interesting, Tamarack way back when it was portfolio management or trading rebalancing, the firm that I was at, we started using Tamarack and I was actually on their advisor board that helped them develop the CRM component and that integration piece way back when Stuart Depino was there and Andina Anderson and that initial Tamarack, I don’t recognize the names, but yeah. Yeah. So wait, that

David Kakish

I’m not that old Chris?

Chris Johnson

Wait, we’re talking back in the early to mid two thousands, so yeah,

David Kakish

I’m kidding. I think we’re about the same age.

Chris Johnson

That’s why I don’t have much hair on top, and I don’t know if people can’t see that, but I like to say I’m follicly challenged because of my age.

David Kakish

Yeah, it’s interesting in that 10 to 30, I think Redtail is really big. I think TAVI Rack is really big. And then depending on the type of company, I sometimes see Salesforce.

Chris Johnson

Salesforce, we’re doing custom, that’s the other and stuff like

David Kakish

That. Yeah, those are absolutely. So alright, well I’ll tell you what, thank you. My big question was like, Hey, what are you seeing in the smaller versus larger versus mid-size RIA, I guess I’ll kind of just open the floor for you start. Maybe we can take ’em one at a time in whatever order you want and kind of dissect that and talk about the pros and the cons and go from there. Maybe that’s a good way to do that if you don’t mind. Okay.

Chris Johnson

So I mean if we start A to Z advisor engine, they’re promoting their complete wealth management platform. They’ve got all of these different technologies that are part of the system. Their challenge has been they had to re-engineer their whole platform from an in-house server-based model to a web-based model as everybody was going cloud. And by the way, the cloud,

David Kakish

This is what people knew meant for many years, is juncture, right?

Chris Johnson

Juncture. Exactly. That’s what Juncture Juncture was.

David Kakish

And what you’re saying it was built server-based or desktop based and then desktop-based.

Chris Johnson

Absolutely. There was a desktop installation. You had to have your own, I think it was a SQL server back then to run the database. And really it had a footprint in the firm and lots of support needs from supporting the database and the server that ran the database. And as everybody started going to the cloud, everything for Juncture was so hardware based that they had to re-engineer their whole platform. And so I think they’re getting there. They have a lot of different things that they can do. The CRM has contact management, practice management dashboards, admin tools. They’ve got their digital onboarding and client portals. So they really have a lot that they can do portfolio management, so all their data consolidation and rebalancing and reporting and fee billing. And then the planning side, I think where Advisor Engine is light on is the integration. The planning tool is their in-house planning tool.

I mean they use, I think Franklin to help with their models or maybe it’s their goals-based planning that they use Franklin template for, but a lot of their stuff is more built in the system, whereas a Red Tail has integrations, they do more integration of data versus building out things themselves. So advisor engines great for as you get to be a little bigger, that’s where I see it. I have one client that’s on Advisor Engine and they’re a larger firm. They’re in the 30, 30 ish range of people and growing. So I think their advisor engine opportunity is really to go for those larger firms that really want some digital workflow stuff because their digital onboarding is really nice, but they’re kind of light on portfolio management. I mean, this specific client uses Black Diamond for their portfolio management. They don’t even use Advisor Engine for that piece because it’s kind of light, it doesn’t have the complex reporting things that Black Diamond does so advise on. I don’t know that much about that.

David Kakish

Chris, real quick, Chris, before we move on. So one thing with Advisor Engine, and for the people that know it under juncture, they actually have a lot of market share. And I think one of the big challenges of Juncture is their, and I know this, I have an interesting story. They built so much of their stuff with what I would call legacy onsite server, that it was really a challenge for ’em to move to the Juncture cloud to migrate.

And it’s like a legacy software that now you’re trying to build in the cloud. Whereas some of the other competitors think Salesforce for example, it was always originally a cloud-based application.

Chris Johnson

Yeah.

David Kakish

And what’s funny is we were thinking about the cloud, I think way before Juncture was that we even got the domain name juncture cloud.com. We had that domain name and then we had a bunch of other something cloud.com.

Chris Johnson

Sure.

David Kakish

But legally you can’t keep a brand’s name. So we actually, we gave it to Juncture, we transferred all that stuff to Juncture during those days. And that’s why I kind of have a funny story behind that. I just wanted to share that.

Todd Darroca

You could have charged a lot for that David, man, I would’ve would’ve been like 10 grand.

David Kakish

Todd, yes and no. You can’t use somebody’s brand and do that, but if it was a generic name x.com on Twitter, yes, you could have gotten a lot, but I can’t go in and say nike cloud.com actually. So we transferred all that. We didn’t take, or if we did take money, it was just something like nominal or whatever.

Todd Darroca

I believe this happened to Salesforce too. They forgot to re-up their domain name and somebody bought it. Yeah, someone bought it, yeah.

David Kakish

Are you serious Salesforce?

Todd Darroca

Yeah. I think obviously Salesforce being Salesforce took care of that real fast.

Chris Johnson

Yeah, you’ve got all the trademark stuff that comes into play with that, right? I’m sure all these companies are trademarked and you can’t use trademark names like that or by domains to them. So

David Kakish

Just a little, I wanted to make this stuff can sometimes be dry, so I wanted to make it a little bit entertaining. So advisor engine, what used to be known as Juncture, we talked about that. Fantastic. Thank you. And you were going to start to talk about advise on

Chris Johnson

Yeah, so advise on, I don’t know a whole lot about them because I haven’t really come in contact with clients that are using ’em. What I know is they’re trying to be, again, that one-stop shop where you’ve got portfolio management and client reporting, CRM, billing, rebalancing, all of those things. So kind of a investment type thing, a tamp, I think they’ve got a tamp piece of the business. And so I don’t have a lot to say other than I hear that people, I think they’re becoming more noticed in the industry because I think they’re modern, right? Their interface looks modern, their reports look modern, they’ve got a document management component of it. So if you’re a firm looking for a one-stop shop, I definitely think there’s someone to look at and really to do a comparison of what your needs are to see if they fit. And I think they can help the larger firms because of that fully integrated setup.

David Kakish

What’s your take, and this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it’s an important question to ask. What’s your take on best of breed and then a one-stop shop where it’s sort of everything. Now, generally speaking, the smaller you are, it’s better to have a Swiss Army knife, right? Yes. The bigger you are, you want have maybe separate but curious, what are your thoughts on that? Because that’s a question that even transcends the RIA world, but we’re going to focus on RIAs.

Chris Johnson

Absolutely. No, and I get that question a lot. And again, I come back to what are your needs and really the needs of my clients, what do you need? How do we pull them together? And I think you and I passed little emails that we are trying to look for companies that maybe could build data warehousing behind these systems that can help some of the integration components that maybe aren’t there. That’s something that I think when you look at advise on and you look at Tamarack in investnet type, they’re this big integration piece that has the one-stop shop. Well, that costs a lot of money usually, and you don’t have a lot of flexibility with those because they’re built and you use ’em and you’ve got your lists and things that you can create in the system for how you code a client and what their status is with you and segmentation and those kinds of things.

But you’re kind of stuck with what they have. Whereas something like a Salesforce, you can buy Salesforce and then you can build all around it and integrate and do whatever you want with it. In fact, one of the firms, when I was in the wealth management practice, we were partnered or aligned with the RIA side was a large RIA that used Salesforce and had put a ton of money into it and customized it and built custom integrations with the financial planning tools and all kinds of stuff that then made it a very wow experience. Well, that’s very expensive to do. So yeah, your smaller firms usually from a cost standpoint, that one stop shop, you buy the one license and you get their pieces, you’re

David Kakish

Covered across the board.

Chris Johnson

Yeah, yeah, you’re covered. Yeah. Yeah.

David Kakish

I mean the way I see it is if I were an RIA with five employees, I’d probably be looking sort of an all-in-one. Absolutely. If I had 30 employees, there’s probably nuances where I’m like, no, I may want to customize Salesforce or Redtail or Absolutely.

Chris Johnson

Yeah. That’s what I generally see across my client bases. Cool. Yeah, the smaller ones are one-stop shop, they want it easy integration. Not a lot of problems with trying to figure out, well, here’s my planning data, here’s my CRM data, how do I pull those together? Yeah, sure.

David Kakish

Okay. Alright. Advise on we talked about that. Okay. Red Tail. Red Tail is kind of the big one in the SMB space, I guess if we want to call it that.

Chris Johnson

It is. Yeah, it is. And Red Tail’s been great. They merged with Orion not too long ago, so I think that’s helped Redtail for a long time was having a lot of service challenges and some challenges with database connection and things like that. And I think they’re really resolving a lot of that with the partnership with Orion. I think Orion’s looking to, when you look at Investnet versus Orion, Orion’s trying to be investnet I think. And with bringing in A CRM and some of those components and really trying to compete in that marketplace, Redtail has definitely been one of those main components that people have used.

Most of my clients are on Redtail, not that I’ve recommended it, it’s something that they’ve had. And so I have a lot of experience, and actually in the wealth management practice that I ran, we used Redtail for the first part of that business initially when we were with a different RIA than the one that used Salesforce. So I have a ton of experience in Redtail in building workflows and helping people actually migrate data into it. One of my clients started their own RIA about a year and a half ago, and they were on their RIAs Redtail database, and so we had to set up their own Redtail, and so we had to do a migration of all that data. So the features are great, they’ve got imaging, they’ve got Redtail speak, you can use their email. So they had a lot of options and I think they have over a hundred integrations that you can connect to

David Kakish

And we see a lot of Redtail, right? In the 30 employee, if you’re an ria, a 30 employees, I think Redtail has a really big market share and for good reasons, for good reasons, and generally people that are using it are fairly happy and not looking to move away from it. Absolutely. That’s kind of been my experience.

Todd Darroca

Here. When you talked about migration out of the six that you’re talking about, is Redtail one of the more, I guess, simplistic ones to do that migration? It’s not a big pain in the neck, or is there one that maybe is really smooth and easy that if somebody was trying to switch or migrate, they should look at first?

Chris Johnson

Yeah, migration data migrations are always playing craps. You’re rolling the dice because garbage in, garbage out. The current database may be full of bad data, and when you bring that over to a new database, it’s still bad data. So I spend a lot of time with my clients in doing a data migration in cleaning up the existing database so that it’s accurate, it’s complete, it has all the information that you need so that you can make that transition really easy into the new database. All of these vendors have onboarding solutions and data migration solutions that are part of that process when you buy their product. And I don’t think there’s one that’s better than another. I think it really comes back to how good your data is. And if you have a lot of complexity in that data, then you can run into a lot of challenges.

So I’ll use an example. Redtail has very limited amounts of fields that you can customize, whereas Salesforce has a lot of customization that you can build into it. So if you have a very customized Salesforce database that you’re going to move to something that’s more not customizable, you will have challenges with that because well, where do we put this field? Where do we put that field? So that data mapping becomes a challenge and not that you ever see people going from Salesforce to, it’s usually the other way, Redtail to Salesforce. But yeah, that’s a great question. It really depends on where your data’s at and how are you going to migrate that into the current or the new database.

David Kakish

Yeah, it’s really interesting, and this is probably a great segue to go from Redfield to Salesforce. You said something really important. We have a lot of people that are using Redtail, and I don’t know if I were to liken it to cars, I feel like it’s, I don’t know, a Honda Accord very reliable, works really well, not a lot of thrills, but I don’t know, maybe you want to upgrade to A BMW or a Mercedes or something. I don’t know. But I think Redtail just it does a lot of what you need. And again, I’m talking like in the sub 30 employees, right? RIA is under 30 employees, but you’re right, when they’re trying to do a lot of customization, it can become a challenge and then people start looking at Salesforce. So that’s probably a good for you to start talking about Salesforce.

Chris Johnson

So Salesforce is a beast, right? I mean, they’re in who they serve, whereas Redtail was built for financial advisors. You don’t see a lot of real estate people using Redtail. Why would they go to a system that’s made for financial planners and investment advisor type people? Whereas Salesforce is a CRM period. They have a financial services module that’s more geared and built towards financial planners and investment managers. But yeah, when you buy into Salesforce, you go into it knowing you’re going to have a ton of resources that go into database setup and how you use it and ongoing support and maintenance for that because there’s so much that you can do with it. In fact, the clients that I’ve worked with that have Salesforce usually have their own Salesforce certified people that have some of the different certifications that you can get from Salesforce so they can do that work on their own versus having to pay an outside consultant to do that.

The customization and some of the, it’s almost like coding, right? It’s not necessarily coding, but it’s almost like coding where you have to build out this module or you have to enhance this reporting feature or do these various things. So yeah, Salesforce is a big behemoth and if you have the resources to do it, and it’s really a great tool because you can really make it your own. And the firm that I was working with, that’s what they did. We had e-money integrations that aligned with the Riskalyze score, and it was just this cool platform and they had this whole process of how people identified who they are as people. So we got really deep into who a person is and then aligning their investments and their goals and their plans for the future with their money. And it was really cool, but I think I heard they put 25 30 million into that, and that’s a lot of money and resources and the smaller firms just don’t have that.

David Kakish

Yeah, I mean, to your point, if I were a five person RIA, I wouldn’t look at Salesforce, I would look at Redtail, but if I were a 30 person RIA and I need to get some of that customization that I’m just not getting in Redtail, thats where you start looking at and saying, okay, you know what? Salesforce begins to make sense. But with that, it’s like you almost have to have a part-time, Salesforce developer, or even maybe a full-time or a company that knows that really well for you. Absolutely. Yeah. Back to your question, one is not better than the other. What are you trying to do?

Chris Johnson

Yeah, you can do it yourself. You go into the database lists and you can customize your status or you can customize your keywords or these other things that are list oriented that allow you to query the database. How many clients do I have that golf while I’m doing a golf outing? So now I send out a blast email using that data to invite them to a golf event. Whereas Salesforce, I mean you’re customizing. You can customize anything really.

David Kakish

It’s a double-edged sword, right?

Chris Johnson

Absolutely. Well, if something goes wrong, how do you fix it? When you’ve got that level of stuff, how do you fix it? Redtail, you go to Redtail and say, Hey, this doesn’t work. If you’ve built out your own Salesforce, now you have to figure out, or the company you’re using has to figure out, how do we fix this? Cool.

David Kakish

Well, listen, we got two more left, Tamarack and Wealthbox. And so Tamarack, if you weren’t in this industry, you would think it’s a spice or something like that, right?

Chris Johnson

Absolutely. So I think Tamaracks great Tamaracks built on Microsoft Dynamics, and so if you’re a Microsoft shop, the integration of Dynamics to all of your other Microsoft Suite products is fantastic, and there’s a lot you can do with it, especially now with copilot and all of the AI stuff that’s coming out. Talk about creating some automation in what you do. It’s a great platform for that. Along with, again, they were a wealth management practice that basically initially built the system and they started with rebalancing, which was portfolio management type stuff, and then they expanded out to CRM and compliance and all the other components. And so again, if you’re looking for a one-stop shop, Tamarack is one of the ones you should be looking at now, expensive. So when you compare Redtail or advise on or Wealthbox to Tamarack from an expense standpoint, you’re going to be paying a lot more for that development and money that they’ve put in into building the system. But yeah, if you’re a larger shop that’s looking for a one-stop shop and can afford it, rack is definitely one to look at because of all the pieces that they have.

David Kakish

And when you say large, again, just to go back for the listener, when you say a larger size RIA employee headcount, what rate would you…

Chris Johnson

Yeah, you’re in that same with Salesforce, 30 plus I think. 30 plus. Okay. Yeah. I mean smaller firms can do it, but it’s expensive. You have to be willing to make that investment, which smaller firms can do. But I think when you look at scalability and cost and all of that, your people and your technology are usually your two biggest costs in your p and l. And if you’ve got a large chunk of that going towards Tamarack, which is again, it can be a one-stop shop with everything, you can look at that and go, yeah, maybe I can afford that as a smaller shop, but personally I think it’s geared towards that larger market.

David Kakish

Sure. Okay, cool. And then the last one on our list is wealthbox. And again, to be fair, we did this in order of, we did it alphabetically, right? It’s not like market share or anything like that, it’s alphabetically. So the six CRM number six on our list is Wealthbox.

Chris Johnson

So Wealthbox, again, I don’t have any clients directly using this. I’ve come across it where people have asked me to look at an analysis in comparison of them versus Redtail. I think the two of them are the two that kind of most closely match each other in what they can do. But from what I hear, I think Wealthbox is another great solution for those independent breakaway people that maybe are starting their own RIA and from a cost standpoint, not it’s comparable to the Red Tail side. And so I think it’s a great one to look at. If you’re going to compare, and you’re a small firm, Redtail, Wealthbox for sure are two that you should be looking at.

David Kakish

Yeah, and that’s exactly what I was going to say. I think Redtail and Wealthbox in that SMB space in the small to mid-size, RIA, they kind of compete. I think Redtail is kind like the well-known, established one. Absolutely. And I feel like Wealthbox is really kind of chipping away at Redtail, and then they are, every time they do, they like to brag about it, right? Yes, absolutely. Rightfully so, because their business. Yeah. Alright.

Chris Johnson

Well, and I just want to make one other point on those. I see a lot of these solutions in, they may not be their own RIA, but they’re an independent office that maybe is aligned with a larger RIA and they have, so I’ll use Cambridge Investments as an example. They’re a large broker dealer, RIA, but all of their advisors are independent. So you come into a firm like that and they say, here’s the options that you have from A CRM that integrate with our in-house systems or things that we use, wealthbox, red Tail, all of those are part of that. So these smaller independent may not be their own RIAs, but advisor offices are candidates for products like that. For sure.

David Kakish

And again, I just want to go on the record and say Todd and Chris, which one of these partners or vendors is paying CRM vendors is paying us the most?

 

Todd Darroca

All of ’em.

Chris Johnson

Zero. Zero. They’re the same. They’re all the same.

David Kakish

I just want to put that I don’t paying us

Chris Johnson

And nobody pays us I zero for any of those partners.

David Kakish

I know. I just wanted to put that out there. Truly agnostic. And that’s kind of why we talk about that. And sometimes there’s a ton of value in talking with you, Chris, where we’re like, Hey, listen, what’s the deal? And I know mean this space pretty well, but I got a lot of really great insights today. Let me ask you a couple of follow up questions. And again, thank you. What you shared was very, very helpful. If you are running your own RIA firm with five employees, let’s just kind of stay there, right? Which CRM would you use and why?

Chris Johnson

Well, honestly, I would either use Redtail or wealthbox. And again, I don’t know enough about wealthbox, but from what I hear, they would be ones that I would look at Redtail for me right now, just because I have so much experience in it and I know the system, you go to things that are easy and that, right? That’s how natural you lean to those things. Red Tail’s great, but again, it’s turning into a big company. Orion’s now owns it, so who knows where that’s going to go. But between I think Redtail and Wealthbox, those would be the two that I would focus on looking at for my own shop.

David Kakish

I have one last interesting question, then I’ll turn it over to Todd to see if he has any questions. And this question isn’t really a fair question, but which ones do you get the most complaints about? And the reason I ask that is you got to remember if somebody’s not using something, nobody complains about it, right? And I’m curious, which ones do you get the most complaints about? Are people just maybe have a hate relationship? I don’t know, maybe hate’s a strong word. You know what? Yeah, yeah. Which ones do you get a lot of complaints about? Red Tail. Okay. Red

Chris Johnson

Tail. Yeah. I mean, because a lot of my clients use it and they’ve gone through this evolution of being their own company, trying to develop things on their own to Orion, taking them over through the pandemic from a service standpoint. Companies were really struggling with supporting service and I mean, you could be on hold with Redtail back then for 45 minutes to an hour.

David Kakish

I remember that. They went through a difficult, painful support experience for a while. I think they’ve fixed that though, right?

Chris Johnson

They have no, yeah, absolutely. And my comments are just inexperience and knowing it’s not disparaging against them or anything like that. It’s just knowing, I mean, everybody goes through challenges in their business. We all do. Nobody’s perfect and stuff happens. It’s really how you come out of it and really what you do to support your clients. That’s where when we’re talking about do we get paid for this? I look at myself as a fiduciary. I grew up in the RIA A space and RIAs, you’re a fiduciary to your clients. You do what’s in their best interest. If we were getting paid for this, we wouldn’t be doing what’s in our best interest for our clients by talking about and recommending and saying, these are ones that I would use. So just want to put that out there to be fair.

David Kakish

Yeah, I just want to put this out there based on what you said. It’s an unfair question because a lot of our clients use Redtail, right? And obviously if you’re using something a lot, you’re probably going to complain about it just because…

Chris Johnson

You get the good and the bad.

David Kakish

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that’s why I said it’s an unfair question. I always think it’s an interesting question.

 

Chris Johnson

Well, so here I will also say though, advisor Engine has gotten their NOx two because of their evolution from being that in-house, hardware based desktop installation to the cloud base. I know they had a lot of challenges with people migrating to that cloud base solution, and so I think they got a lot of knocks on that too, but I think they’re past that.

David Kakish

I think from what I understand, I won’t get too much into it, but when you build, it’s a server-based application and a cloud-based application, they’re just totally different. And I think that was their, yeah, and I agree with you. I think Advisor Engine is way past that, but when they were going through that process, it was a little bit tough for, it wasn’t a seamless transition of Oh yeah. It was almost moving to a different CRM back then.

Chris Johnson

Totally. Well, yeah. And then, I mean, you’ve got Investnet too, investments at behemoths, so everybody knows challenges, and you’ve got a big company like that. You have service challenges that you go through. So they all do, right? Again, nobody’s perfect. I think it’s really, you find the solution that best supports your needs and you figure out how to work as best as you can with them. Yeah.

David Kakish

Cool. Well, Todd, I want give you, I don’t know if I’ve been asking a lot of the questions, but I wanted opportunity to ask Chris any questions on your

Todd Darroca

No, I think there’s a lot that Chris has said today and some great insights. So I think my only question is how can somebody get in touch with you, Chris? I mean, what’s the best way?

Chris Johnson

No, best way is either email or phone. My email is chris@triggerbytetech.com. So gigabyte is just like gigabyte if you think about it. And then tech.com or my phone number is two eight one seven seven seven six seven. And just a little history trigger byte, when you think about Byte. Until I started Gigabyte, there was no such thing as a gigabyte, right? There’s gigabyte, terabyte, megabyte, all the bites, and Tri is actually my middle name. So Byte has a very meaningful background as to how I formed the company and where that name came from. So I’m the first trigger byte in the world. Cool.

David Kakish

Cool. That’s a great story, Chris. And by the way, if you’re driving, don’t feel like you have to write this down. We’re going to include this in the show notes. We’ll include Chris’s email and his phone number. So yeah, Chris, thank you so much for these. You’ve shared a lot of really great insights. If you’re listening to this and you’re saying, wow, this Chris guy really knows this stuff. He does. We just kind of scratched the surface. Chris, this was a lot of fun to geek out on some of this stuff.

David Kakish

Not in the RIA space, this is so boring, right? Totally. You this space, you’re like, oh, that’s what I wanted to hear. That’s what I want to know. I want validation, and I don’t want it to be from the vendor because the vendor’s always going to promote themselves. And so I think this has been a phenomenal session. I guess before we wrap up, Chris, any final thoughts or insights or words of wisdom you wanted to share with the listener?

Chris Johnson

Yeah, no. When you say you love geeking out about this stuff, so do I. And a lot of my friends and people that I know and work with just kind of look at me, excuse me, and go, you’re kind of strange because you really get into this stuff and advisors don’t. They just want to serve their clients. And that’s where I can help and add value because I understand what they’re trying to accomplish in serving their clients. I understand what their staff goes through on a day-to-day basis, and I love it. And I look for ways that I can add value, and I think my background kind of supports that. Yeah. Thank you. Sounds good. I appreciate

David Kakish

It. Yeah, Chris, thank you so much. And then, Todd, since you’ve got the wonderful radio voice, maybe you can go ahead and you can sign off for us today.

Todd Darroca

Of course, of course. Well, as always, guys, thank you so much for listening to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by of course, RIA Workspace. And for more podcasts and resources, go to our website, our ia workspace.com and check out the learning center. That’s where all of our episodes and other cool stuff will be just for you to research and bookmark. And as always, Dave, and I love hearing from you guys, and I’m sure Christopher now would love to hear from you too. So please reach out to us in the episode ideas or comments, and we always love to see those. And we hope you stay tuned for more RIA Tech Insights in our next episode. We’ll see you guys later. Thanks for joining us.