Tag: IT Services

RIA Tech Talk Podcast: Featuring Kent Tkach from Practify

As your RIA grows, the limitations of traditional CRMs can become a major roadblock. In this episode of the RIA Tech Talk Podcast, we sit down with Kent Tkach  from Practify to discuss why traditional CRMs may be falling short for RIAs that are scaling—and how a purpose-built solution can make all the difference.

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Read The Transcript

Key Takeaways from the Episode

1. The CRM Struggles That RIAs Face

Many RIAs start with traditional CRMs like Redtail, Wealthbox, or Salesforce. While these solutions work well for basic client management, firms often hit roadblocks as they scale. Customization becomes costly, workflows get cumbersome, and firms find themselves needing external consultants to make their CRM work for them.

2. Why Practify is Different

Practify is designed specifically for RIAs and wealth management firms, addressing the common pain points of scalability and customization. Unlike traditional CRMs that require heavy customization or external overlays, Practify is a fully built platform designed for RIAs from the start.

3. When to Consider Switching

If your firm is hiring external Salesforce consultants, struggling with disjointed workflows, or using multiple spreadsheets to track key processes, it may be time to evaluate a CRM that scales with you—without the ongoing maintenance headaches.

4. Practify’s Approach to CRM & Workflow Management

• Prebuilt Workflows & Reporting: Many firms find they can get started without additional customization.
• True CRM, Not Just an Overlay: Unlike Salesforce overlays, Practify replaces Salesforce while still leveraging its powerful infrastructure.
• Dedicated Support & Training: Practify provides in-house technology consultants to assist with onboarding and customization—so firms aren’t left figuring it out alone.

5. The Hidden Costs of Customizing Salesforce

Many RIAs underestimate the ongoing costs of maintaining a highly customized Salesforce CRM. Licensing costs are just the beginning—keeping the system functional often requires ongoing consultant fees and technical support. Practify eliminates this complexity by providing a tailored, all-in-one platform.

Who Should Consider Practify?

Practify is ideal for RIAs that are:

• Growing beyond 10+ employees
• Looking to streamline operations with automation
• Frustrated with CRM limitations and costly customizations
• Seeking a platform that provides ongoing support, rather than just software

Want to see how Practify can support your RIA’s growth? Reach out to Kent for a consultation:

Website: www.practify.com

Listen To The Audio:

Read The Transcript:

Hello, and welcome to the, RIA Tech Talk podcast brought to you by RIA Workspace. We’re on a mission to simplify the complex world of technology for RIAs just like yours.

In this podcast, we will be your tech guides breaking down those often confusing tech topics into plain and practical terms.

I’m David Kakish, and today we have a special guest with us. His name is Kent Tkach, and he is with Practifi. And the title of the podcast today is if you’re scaling your RIA, your CRM might be holding you back. And I think the big problem and, you know, this is what I was talking with Kent about, earlier was if you’ve ever been frustrated by the traditional CRM that was built for your RIA or built for RIAs, it feels like it doesn’t quite fit the size. Maybe you’re constantly hitting roadblocks. You’re trying to customize it.

And, you know, we’ve all been there, and this isn’t necessarily a criticism of something like Redtail or Wealthbox or Salesforce or any of that. They do have their strengths, but there’s a point where you might be scaling your RIA and you might be hitting some challenges with flexibility and, you know, other things like that.

The goal of this episode is to share with you why some of these traditional CRMs might fall short, what makes, Practify different, and then how to strategically think about your CRM as your firm grows. And I guess, you know, Kent, I’ll, I like to get straight down the business, but, you know, you wanna share about yourself a little bit and, you know, how wonderful the weather is in Chicago because, yeah, we’re here. You know? So you can do that, but then we can kinda get down to business.

But I think I you know, I kinda gave a high level overview, but, you know, from your perspective, what’s yeah. May maybe introduce yourself real quick and then just kinda dive in. Like, what’s the really big problem that, you know, your company solves? Because I I I’ll be I’ll be very transparent with you.

For me, I always thought of your company as more of an overlay, not a replacement, and I think that’s kind of a big misconception out there. So I would love to give you the opportunity to introduce yourself, and then what’s, you know, what’s the big problem that, the R and D guys are having.

Appreciate it, David, and and thanks for thanks for taking the the time today. As I I think we both knew on the first couple conversations that we had, a a podcast was was in order just based on our our conversations about the about the space. So, appreciate the the opportunity.

So, you know, you you did a great job, one on my last name, because no one ever gets it right, and I always make people pronounce it.

And so I I know we may have rehearsed it on the back end, but, You coached me really well.

Thank you.

So Practify. Yeah. So, I mean, in its simplest terms, we’re a CRM platform. Right? And so, our focus is on the RA wealth management community. We we don’t focus on any other, segment in the market, and and we’re we’re really here to to build a product or or to provide a product that enables RAs to to efficiently grow their business.

And in doing it with a with a product that opens the doors a little bit as far as customizations.

Every single one of the firms that we’ve worked that we work with, they’re all they’re all different in their own category.

And and some of the the competitors that you you had mentioned, they’ve got a a really good niche in in the market and do a a great job for some of the firms that are out there.

What Practify has built is is a platform that that really, I I talk about this all the time of we wanna keep it very simple, yet we want it to be scalable for the business. And so as firms grow, maybe they they add advisors that are in a different state or different offices, and they wanna start to to to create barriers around what people can see.

But they also wanna do the basic stuff of task management, workflows, marketing, and things of that nature. And so, we’ve built a product that sits on top of Salesforce.

And to your point, a lot of firms will look at us as a as the the term overlay.

We are not an overlay. We are we are an actual product that is built on on top of Salesforce.

So the the difference between an overlay and and a Practify product is an overlay is gonna use the resources with Salesforce and just plug their product, alongside of the Salesforce chassis where To your to your point yeah.

Sorry to jump in and interrupt you. Yeah. Go ahead. Like somebody’s getting Salesforce then you sit on top of that.

We’re we’re just getting Practify. It’s it’s it’s not really a, for the lack of a better word, you don’t need Salesforce plus Practify. It’s just Practify. Then.

That’s it. Yep. Yeah. In in a in a simple form that that is that we would replace the Salesforce, the Salesforce platform. Yep. Because an overlay is going to be an addition to the Salesforce platform.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think I you know, there’s there’s we we did record an earlier podcast about, like, like, some of the six most common pod or I’m sorry. Most common podcasts, the CRMs for RIAs that are out there.

Yeah.

Red Tail, Wealthbox, Salesforce, Tamarack, AdvisorEngine, and AdviseOn. Those tend to be, you know, like, the big ones. And the first, I think, three or four that I mentioned, you know, it’s just a pure CRM, and and the other ones are sort of an all in one. But I think one of the things that you’ve mentioned is, you know, when people are beginning to try to do a lot and and this isn’t like us picking on, you know, Red Tail, Webex, or Salesforce.

It’s it’s when you go in and you’re like, I’m trying to do a lot of customization, and I’m just not getting it. And I’m beginning to hire consultants, and it’s gets getting kinda complicated. Yeah. But I think I think that’s, you know, with a I I guess it’s you know, the size of the RIA is is somewhat relative.

Right? You know, we’re not talking about, like, a solar adviser or, like, an RIA. You know, generally speaking, it’s probably RIA five ten plus employees, you know, maybe even a lot more than that. But I think it’s less of the size, but it’s more of, are they really extracting, as much as they can out of that CRM?

Or if they’re using it as a simple CRM, right, then, I mean, you guys don’t make a lot of sense. So maybe talk a little bit about that because I think that’s that’s really what resonated with me when we were talking last time.

Yeah. It’s it’s a great point. And, you know, we don’t look at firms from a size perspective.

We look at it more as kind of, you you know, how their business is structured and and what’s the complexity of it. And so to your point, you know, there could be a firm that is, you know, ten or fifteen users that all they want is a task management platform to kinda organize their day.

Products out there that that help with that and do really good jobs with it. There could also be a firm that’s five users that really wanna focus on automation and workflows and and marketing and being able to attach, other tools to their instance.

And so they become a little bit more complex and need tools that are a little bit more scalable for the business. Right? And so, you know, typically we’ll work with firms, you know, ten plus users and and up.

But it all depends on on the, the platform that they’re on or the what they’re looking for. And so, again, a firm that’s just wanting task management, Practify is probably too much of a platform for that, because we can do those simple things, but most firms wanna want a little bit extra to kinda guide them through growth. And and and that’s where we’ll we’ll see some differences between our platform, and some of the competitors that are out there.

Yeah. And and if, I think I think the big thing is again, I’ll pick on Salesforce because they’re big and big big on. Right? But it could again, it could be anybody.

Right? Yeah. If an RIA is going in and beginning to hire, like, consultants to kinda come in and start doing, like, you know, plugins and add ons and customizing Salesforce, it it might be worth their while to just talk to, you guys over at Practify. Right?

Yeah.

We we see it a lot where there’s firms that, you know, they they go with Salesforce because it’s the known commodity. Right? Yeah. And then they get into the weeds, and they’re like, holy cow. This is this is more than we bargained for. And so now they’re out working with consultants or engineers and and trying to trying to build a product that maybe the engineers or the consultants, maybe they understand financial services, maybe they don’t. They just know how to build Salesforce.

And so within Practify, we’ve built a a product that, you know, I I like to say gets firms, you know, eighty to ninety percent of the way straight out of the box. Yeah. You know, we’ve got workflows that are prebuilt. We’ve got reports that are there. We’ve got integrations with portfolio management tools, with custodians.

And so when when they have to work with a consultant or if they choose to work with a consultant, they they can, to to to further the customization, or they can use our technology consultants who are employees of Practify that will help kind of, extend that that customization within Practify. We have a ton of firms that out of the box, Practify is will get the job done, and they don’t need any customization.

Yeah.

And then others, you know, they’ve got their widgets that they wanna build in. They’ve got, you know, third party tools that they they really wanna connect deep with.

I’ll share a a a quick story on on one of the firms that that we’ve worked with that that really Practify helped from a from a marketing perspective. It was a it was a local firm that I’ve I’ve had a a great relationship with, and they’re they’re huge marketers. Like, they’re doing TV, radio, and and they are I mean, in their office, they’ve got they’ve got a a studio that that’s there. And so the first time I walked in, I was like, okay.

Marketing is, is a subject that we wanna we wanna be able to talk through.

And so, what we need video a video studio, not just a podcast studio?

Yeah. They’ve got a they’ve got an they’ve got an office there that has, you know, different microphones around. So when they bring in, individuals, they do a TV, show that that airs on the weekends.

And this is this is an RIA. Right?

It’s an RIA. Alright.

I I just wanna make sure I’m I’m hearing you right.

Yeah. Yeah. And so their focus is is marketing growth. I mean, they are out Sure.

You know, spreading their name. And so, you know, the the struggles that they had was, you know, trying to gather all the information that they have from their marketing. So they do a a news, podcast on, you know, let’s say, WLS or they do it on Fox or whatever. You know, trying to gather the information on who’s attended, what’s the ROI on those those episodes, trying to gather they were in spreadsheets, and they had they had stuff all over the place.

And so what Practify came in and and did was was really provide them with a with a marketing platform based on our on our CRM platform that will help identify who attended, was there a follow-up on it, was there a a client created based on, you know, was it based on the Fox show, was it based on the, you know, the WLS radio network? And so now they’re able to track, and start to budget for, hey. This specific marketing works best for us.

And we were able to do that within some of the campaign tools, and marketing tools that we have, with inside of Practify that really brought it all into one spot rather than having to go to five different spreadsheets to go, okay. Here’s the cost. Here’s who, you know, here’s who, attended, and they became clients. Now it’s all in Practify.

Sure. Okay. Cool.

So really cool. I mean, it’s a it was a cool, it it was really cool to see kind of all that come together.

Sure.

And then another one of their their kind of issues was their advisers are out on the road all the time.

And so mobile was a big it it was a big deal for them to be able to go, hey. My adviser’s on the road. He or she wants to type in notes, you know, right now rather than waiting to come to the office. We’re able to to connect them, and then kick off different task management, details right within with inside of our our app. So Okay. Solved a ton of problems.

Or not not necessarily problems, but probably more of, handcuffs because they were running the business great doing it. It was you know, we went from having ten steps now to, you know, let’s say, three.

Sure.

And that that’s a problem solver.

So Cool. And and, Kent, I was just gonna say, you you sound like you know what you’re talking about. I I believe you’ve been at Practify for a while. Right? How how long how long have you been Yeah.

So I’ve been it’ll be five years Okay. In a week. Right. So in Practify numbers, that’s like a dinosaur.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Looks like dog ears. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

It looks like you’re a dog, but Yeah.

I’ve been called worse. Don’t worry.

But we our firm our firm started in twenty twelve in Australia, in Sydney, Australia, and and then migrated over to the US, you know, late twenty eighteen into twenty, nineteen and really started kind of a a marketing effort with inside of the states, you know, mid twenty nineteen into into twenty twenty, right, before Okay. The COVID.

So your your CEO is Australian based in Australia? Is that okay? Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys have your team meetings? It’s like, good day, mate, and all that.

Oh, yeah. It’s Alright.

Thank you.

They have their slang. Yeah. And some of us look and go, what did they just say? And then they joke and laugh and go, oh, yeah. We forgot.

But we’ve got, a number of my colleagues moved from Australia, and they’re here permanently. Yeah. Our CEO, he spends about half the year between Australia and the US. Yeah.

Alright. Cool. He doesn’t he does he’s not he doesn’t come to Chicago. Right?

He doesn’t he I’m guessing He’s here.

Oh, he does? Oh, he comes to Chicago.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Okay.

Alright. Cool. Does he come in the summer or in the winter?

Oddly enough, he loves the snow. So Okay.

He loves He doesn’t get it there.

Okay.

Yeah. He loves the winter. So all all the Aussies, they you know, when we get half of inch of snow, it’s like, you know, it’s it’s the best thing that ever happened.

So So so listen.

I I you and I can easily get distracted and talk about this other stuff. But but going back, you know, I think I I mean, just I’ll I’ll kinda walk you through the cycle that I see of what people have, and you tell me if this is right on the money or not. You know? Yeah.

Somebody start you know, whatever. But but they break away. They start their RIA. Right? You know, they’re using Redtail.

Redtail’s a great CRM.

They’re growing. They’re scaling. They like, man, we need to do more. And so they move over to Salesforce, but then they realize, oh my goodness. We gotta get, you know, some developers and we gotta do this and that. And and, you know, they’re taking and and the idea of Salesforce is it integrates really good with third party and it’s easy to build third party tools and, you know, all this other stuff. It sounds to me like the cycle of, you know, from where I’m sitting, it was like red tail Salesforce with a lot of customization to Practify.

And it’s almost like if somebody went from, you know, the the cookie cutter red tail directly to Practify, they would have saved a lot of money and headaches from Salesforce with the customization. Is that am I on point with that?

Or You are.

You are spot on.

And and I think what happens is firms don’t understand the the real cost of of Salesforce, which is the upkeep. And so, you know, the the licensing structure is is one, but then it’s, you know, how do we keep this thing running? You know, if Salesforce comes out or pushes up updates, are the things that we’re building, are those gonna work with the updates that they’ve provided? If not, who’s gonna fix them? Do we have to, you know, consult with an engineer again? Do we just keep an engineer on, you know, on on staff?

I didn’t even think about that. You’re right. A lot of them will yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whether they have somebody on staff or, you know, like, so, yeah. Outsource.

Yeah. So, you know, I always say it’s it’s not the initial, it’s not the initial license that is the the money center for for Salesforce.

It’s the upkeep of of the platform. Yeah. So that spigot, you’re always you’re always going going to the spigot for, okay, we’ve got a you know, we need an update here or, hey, we wanna build a new workflow. Who knows how to build the workflow in our team?

Nobody. Okay. Let’s try to let’s try to find a way to do it through their trail head. Oh, that didn’t work.

Let’s just hire somebody to come in and build it.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know? And so the the cycle kinda continues. And so Okay.

Practify has has solved that of one, you know, coming you know, building out, you know, preexisting workflows or consulting with firms that, you know, are looking to to grow and do some customizations to figure out when does this make sense? Does this make sense on our initial implementation?

Or is this a phase two as you’re getting used to Practify, you’re you’re working within it, your your employees are starting to to do that change management, which we know is always so hard.

Then do we go in and say, okay. Now let’s build workflows. Let’s build reports.

And we do that all through our our service model. And so, anytime that we’re doing updates, we understand what the impact is going to be on our clients’ orgs rather than, you know, Salesforce is gonna go, hey. We’re gonna use this, you know, AI agent. We’re gonna put it into into the the org, and all of a sudden firms are going, wait. Now it’s it’s it it broke our integration with x, and now it’s not working.

So Sure.

How do we do it? Yeah. Which then kinda comes to my my point of the lack of adoption within within a Salesforce because it doesn’t work. It’s constantly changing. There’s always things in motion. And so firms will just go, I’m just gonna go back to my spreadsheet and write this stuff down and and keep it in in Excel.

By the way, I I don’t I don’t even know if it’s a spreadsheet. They go from Redtail to to Salesforce back to Redtail. Right? I don’t see that.

That’s right. Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s Yeah.

Yeah.

So that’s that’s what I okay.

Exactly. They you know?

And so It’s too complicated, too expensive, and it’s like it’s just it’s not working out.

You know? Yeah. So yeah.

And you have to have, you know, in our like I I mentioned before, change management. It’s probably the hardest thing to do when buying technology, because what firms I’ll I’ll see firms will come to us, and they’re used to the red button that’s on the left. Right? And it’s always worked.

It’s been there for twenty years. And now all of a sudden, they buy this new technology like, hey. This is great. It looks better.

We’re finally coming into our own from a technology standpoint.

And now the red button that’s on the left is now a green button on the right, and nobody can process it and go, wait. How are we supposed to do this? And so there needs to be this, this component of change management that comes from training and talking to staff that’s on-site or, you know, via Zoom or or whatever. Practify provides all of that because we know it’s a huge change going from any CRM, whether it’s Redtail, Wealthbox, Salesforce, to another CRM.

We need to get buy in from the users that are using it. And in order to do that, they need to know what they’re doing.

Sure. Okay.

So it’s a a it’s one of our it’s one of our bigger selling points Yeah.

From, from our partnerships. So I like to tell firms that we’re not, you know, we’re we’re not a piece of software. We’re we wanna partner with you because as you’re growing, we’re growing, and it’s it’s better for everyone.

Yeah. So so kind of on that point, who who are your best clients? Right? Like, you know, you get, you know, RIAs that are using this, and they’re like, yeah. These guys really appreciate it, and these are things that you know, the top two things that they couldn’t do with their old CRM.

Yeah.

It’s a great question. So where we get real buy in is is typically from the operational side of the business. So, you know, your COOs and and the the individuals who are running the day to day, because once they once they they get in deep with with Practify and they understand it and they know how tax management works, they know how workflows work, they really see the value, and then they become the champions to the other other teammates within within the organization. And so, again, it doesn’t necessarily have to be size, but it’s really firms that are, one, looking to grow.

One or or two, kind of looking for ways to to take the manual type of stuff out of out of their business.

And then three is is really to organize from a from a process perspective to do it all in in one solution. So another example I’ll I’ll talk about is, working with another firm. They were on another platform, and I asked them how many workflows they had, and they said over a hundred. And I thought to myself, like, like, how is this possible that you have over a a hundred workflows?

And and part of it was because the system that they were using wasn’t elaborate enough to be able to take some of those workflows and combine them into into one. So so they had to create multiple workflows, whereas in Practify, it could still be a workflow, but maybe be a checklist or or some sort of form inside of of a workflow.

Yeah.

So we went from over a hundred workflows to to less than fifty, and it becomes more manageable because now we can kick off a workflow that, you know, moves a prospect into a client. And and and that all one workflow, it can automatically kick off certain workflows that that just before within their other system had to be a new workflow. Yeah.

So when you’re dealing with a hundred plus workflows, you know That’s a lot. Think of, yeah, think of a new employee who comes in and they’re like, holy cow.

Yeah.

How am I gonna what what are we doing here? So Yeah.

So those are some of the things that that we can do to help, that really kinda cuts down from that manual type of stuff.

Yeah. So so let me let me ask you the opposite of that too because, you know, there are there are some RIAs listening to us where this is probably not a good fit, and that’s okay. Right? Because, I mean, that’s why there’s different players.

You know? You know? That’s why we have apples and oranges and bananas, and passion fruit and, you know, everything else. Yeah.

What’s you know, what would not be a a good client? You know, what’s not a good fit, for Practify?

Yeah. I think, you know, kind of our you know, we were talking about earlier in our discussion, you know, firms that are really looking for almost like a Rolodex.

Yeah.

Right? Okay. I want a list of all my clients, and then maybe a spot to jot some notes.

Their their business has been on cruise control. You know, they’re not, you know, they’re they’re not bringing on new advisers. They’re, you know, they’re they’re they’re doing a great job for their clients because they know them really, really well, and they don’t need spots to go, hey. You know, if this client needs to move money, we need to do these five things. They just know it because that that’s how they do their business. And so, you know, a firm like that that would get into Practify would would probably see, it it being a little bit overwhelming.

Even though, you know, our business and our platform can be like, we can scale it down to be as as simple as as needed.

But from an economic perspective, if you’re just looking for more of a Rolodex, there’s there’s better tools that are more Yeah. Yeah. Economical Sure. Compared to some of the things that that we provide.

If you’re if you’re using it as a basic CRM, you know, David, here’s his address, his email, phone number, stuff like that. I mean, that’s not that that’s not the game that you, you know, Practify is playing, you know, and that’s fine.

You can probably find some some other tools that are, are just as good at doing that that probably are, a little bit more economical.

Okay. Alright. Cool.

Yeah. I mean, listen. I think I think part of the reason I wanted to talk with you and and, you know, record this podcast is I just I just don’t think a lot of people know, a a lot about, at least in the space, we’re in a lot about Practify. Yeah.

Because I see again, I see that a lot where it’s I’m going from again, I’ll I mean, this could be anything from red Redtail to Salesforce, and now with all this customization, it’s like, man, if you if if that client would have just talked to Practify first, they would have just solved so many things. Yeah. Right? And, and, again, there you know, and in incorrect assumption, and, I mean, I was guilty of that long time ago.

It’s like, hey. It sits on top of Salesforce. Right?

It’s not like it’s your own CRM.

It’s not a a Salesforce add on or, you know, anything of that sort, and it makes a lot of sense to do that. And I think the key is this. This is really comes in handy, and I see this with RIAs that are scaling their RIA, and and their CRM is holding them back. Right?

Like, their CRM is a gold mine. And if you’ve always suspected that your CRM is a gold mine and, you know, you’re not able to do more with it Yeah. Should definitely talk to, you know, Kent and the team over at Practify. Yeah.

So Yeah. And you and you make a good point about, you know, Practify in in, you know, being out there, especially on some of the reports that come out because you’ll always see, you know, what are the top five used CRMs. Yeah. And a lot of these reports, Salesforce is listed, but that includes a Practify.

So they just roll up a lot of the the overlays in some of these other products that are, you know, that are built on top of Salesforce under the Salesforce umbrella. So Yeah. If you were to if you were to dive into let’s say there’s, you know, Redtail, Wealthbox, AdviseOn in Salesforce. Well, Salesforce may have five different other platforms that that have rolled up to it.

And so people just see, oh, Salesforce.

And so a lot of those reports, that’s how those are they’re they’re built of Yeah.

Yeah. Well and then and then the problem I have is they don’t do a really good job of just doing a distinction between the size of the RIA. Right? And, you know, it’s and and I know they look at AUM a lot, but, you know Yep.

Employee headcount’s another important piece. Yeah. And, again, you know, with certain AUM or with a certain employee headcount, certain CRMs are great, but then you hit a certain number and you’re like, you know Yeah. It’s just, you know, it’s just not.

And and so, yeah, I’m not able to have yeah.

There are some firms that have, you know, that market where, hey. Let’s say it’s, you know, it’s a it’s a big broker dealer that has a relationship with, with the CRM, but they, they give their advisers who are maybe, you know, one person, two person, four person kind of firms, the ability to to use their approved CRMs. Yeah.

And and so they’re they’re looking at data from a different kind of perspective.

Exactly. Yeah. And in those cases, it’s almost like they’re dictated. Like, you you’re you have to use XCRM.

They’re, you know, they’re not choosing it. And so but, anyways, I don’t wanna get too much into that. I guess I guess just maybe, two things, and then we’ll kinda wrap it up. Yeah.

Sure. Anything anything unique or anything that I did not ask whether, I don’t wanna ask about you. I’m sure there is. But about about Practify Yeah.

Something I didn’t ask or something that’s unique that, you know, the the listener maybe should be aware of, and you’re like, oh, yeah. That’s just sort of an immediate red flag. I should definitely talk to Practify.

Yeah.

I I think we touched on a lot of good points. And and, again, kinda coming back to, the servicing side of of Practify where when people are looking at Salesforce, they’re not getting that they’re they’re not getting that side of of the equation. And so when I when I talk to firms, I’m I’m really I’m I’m really trying to push them to getting them thinking about us as a partner, a real true partner of, hey. We’re going to help with training and implementing and consulting and building. We we we have those employees at at Practify. That’s all part of of the client experience.

Okay.

And so the the one thing that I try to get firms that are looking at Salesforce because they know that, hey. Here we get the platform, but now we’ve gotta do all this other stuff. And so firms looking at Practify sometimes think the same thing. Hey.

We’ll get the license, but now I gotta go hire, you know, a bunch of different engineers to to build this. And and that’s not our business model. We we wanna get firms, to not have to come in and do a a ton of customizations because, when you start adding customizations, that that includes time, and time includes money and, you know, and resources and and things like that. So, really, I think the the key thing for the listeners to to kinda hear is that, you know, we are a true technology partner, and not kind of a a piece of technology.

Sure. Okay. And then and then what’s if if this resonates and again, you know, from my perspective, again, I I’ve seen it. Right?

I’ve seen it where people are just they’ve outgrown their CRM. They’re trying to do a lot more with it. And, honestly, they just haven’t reached out to Practify. And I think, you know, a call, a demo Yeah.

You you know, just a brief discussion with you or somebody on your team would be really valuable. What’s you know, maybe share your contact information and then, you know, what’s, you know, what what’s typically involved? Is it like a discovery call? Is it a demo?

Maybe walk through, you know, what that looks like.

Yeah.

I appreciate that too.

So we’ve got a ton of information on our on our website. It’s it’s practify dot com.

That’s that’s w w w dot p r a c t I f I dot com.

Right?

That’s right. Yep.

I just wanna make sure we say that the right one.

Thank you. I’m I’m just so used to saying it, but I I have seen even clients of ours email and and spell it wrong.

But, practify dot com, you can you can see, you know, different webinars and videos.

There is a spot on there to connect to to set up a demo Okay. Which would then connect, the the individual to one of our sales team members.

Okay.

And so, typically, what will happen is we’ll get a message that, hey.

You know, David’s interested in in a demo. We’ll set up an an initial kind of discovery call.

I I like to do this because, one, I have no I going in blind to a demo, we could, you know, we could all over the place. And so, you know, what is it that that you’re really kind of looking for?

How do we how do we get some input from you on on, you know, here are maybe three things that that we’re really struggling with. And so the more that we learn about, you know, some of the needs and wants from from a firm, we can tailor the demo, to that. And rather than showing you things that you’re like, yeah. We’re we’ll never use that. Yeah. Okay. And so, my email is, kent, k e n t, dot tcatch, t k a c h, at practify dot com, p r a c t I f I dot com.

Sounds Sounds good. Thanks for sharing that, Kent. And if you’re listening, we’ll include we’ll include, Kent’s contact info in the show notes, so you can reach out directly to Kent, you know, and and Practify. But, yeah, I think I think, Kent, if it’s okay with you, I’m gonna go ahead and wrap it up unless Yeah. Anything else you wanted to, add before we wrap up?

No. I I would just say, you know, obviously, technology is there there’s a lot of it out there. If you look at, you know, Kitchens’ map, there’s a million things on that map these days, and and I know it’s, you know, sometimes daunting to take a look at it. But even if you’re just curious about, you know, how we’re working with some of the other partners that you’re at, or other tools that you’re using, we’re happy to have those conversations to to act as kind of a a technology consultant to to see if Practify could be a a potential fit as well.

Sounds good. Kent, I know you’re busy. I know it’s cold here in Chicago. Actually, it’s not too bad today.

What about We got a big warm up. Yeah.

It’s like, what, thirty two degrees or thirty four?

You know? Will be out.

Yeah. The sun’s out. We’re gonna be out in shorts. You know? So Yeah. Hey. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much. And then for the listener, you know, I think I think the key message is, look. If you’ve been frustrated with your CRM and it feels like it’s not scaling with your firm, I would definitely encourage you to reach out to Kent and, you know, look at the, Practify website.

Because, again, I I from my experience, not a lot of people know that this is another option that’s out there that you don’t have to do a lot of, you know, hire a developer and customization of Salesforce and, you know, some of the other things like that. So with that, Kent, I wanna thank you.

I wanna thank the listener for listening to the RIA Tech Talk podcast brought to you by RIA Workspace.

For more podcasts and resources, go to our website at riaworkspace.com and check out the learning center. Feel free to reach out to, any questions or topics that you’d like us to cover, and stay tuned for more RIA Tech, insights for our next episode.

In this episode of RIA Tech Talk, we tackle a question that’s been popping up more and more: Can an RIA run successfully on Macs? While many RIAs default to Windows for compatibility with financial software, there’s a growing interest in using Macs for their security features, user-friendly experience, and overall longevity.

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Read The Transcript

Here are the highlights of this podcast episode:

1. Why Some RIAs Hesitate to Use Macs

Common concerns include compatibility with financial software and misconceptions about Macs’ security and functionality.

2. Productivity and Software Compatibility

For many RIAs, web-based tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 work smoothly on Macs. With cloud solutions, critical applications like CRM and portfolio management run seamlessly, especially when using advanced tech that lets apps appear as native icons on Macs.

For older or server-bound software (e.g., customized QuickBooks Enterprise), special setups like cloud servers with remote apps are required to make them accessible on Macs.

Many RIAs use a combination of Macs and Windows computers without compatibility issues, especially with cloud-based applications.

3. Benefits of Using Macs in an RIA

Macs have built-in security features, including encryption and malware resistance. Many RIAs take additional steps like implementing Defender for Endpoint for added protection.

Macs are valued for their intuitive interface and smooth user experience, which can reduce stress and boost productivity.  Although Macs may have a higher initial cost, their durability can mean a lower total cost over time.

4. Finding Mac-Friendly IT Support

It’s important to work with an IT provider experienced with Macs, as many IT providers are still primarily focused on Windows.

Some firms use Macs for front-office tasks and Windows for back-office needs, allowing flexibility without compromising performance.  Macs integrate well with iPhones and iPads, enabling seamless access to RIA tools and files across devices.

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Read The Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the RIA Tech Talk Podcast brought to you by RIA Workspace. Space. I’m Todd Darroca and alongside me as always is David Kakish. And together, we’re on a mission to simplify the complex world of technology for RIAs just like yours. In the podcast, we’ll be your tech guides breaking down those often confusing tech topics into plain old practical terms. And so we hope you join us in 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. Today, David, what is our focus today?

Alright. Well, listen, Todd. Good to have you, and good to have the listener on. And today, we are gonna basically talk about, can I really run my RIA on MAX? We’re gonna you know, the title of this the title of today’s podcast is MAX for Financial Advisors.

Can they meet your RIA’s needs? And I’m always surprised at how often I get that question, because I think there’s some you and I were kinda chit chatting a little bit before the podcast. There’s some historical context where Yeah. It was a it was a closed you know, Max, we’re a closed system.

For many years, Macs did not work with financial advisor software. And then, I guess the other thing is, a lot of times when people say, oh, yeah. It works with Macs. It means it’s turning it into a dumb terminal, and it works with the Mac. Right?

So for those of you that are Mac users or even if you’re not a Mac user and you wanna say, hey, can I really run a Mac, using Mac with my RIA?

And can I be secured? Can I be productive? That is the question that we are gonna answer today. So that’s kind of what we’re gonna focus on.

And so hopefully, at the end of this, David, people will be able to breathe a sigh of relief, hopefully.

So before we get into that though so yeah.

So tell me a little bit more about, you know, you hear this question a lot. And so why what’s what’s gonna add value to the RA who’s listening to us? Why is this important? What’s gonna do what’s this gonna do to help them do their jobs?

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So the typical RIA, think, you know, ten employees. Right? It’s almost always the case that there’s two people that are, like, diehard Mac users.

They’re like, hey. I wanna use Macs. And then companies are like, no. We’re worried about security.

We’re worried about IT compliance. We’re worried about you being productive and so on. And and also, hey. Our IT provider doesn’t support Macs and, you know, things of that sort.

So it’s a pretty it’s a pretty big challenge for some RIAs. And, again, there there is some good historical context. By the end of this session, you’re gonna learn like, hey. Can my RIA use a Mac?

Is it secure? Is it productive? Am I gonna have any compatibility problems? Right? And we’re not, you know, on we tend to be pretty agnostic.

Again, neither Microsoft or Apple is paying us. I just wanna put that out there. You know?

Wouldn’t that be cool if Apple did care about this? Like, here you go, David. Here’s a big check promoter. Yes.

Yes. Yes. So quick disclaimer. Yes. Neither neither Microsoft or Apple is paying us. We’re pretty agnostic, and we’ll share about the we’ll share that.

So I guess to kinda jump right on in, you know, why why are some RIAs hesitant to use Macs? And it’s a very, legitimate concerns because the concern is like, hey. Is it compatible with the financial software that we use?

Is it secure?

Will it integrate really well? And, you know, does things like that. So I I think to answer that question, I I first wanna talk about the productivity suite. And when I talk about the productivity suite, it’s basically saying, hey. Are you using Microsoft Office? Are you using, like, the Google Works space? Right?

Lots of RIAs, I’d say over eighty percent of them are using the, Microsoft ecosystem. But just really quick, I’ll talk about the Google Workspace. It’s all it’s all a web based, platform by Google, so that’s gonna work really well out of Mac. Right? There’s no problem there. I’m really gonna focus on Microsoft Office because that’s the dominant player. That’s the player that we support.

If Microsoft Office is set up correctly, it can work really well with your MacBook. Okay? And what I mean by that is, MacBook, Mac, really, you know, any Mac out there. And as a matter of fact, I would even go and say iPads and iPhones and things like that too.

But just kinda focusing on the Mac, if you’re you’re you’re gonna be using and the Mac users know this. You’re gonna be using Office for Mac. You’re gonna be using Finder inside of which is equivalent to, like, file explorer, and that’s gonna work extremely well if it’s set up correctly, and it works really well with the Microsoft ecosystem. And as a matter of fact, if I’m not mistaken, Todd, you are a Mac user.

Right? So you were you you recently switched, and you started using Office for Mac. Yeah. Yeah.

How how was that experience? I guess, let me ask you that.

It it was it’s good now. After I figured out how the desk to get the desktop app to, like, sync over and all that stuff, it’s fine. I think I I don’t like using the web based or the web browsers because it’s I have to open up a browser and then keep it up all the time. But, no, I think the desktop acts apps, and again, I remember Microsoft Office, you couldn’t get it for Mac. And again, this was when I was in college, you know, ten, fifteen, someone years ago.

Yeah. You couldn’t do Office on a Mac until they finally gave you a CD to so, yeah, so far it’s good. Yeah. So far it’s pretty seamless. Nothing crazy. It does go to my phone and my iPad. So, yeah, it’s it’s pretty solid.

Yeah. Listen, the quick the quick and by the way, I didn’t realize you’re that old. You used to use CDs. Some some of our younger listeners, they may not know what a CD is.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember it came in this it came like a DVD case and it basically had like yellow lined paper as the cover. And it said Microsoft Word or Office Suite and it had the old logos when Apple used to make like these bubble letters or bubble icons. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. And we got a discount at since I was in college, you got a discount, man. That was a huge discount, and it saved me some money. But, yeah, I remember that. I had to freaking get a separate CD, like, CD player.

I don’t know what you call it now.

But, yeah, CD ROM. CD ROM. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Our our younger listeners don’t know what that is. But so so so anyways, you know and and also to be fair, there was a history of, like, Microsoft and Apple, you know, not working well together and stuff like that. Here’s the deal, and I’ll dive into the details.

If Microsoft Office is set up correctly on your Mac, it works it works flawlessly. And as a matter of fact, I’m traveling, and today I am actually using my MacBook, to record this. And it works seamless. It works really well for me.

So the, so I’m talking about the Office Suite. Office Suite for Mac works really well. You use finder. We have finders, you know, working with SharePoint.

And again, on my computer, on my MacBook, I go to finder, open up the files. I work I do everything I need to. I use Word for Mac, Excel for Mac, you know, and so on. Now let’s talk about the financial applications like Orion, Redtail, eMoney, Advizon, you know, just, you know, all the different, financial applications that are specific to the RIAs.

Most of these applications are actually web based, and so what we set up our clients with is single sign on for web based applications. And so you open up a browser and then you can access all these applications securely. And as a matter of fact, even if you did not have single sign on, you could still open up, you know, Safari or Chrome or whatever your preferred browser is and access those web based applications.

Now let’s talk a little bit about server based applications, and that’s like a small minority of RIAs. There’s maybe less than twenty percent that are using server based applications, and there might be a business reason they’re using that. Right? They might be using, like, an older version of Juncture that has a lot of customization.

They might be using, like, QuickBooks Enterprise, and they wanna run that, on a server based application.

That actually what we do with our clients there, we set that up really well. We basically, will set up what’s called a cloud server and then a technology called remote app. And then if I were using a server based applications, again, think of QuickBooks, enterprise.

I would just it would be an icon on my Mac. And as a matter of fact, if I use Windows, it would be just an icon on my Windows. I would click on it. I would work. From my perspective as a regular user, it would feel like I’m using a web based application even though on the back end it’s sitting on a server. Now to be fair, this isn’t something that you as an RIA would know how to do. It would require somebody that knows what we’re doing.

And I’d even say that most most even IT providers don’t even know how to set that up the right way. But, anyways, a small percentage of RIAs are using server based applications. And even if you are using a server based application, it will it will work really well with your Mac, because of the way that we set that up. So I wanna I wanna recap something very importantly. The this the the the platform that our clients are using, which is powered by Microsoft Office, Microsoft three sixty five, works incredibly well incredibly well on the Macs.

It works natively.

You use Office for Macs. You use Finder, and it’s all, native. You do not need to use something called parallels. You do not need to use a virtual computer.

You don’t need to use a virtual desktop. You don’t need to use a cloud computer or terminal services or Citrix. You can, but if those solutions turn your back book into a dumb terminal and so, you know, many times IT providers will say, oh, yeah. You know, our solution will work really well with the Mac.

You wanna say, well, how would I use that back? Can I open up Office for, Mac and work? If not, you’re essentially turned your MacBook into a dumb terminal or you turned it into a Windows computer. And if that’s the case, you might as well just go out and buy a cheap Windows computer and use it that way.

And so the benefit of this platform in working inside of a Mac environment is you get the Mac operating system. Right? You want that that look and feel and the experience of a Mac, and it’s totally different than Windows. And, you know, honestly, at the end of the day, I’m pretty indifferent whether, you know, people get into the, you know, Mac versus Windows, and I go, listen.

Oh, yeah. You can use both. Right? I mean, you can use both, and that’s okay.

It doesn’t matter. And I’m the classic example. Right? I’m the strange guy, but four days a week, I use Windows, and then one day a week, I use a Mac book.

So so I wanted I wanted to emphasize that because for the Mac users that are out there, they know exactly what I’m talking about about using the native applications within the Mac and not turning it into an empty shell or a dump terminal or a dump computer, you know, as as, we see out there. So, anyways, Todd, I wanted to give some context. I don’t know if you wanted to add anything else or if you had some questions for me about that.

No. I’m just I’m agreeing with you on the interface and how I like to have it natively on the Mac. Yeah. I could you know, I like sometimes I’ll do on a PC, but there is something about the Mac, operating system and just how it looks, you know, interface wise that I just it’s it makes me less anxious.

So I don’t know if that makes any sense. But yeah. No. I totally get what you’re saying, so I totally agree.

Yeah. Well and then and then here’s the deal. Like I said earlier in the call, like, you’ll take a company with ten employees, an RIA with ten employees. I am positive that there are two of them that are diehard Mac lovers and Mac users, and they wanna use the you know, that Mac MacBook.

And and the answer to that, that’s cool. You know, you could and by the way, I should say this. That’s very typical. You’ll have ten employees, and two of them are using MacBooks, and then everybody else is using Windows.

It’s okay. You can mix and match. You don’t have to buy a MacBook for everybody, you know, if you don’t want to.

Sure. Sure.

So let’s talk about the security advantages and other benefits, of using Macs in an RIA. Let’s let’s dive in there.

Yeah. So I think I think the user experience and ease of use, right, the people that are very familiar with the Mac, that’s a huge benefit for them. Right? Like, that’s what they want.

They want the Mac experience. They wanna be able to use that. You know, the total cost of ownership. Right?

You can debate, well, you know, a Mac is more expensive, but it lasts longer versus a Windows. And I’m not gonna get into that because people can do the numbers really. You know? Financial advisers are smarter at money than me, so they can they they can run those numbers, and that’s okay.

Just just like I said before, don’t lease or, you know, don’t rent, hardware. You know? But that’s a separate topic altogether.

You know, some security advantages. There are there is some really great built in security features, from Apple, but we still take that above and beyond. So we wanna make sure that there’s encryption on these MacBooks. We wanna make sure we have the security wrap around, you know, what’s something called Defender for endpoint.

So we go ahead and, you know, we do that. But I think I think the biggest benefit in terms of using a Mac is the user experience. Right? That this is what people want. And, again, to be fair, Apple does a really good job of having some additional built in security mechanisms.

But in my opinion, that’s not enough. We even take that a step further for the RIA, so we secure that, you know, with some additional tools. So, you know, just a little bit on that.

Nice. And and so we’ve got all these new, you know, security advantages, user experience. And so a lot of times and this kinda go back to when we talked about Microsoft Office. It’s the compatibility between, you know, the the programs or the or the, you know, web based and all that stuff. So how how well is Mac now playing, in the world of, you know, apps and software and all that good stuff? Is it still compatible? Is are there still kind of a wall up between them and and others?

Yeah. I you know, it it works really now now, again, I’m talking about the in the RIA space. Right? In the medical space or in other space, it might be totally different. But for me, I’m focused on, you know, the listener who typically is a financial adviser or, you know, works works in an RIA.

There are really no limitations. I mean, you could use a MacBook and you can be fully productive.

And not you know, those those old days of, like, oh, I opened up a document in Word, and now it’s in Windows. There are, you know, Word in Windows and Word in Apple, and that was a legitimate concern. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was a pain in the butt. You know? People the younger people today do not appreciate some of the things that we had to deal with.

And, some of us, like, hey. We we need to be productive as a business. Right? Like, I care less that you like a MacBook.

Like, that’s cool that you like a Mac. Go use it at home. Here at work, we use Windows because we don’t wanna be dealing with, you know, compatibility issues, and we wanna be productive and streamlined.

I can tell you that’s gone. You know? There’s not like, you’re still gonna have the typical, oh, I, you know, I didn’t do this or this is happening or this or that. But but, like, the those major like, I remember, you know, getting a Word document from somebody who used a Mac, It was like, I needed to be I needed to decrypt it somehow to open it on a on a Windows machine and vice versa. It was ridiculous.

And I remember too, like yeah. If and I think it was when and when Excel went to XLX, and then, like, you tried to get it on your Mac, and then you had to get it back to the XLX, it was just I remember having to go through a web, like, a a website to convert my Mac document into the right Yes. Microsoft Word and then send it over. And then they’d have to send it back to me.

Yeah. I I remember that all the way in college. It was so annoying. I don’t know.

I can’t even remember when Mac decided and Microsoft struck that deal to be like, look. Let’s let’s kinda come together on this. But, yeah, that was a godsend when it happened. Yeah.

I I think I think it’s when when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates became friends again.

Maybe. Maybe.

They stopped poaching each other’s employees.

So That’s right. That’s right. So so the way the way that it’s set up on a Mac. Right? This is most of our clients, and this is even how I’m set up and we’re set up. You’re using the Microsoft three sixty five. You know, your files are sitting on SharePoint.

Everything is, you know, everything is sitting in that environment here is in the Microsoft ecosystem. So on the one end, you’ve got, you know, what’s called the Microsoft tenant or your private network at Microsoft. And on the other end, you have the computers or the Macs, and it doesn’t really matter. A Mac plays really well with Microsoft, and a Windows computer plays really well with Microsoft.

Right? But that’s kind of the typical setup that’s there, and and it works really well. And like I said, I jump between a Windows computer four days a week and then a MacBook one day a week, and it works really, really, really well. I’m fully productive.

I don’t miss a beat. You know, the the biggest challenge going from Windows to a Mac is just knowing all the shortcuts. Right? Like, I’m a power user on a Windows, and then I just have to learn sort of the Mac way.

But that’s not that’s not a limitation of the Mac. That’s a limitation of David because I don’t know what those shortcuts are on the Mac. You know? Because I’m traditionally, I’m much more of a Windows user than a Mac user.

So as a matter of fact, Todd, you might know all the shortcuts and, you know, maybe I’ll ask you for a cheat sheet afterwards.

You know, I I know a couple, but I will say what’s wild is when I do see Mac power users and they’re able to just, like, you know, like, quickly click two button two buttons keyboard buttons and then, like, just kinda shift through apps on their screen and it goes right there. Specifically, developers, those are the like, they are crazy when they know these shortcuts on a Mac. I remember watching my old boss, Nicole, do this, and it was just so snappy for her just to switch between apps and and programs. I was just yeah.

I still have to, like, go down to the dock and figure out where they are, like, spend my whole window to get that stuff there. But yeah. Yeah. I know.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m I’m sorta like that on a window. Like, I’m a power user on Windows, and I know all the shortcuts, and I’m like, well, I don’t need to use the mouse.

But on a on a Mac, when I’m using it, I’m like, hang on. You know, I’m like the old guy. Like, hang on.

Where do I go and find this and that?

And, again, it’s not a Mac limitation. It’s a David limitation. You know?

For sure.

So I know, like, when when I used to be in big corporate America, there was always this, but, you know, compatibility off, obviously. But it was hey. Like like you were talking about, we’re all on a Mac or we’re all on a PC because, you know, we wanna be able to seamlessly, you know, service all these pieces of equipment and hardware and all that good stuff. Yep. What is it what are you seeing now as far as how IT is supporting? Like like you said, if you’ve got ten RIAs and two of them probably are gonna use a Mac, how do IT, you know, teams deal with that? Or what have you seen so far?

Yeah. So I think, so the first part of that question is what I’m seeing out there. And then the second part of that is you wanna make sure you work with an IT company that actually does know how to support Max. And I I’m actually surprised at, you know, the number of IT companies out there that still don’t support Max.

I feel like they’re still stuck in the eighties. You know? So but that’s a separate topic. So I think I think most of our environment most of our clients and this is pretty typical.

Again, ten employees, two to three of them really prefer to use a MacBook, and they’re gonna use that. Right? And we’ve got some clients where the leadership team is using a MacBook, but then the regular employees are using a, you know, a Windows computer.

We have some clients where a lot you know, and and a lot of them are only using Windows, and that’s fine. And then we have some not not a lot, probably less than twenty percent that are using all Macs. Right? So it’s Mac across the board. But, again, even in those environments where it’s all Macs, it’s not like they’re using, you know, Microsoft iCloud or, I’m sorry, Apple iCloud and the Apple and I forget what Apple calls their, you know, version of, like, Word and Excel and PowerPoint.

So Pages Yes. Numbers Yes. And Keynote.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. I don’t use those. I don’t use those. I use the app.

Use them all the time.

You do? Okay. Alright.

Oh, yeah. Cool. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So our clients that are using, you know, like, the Microsoft Office suite and and then a a MacBook, they’re really using the Microsoft Office suite. And then as, you know, as part of that not saying you can’t use anything else, but that’s, you know, that’s how they’re using that. Works works really well and, you know, from that perspective.

But I think I think going back to if you if you work with an IT company or an MSP out there, you definitely wanna ask the question and say, hey. Look. Do you support Max? Right?

And I’m sure they will tell you one way or the other. And if they don’t, you may wanna find, you know, a part of it that actually does support Max because, again, you know, it’s it’s very common to go ahead and do that. So yeah.

Nice.

Alright. And so let’s if I and you’re you’re obviously in the field quite a bit, you know, traveling and talking people.

Can you share some examples of real life or real world experiences of seeing, you know, the Mac RAs running Macs successfully in their, infrastructure alongside PCs and, you know, kind of the best practices you’re seeing with them and also any kind of challenges Sure. That you’ve seen them come across that they’ve overcome.

Yeah. I mean, I think I think that going back to what we had talked about earlier, I think the biggest question is, like, we’re okay if we have two or three people that wanna use Max. However, we wanna make sure we’re making a smart decision. We wanna make sure that these two or three employees are fully productive and we’re not dealing with compatibility issues. Right?

You know, and again, because you and I were joking around about the history of it. Right? Most of our clients remember the history of it. It’s like, dude, I we got better things to do than to deal with, like, you know, can I open up this Word document or not? Because it was, you know, or used on a Mac. So we’re way past that. Again, if you’re using if you’re using the Google productivity suite or the Microsoft productivity suite, both of those are gonna work incredibly well with a Macs and MacBooks.

We we’re big fans of the Microsoft Office suite, nothing against Google, but, you know, that’s you know, we’re fans of that. Works incredibly well. And I think what generally happens is the people that are smart Mac users, or have had an experience where they use Mac as a dump terminal. And I don’t do this on purpose, but they’re like, hey.

How do you do that on your Mac? Right? So I’ll bring in my Mac, and I’ll just do a quick demo with them. And they’re sort of blown away because now they’re like, oh my goodness.

I can open up Outlook for Mac, and I can work. You know?

Yeah.

I’m not using a quote, unquote, Windows computer or, you know, using my Mac as a dumb terminal. Right?

And they’re blown away. And it always shocks me because this is what I’m used to. Right? But I need to come from their world where they’re like, oh, yeah. The Mac the best analogy is, like, you know, people that are Mac users are like second class citizens.

Mhmm.

Oh, yeah. I remember that.

Yeah. Welcome to our world. You could still you could be first class. You know? It’s okay.

You could you don’t you don’t have to be a second class citizen. You can still you know, you can use a MacBook, and you can be as productive, and you can, access all that right there. Now as a bonus, what I will say too is I I use an iPhone. I use an iPad.

Right?

I can access the Microsoft applications. Again, if it’s set up correctly, I can access, the Microsoft applications for work, and I can be secure, and I can be productive.

And really, you know, the big ones the the two big ones is people wanna be able to access access email on their iPhone or on their iPad. That’s kind of the big one. Yeah. And then the second one is, like, hey.

My files and stuff like that. And what’s really nice, the way we set that up for our clients is if you wanna use your iPhone and access company resources, we need to make sure that your iPhone meets a minimum IT compliance. So if your password is one two three four, sorry. You can’t access company Outlook.

Right? And then, so you need to have enough, complexity to go ahead and access that. And then once you access work resources on your iPad or on your iPhone, it’s a separate logical container that’s separated from your personal one. And then if somebody works at your RIA and then leaves, right, we can do a remote wipe on everything that’s work related on their iPhone, on their iPad, and stuff like that.

So I I didn’t necessarily wanna get into an iPhone and iPad, but this is kind of a bonus thing. And then, again, the same would apply if it was like an Android or, you know, a a different type of tablet. But but just, again, to just recap, the way that we set up our clients and the way that our clients are working and even if you’re not a client of ours, it’s okay. If you’re using the Microsoft Office suite or if you’re using the Google productivity suite, this is gonna work really, really, really well on your Mac and or Macs will work really well.

The two things to look out for. Right? The two you know, catch number one is, are you using any server based applications? Right?

And and if you are, you wanna be careful work with an IT partner that can kinda get you set up the right way. So that’s catch number one. And then catch number two is just make sure your IT provider is comfortable supporting you if you decide to have some employees on a Mac. Right?

Those are the kinda two, I got you know, those those are the two things to look for that are red flags. Other than that, it works fantastic. And I would, you know, I would highly recommend that if that is your preference, you know, is using a MacBook.

So So there you go.

Everybody can take a breath. We are now in twenty twenty four, and Max and and the Microsoft world will play well together. So that’s great. And do you have any, of this literature and and other resources, like, on the website that we can put in the show notes, David, that the, the listeners can read up on or, you know, get some more information on how that works back and forth?

Yeah. We’ll definitely include the, this this podcast in the well, actually, you know what? Just go to the learning center, right, and type in Mac book or type in Apple in the search, and you’re gonna get you’re gonna get a lot of literature around that. That’s probably the easiest thing to do. So to go to w w w dot r I a workspace dot com, and then click on the learning center, And then just type in Apple or or Mac, and then you’ll get a a lot of literature that’s around that. And then you can just kinda, you know, poke around on on what you’re interested in learning. So yes.

Awesome. Well, David, as always, it was fun taking the trip with you today, especially between the Macs and the Microsoft worlds. I’m sure people have plenty of comments of that. So please join our conversation, put it in the show notes, send us an email. We always love hearing from you guys. And as David said, you know, go to the learning center at, riaworkspace.com and just, search whatever kind of topics you want or for this one, just search in Mac or Apple and you’ll get some great resources there. So as always, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to listen to the RIA Tech Talk Podcast brought to you by, of course,  RIA Workspace.

And so for David and myself, thanks so much. We’d love to hear from you. So feel free to send us a note or an email. And always, stay tuned for more RIA Tech Insights in our next episode. We’ll see you guys later. Have a great day.

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.

Listen To The Audio


Read The Transcript

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.

Listen To The Audio


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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

Listen To The Audio:

Read The Transcript:

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.

In this episode of the RIA Tech Talk podcast, David and Todd discuss the challenges of a current RIA WorkSpace client who had similar IT issues to many RIAs out there. This company went from a frustrating, time-demanding experience with their previous IT provider, to a trouble free one with RIA WorkSpace.

Listen To The Audio


Read The Transcript

In this episode of the RIA Tech Talk podcast, David and Todd discuss the challenges of a current RIA WorkSpace client who had similar IT issues to many RIAs out there.  This company went from a frustrating, time-demanding experience with their previous IT provider, to a trouble free one with RIA WorkSpace.

Background on the RIA

• 13 employees all working remotely
• Based in Dallas, TX with offices in San Diego, Minneapolis and Denver.
• The 4 office locations were in shared workspace locations
• Our main contact was Mary, the Director of Operations.

Biggest IT Challenge

• Mary was spending too much time doing tech support and managing the MSP
• The previous IT provider didn’t understand RIAs and the SEC requirements
• There was no IT roadmap and the IT provider was not proactive
• The IT support was poor and there was no assigned team
• Mary was concerned about several issues
  • Onboarding new employees was difficult and took too long
  • They wanted Single Sign On (SSO) but couldn’t get it set up
  • They experienced ongoing sync issues with OneDrive and SharePoint
  • Their Microsoft licensing was a mess and they wanted their MSP to manage it

 

To hear about Mary’s IT situation today, tune in to the podcast and hear about how RIA WorkSpace eliminated the IT frustration. 

Check out the case study here. 

Related blog: Hiring an IT Services Company for your RIA? Here are the things you should know

Listen To The Audio:

Read The Transcript:

Todd W. Darroca

Hello, hello and welcome to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. I’m Todd Darroca, and of course, always with me is David Kakish. And together we are on a mission to simplify the complex world of technology for RIAs just like yours. In the podcast, we’ll be your tech guides breaking down those often confusing tech topics into plain and practical terms. And so we hope you join us, subscribe, follow us, all that good stuff for each episode as we dive into the latest tech trends, share our expert insights and help you navigate the ever-changing world of our IA technology. David, David. David, good to see you again. Glad we’re here today. It sounds like today our listener may need to take out a notebook or a laptop or an iPad and take some notes. We have a case study today, is that right?

David Kakish

Sounds good, yes. Hey, Todd, it’s always mesmerizing listening to you and your DJ or radio voice, so. I’m always me mesmerized when you do the intro. It’s a lot of fun. Yes, we are doing a case study today. It’s turning it frustrations into freedom. This is a 13 person RIA and it’s very typical of what many RIAs out there, how they’re living and how they’re doing things when it comes to IT and IT compliance and cybersecurity. We’ll keep the company name confidential because there’s just out of respect for this client. But yeah, they had some major, major challenges and frustrations and didn’t know where to turn or what to do or even know that, oh wow, this could be so much better. It’s night and day and yeah, I’m happy to talk about that and how this client overcame those challenges. And then I think you can take this info and do it yourself or you can call us. We’re happy to help. But key at the end, I’m going to share with you the two most important questions you’re going to want to ask when you hire a new IT provider. So stay on until the end. This is my way to keep you on until the end.

Todd W. Darroca

We don’t have big gifts people, but we do have a secret answer to give you at the end.

David Kakish

Yeah, we’ll reveal the secret at the end here in 15 minutes or so.

Todd W. Darroca

And so as David goes through the case study today, it’s a really good media one. We’ve got several resources that we’re going to stick in the podcast notes, so if you’re whatever podcast network you’re on, you’ll see those notes in the description and we’ll make sure this is also online@raworkspace.com and you’ll search for our podcast and we’ll have these links in there. So good things to download, take notes on. But hey, let’s go ahead and jump right in the case study, David, and we’re starting with Mary and tell us about Mary and what you saw.

David Kakish

Mary is a real, but that is a fictitious name. I just want to put that out there. We want to protect this client. So they’re based out of Dallas. They’ve got four offices. These are shared office spaces. I can’t remember if it was Regis or WeWork, but one of these places. So it was Dallas, Denver, San Diego, and Minneapolis 13 employees. Mary was the director of operations, or she still is, or at least she was supposed to be the director of operations and she became an in-house company IT guy.

 

Todd W. Darroca

That goes under the list of other tasks in a job description or marrying.

David Kakish

Exactly, exactly. So kind of typical and the biggest, biggest challenge is the IT provider or the MSSP she was working with did not focus on RIAs and they just became terrible. So when they first started working with them, they worked good, they had a really good support person that they can go to. And then as the company changed and that one person left, it just became a total nightmare and she was so spending so much time on being tech support for her internal team and then managing that IT provider and we’re joking, we’re saying she was the director of operations and she ended up spending so much of that time on just it, and it became really, really, really frustrating for her. So that’s probably, if I were to say what’s the main thing, that was the main thing that was going on there. But there were other challenges and other pain points, but that was one that was carrying the most weight on her shoulders.

Todd W. Darroca

How common is that, David? For all good intensive purposes, these IT providers hop into a company that has an RIA and then they just get overwhelmed once they start getting into it. They’ve never dealt with that type of volume or type of business. How often do you see that?

David Kakish

Actually a lot. And the reason is it’s not so much that type of volume because it’s not like RIAs have a lot of requests and volume and stuff like that. It is that type of business. And what I mean by that is, okay, this company 13 employees, their requirements for cybersecurity and IT compliance isn’t like that business with 13 employees across the street, their requirements are much, much, much bigger. So if you think about an enterprise business or a big business, they have hundreds or even thousands of employees. You as an RIA with five employees, 1330 employees, you have the same requirements as that really big enterprise when it comes to cybersecurity and IT compliance. And just a lot of times that IT provider becomes overwhelmed because you’re talking about enterprise security and they’re used to providing what I would call smaller mid-size business security, and they just don’t bridge the gap. And it’s not that for that IT provider securities is not important. They just don’t realize it’s exponentially more important for that, for your RIA.

Todd W. Darroca

Right, right. Alright, so let’s dive into the challenge, the challenges and pain points that she was talking to you about or that you discovered when you sat down with Mary.

David Kakish

Yeah, so like I said, she was spending so much time on it. She was doing the tech support, she was managing the IT provider. It became for her, it was almost like two thirds of her time. This is crazy. I am spending two thirds of my time on this. And then she just had that discussion with the owner and said, Hey, look, here’s going on. And so that was the big part of it, but why is that, right? So the IT provider that she was working with did not understand the RIA vertical, the SEC requirements. There was no proactive advice, there was no roadmap or anything like that. Again, good techs, good people, but that’s kind of what happened. And then I think they were with that company for quite a while because they had a good primary person and then that primary person left and they’re like, all right, who’s supporting us? Who were you working with? And it was just chaos. So she didn’t have an assigned team, just like anybody would help. And then it’s almost like I call in and I would start from zero with every new rep that’s answering the phone to try to help it. So

Todd W. Darroca

Yeah, that’s terrible. Yeah, I hate to over and over and over and over and over again telling you the problems or the goals.

David Kakish

Yep, exactly. Yeah, and it gets really frustrating. There were some other things that she also wanted. She’s like, Hey, listen, it would be really nice for us to have a single sign on for our web-based application. So if you think about a typical RIA, they’re using anywhere your RIA is using anywhere, let’s just say from five to 10 web-based applications, think Wealth box e-money Orion, things like that. It would be really nice for employees to be productive where they can come in and they can see a dashboard and access these web-based applications, but also more security like the one derived in SharePoint sync issues. It was a mess. It was terrible. It was terrible. She would go to ’em, they would fix it, it would happen again and stuff like that that IT provider was not managing her Microsoft licenses. She was overwhelmed. She’s like, what are all these licenses?

Probably the other thing that was very visible was the employee onboarding and offboarding. And by the way, I hear this one a lot. It is a nightmare. So you hire a new employee, it takes hours, days, and sometimes weeks. I kid you not weeks to set up a new employee with all the tech. And the problem is it’s painful for her. It’s so embarrassing. We just hired Todd to work at our RIA and when the tech isn’t set up, it is a reflection of our company as an RIA. And so they were kind of embarrassed. They’re like, man, we need to recruit and higher quality people. We’re not going to bring ’em in and all the tech is not working. And might, oh yeah, your computer is set up, but I can’t email. And just different things like that. And then the big part of that also is the offboarding.

When they let go of an employee, they didn’t have the confidence that that person was completely locked out of the systems. So they had some cybersecurity and IT compliance concerns and just did not have faith in that. And then what is that? I think Bill Gates has a book called The Speed of Trust. You trust the other person or the other company, just business happens faster. And when you don’t have that trust, it just evaporates really, really, really fast. So anyways, I went through a slew of things. I know that this is sort of all with this one client, but it’s not uncommon. Most I was going to

Todd W. Darroca

Ask you, is this typical, is Mary asking for the moon here or is this kind of the basic fundamental stuff or just basic stuff that you hear day in and day out?

David Kakish

No, Mary’s not asking for the moon for us, and I’ll talk about what we did and how she works today so the listener can have a better understanding of that. But what’s somewhat not typical in Mary’s situation, I mentioned seven or nine things. They have the seven or nine things going. Most other RIAs that want to make the change, they have two or three things going on. They’re like, all right, we got to find a partner because of that. But in this case, that’s why it’s a great case study because it’s like, hang on, it’s the nine things that are happening and all nine things were happening most of the time. Again, like I said, there’s two or three things that are just consistently happening at that RIA saying, Hey, I want to go ahead and I want to find an IT provider because of that. Right.

Todd W. Darroca

So what did you guys do? Let’s tackle it kind of bit by bit here. So one of the first things that she was doing that was she didn’t like doing was spending so much time on the IT side of things, doing tech support, managing MSP. So what did you guys do to give her that time back?

David Kakish

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say our biggest success, the biggest success and what she loves was that she was completely freed up. And when you think about technology in it, I jokingly tell people, it’s kind of like at cybersecurity, it’s kind of like air. You’re breathing and as long as you’re breathing, everything is okay, but then the second you can’t breathe, two minutes, you’re dead. And it’s the same thing with technology. If it’s working, life is fantastic, but if you’re having email issues and your emails are not going through or whatever, you can’t work. You can’t be productive. And it just happens. And so the problem happens is with the old provider, it doesn’t get fixed the first time and then she follows up and then she has to manage them and it’s like, oh my goodness. And so she became part-time tech support. She was telling me this, it’s like it’s a lot faster for me to solve it rather than to call them to solve the problem.

Todd W. Darroca

She literally took her out of the equation. You kind of lifted her up and said, Hey look, my team’s got you. Don’t

David Kakish

Worry about that because when things are working well, you don’t have to manage that partner. What happens is, alright, let’s have weekly meetings to talk about the service tickets. What’s going, why are you having weekly meetings? You’d rather not have those, right? Let’s have quarterly technology for your reviews, or let’s have strategic meetings, not like, Hey, what fires are we putting out? Those should just be put out and you’re not dealing with any of that right there. So that was probably the big thing. She loves it because she’s freed up. She’s not spending two thirds of her time on IT and tech support. And at the same time, she’s not spending all this time managing and following up with us because these things just, they’re done

Todd W. Darroca

And you take care of all the compliance issues, all that stuff. That’s all, again, along with the tech part, the compliance and regulatory stuff.

David Kakish

I would just add the IT compliance, right? I’m careful to say that. Yeah, yeah. The IT compliance. Exactly. And then some of the other things that we did during the onboarding process that she just absolutely loved. So during the onboarding process, the first 30 days of working together, we set them up, we set her up and her team with web single sign-on for all the web-based applications. So now the entire team, they don’t need to manually log into redtail.com with their own username and password and Salesforce and e-money and Orion and so on. Now they come in, they open up their browser and it’s right there. It’s a dashboard. And actually it makes them look really good because it feels like they’re providing a dashboard for their own employees where they can access all these web-based applications. And then I hear this a lot, and this, if you’re working in SharePoint and OneDrive, you probably have a lot of sync issues.

It happens all the time and just clients come to us and we just make those things disappear. And the problem is it’s not like if it’s not set up right or if you don’t know if somebody you’re working with doesn’t understand the high level of this, you’re constantly going to have these issues and our clients just don’t have those. The other thing that she absolutely loves, Mary loves that she has an assigned team. She’s working with the same team members on a regular basis. So we’ve got 20 team members, but she’s not randomly assigned. She doesn’t talk to Todd one day. David the other day, Bob Scott, she’s talking to the same team members on a regular basis, and that’s great for her. It’s great for us. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel on every single phone call. And by the way, that’s a big complaint with a lot of people that are reaching out to us.

Todd W. Darroca

Yeah, well that’s nice. I mean, again, if they have a problem, Mary doesn’t have to re-explain something. The two team members are say, oh yeah, Mary, yeah, we got you. Let’s dive into that. That’s good.

David Kakish

Back to the, then there’s comradery. They know each other, right? It’s like a partner relationship. It’s not like one 800 no help.

Todd W. Darroca

And then for the single sign on, I want to go back to that real fast with single sign on, this also helps with the offboarding of employees, right? Because now there is kind of a guarantee, or not a guarantee, but a really safe bet that everything has been taken off of that outgoing employee. So they don’t have any access to everything. It’s not going through all the programs. It’s literally just going through single sign-on and removing them from all those

David Kakish

Applications. Yeah, exactly. Here, I’ll make it simple for you. Scenario A is what an RIA, like yours doesn’t have single sign-on scenario B is an RIA. Like me. We have single sign on for the web-based applications, Todd, and your scenario A where your RIA does not have single sign on for web-based applications. What’s going to happen is you’ve got somebody on your team that has a spreadsheet. What does Todd have access to? Salesforce? e-money, Wealthbox, Orion has to go through FedEx, maybe, I don’t know. And so when they let go of Todd or Todd leaves, it’s a manual process. Let me go in, let me disable them accessing their computer, their iPhone, this application, that application, this and that. In our case with web based single sign on, we disabled their main account. They’re not able to access their computer, they’re not able to access their email on their iPhone or anything. They’re not able to access any of these web-based applications, Wealthbox, Redtail, Orion, and things like that. So you are absolutely right.

Todd W. Darroca

Nice. So let’s get back into again some more solutions that you gave to Mary or brought to the table for her. And one of the things that she wasn’t doing well and not for her own, not to blame her, but the Microsoft license is pretty complex. Big mess going on there. What’d you guys do there?

David Kakish

Yeah, it was overwhelming. And I guess for us, we just managed that for our clients. For us, it’s just part of what we do. And the funny part is we love doing that for our clients to clean it up, because I don’t think Microsoft needs more of our money or your money. I think Microsoft’s got plenty. Their profit margins are very high. So we’re trying to make sure that, and this, I’m telling you, this is so common when you look at the Microsoft licensing, right? You’re like, oh, crap, we’ve been paying this thing for three years and we haven’t used this, and it’s throwing money out the window, flushing

Todd W. Darroca

All the features that you could use and the products. And within that licensing.

David Kakish

Yeah. Well, it’s not just that, but it’s, it’s like, oh, they have this license for this and this and that, and they’re not using it. Or somebody worked there for three years and they’re still paying for ’em and stuff like that, and it kind of gets complicated. Yeah, that’s kind of what happened

Todd W. Darroca

When you went to Mary and said, Hey, look, you’re not even using these things or you’re not taking advantage of this on your license. What was her reaction? Did she kind of get that or was she like, oh, crap.

David Kakish

So I’m not on those calls once the onboarding is done where there’s our onboarding team and they work with her, but I can only imagine what it’s like to be fair, there’s parts, they’re embarrassed a little bit because it’s like, oh man, we’ve been paying this for so long, and then they’re pissed off and annoyed that they’re old or even more, and we’re not trying to put salt on a wound. We’re trying to basically say, Hey, look, later is better than never is all these things.

Todd W. Darroca

I think the other thing that I want to touch on here is you take away this not only the technical tactical side of things for her, but you’re also looking to the future and making sure that she’s staying up to date. So what did you guys do there to I guess, get her ready for the future or be prepared for anything if it changes?

David Kakish

So built into our model, so after we worked together, usually 90 days at the 90 day mark or so, we’re going to do what’s called a strategic technology review. And that’s a way for us to provide you with proactive advice. And then depending on your size as an RIA, we’re going to do one to two times per year where we have that strategic technology review. So in addition to getting a monthly executive summary report and some of the other stuff, we actually want to sit down with you, let’s just say twice a year where we say, Hey, Todd, let’s look at all of your IT infrastructure, cybersecurity IT compliance and things like that, and put that in a red light, green light orange light category at a really high level. It’s not meant to be a highly technical discussion. It’s meant to be a business technology discussion.

And then we just take everything that you have and everything we’re doing. We say, okay, is this green? Is this orange, is this red? And then that also gives us the opportunity to talk about what’s going on in the industry or what’s coming. So that’s something by default that we’re doing with our clients twice a year. And there are other things like that that we do. I don’t want to bore people to death, but we do the backup and disaster recovery. We do a fire drill twice a year, can we recover the backup and then, hey, here’s the fire drill, and then we share the reports and the data with our clients. We just do these things by default because we want to make sure we have that. So yeah, it’s just a great way to do that. One of the big things right now we’re talking with a lot of our clients about mentioned that to you in the past is, Hey, you don’t have data loss prevention for your email.

What I mean by that is if your employee sends out an email with a social security number, account number, passport number or so on, we want to make sure that either that’s prevented from going out or that it’s encrypted and that we automate that whole process. So these are the kind of things we talk about, but it’s literally, it’s a one hour session where the technical account manager will sit typically with the CCO Chief Compliance officer or anybody else on the team and say, Hey, here’s a review of your entire environment in green, in red, and then here’s coming up. And then just kind of have that strategic technology discussion. We don’t think it’s rocket science. We like having it, our clients having it, but I’m just amazed at how many other people don’t have that.

Todd W. Darroca

Right. And how do you keep your team internally, let’s say there could be feedback for the team that Mary was like, Hey, this isn’t going as well. Is there that constant communication and evaluation that you do to make sure, and obviously you probably do, but that Mary can at least give feedback and make those adjustments, and you guys internally can make those adjustments?

David Kakish

Of course. Yeah. So again, the assigned team we absolutely love, we are 20 people, but each client basically gets assigned three team members. We absolutely love this for our clients, and then we absolutely love it for our team. There’s just a sense of ownership, there’s a sense of community camaraderie. It’s kind of weird because we’re technically a vendor, but we don’t like to use the word vendor. We’re more of a partner and you start working, they’re like, wow, okay. And it’s almost like an extension of your employees. It’s pretty cool, and we love it. I don’t know why other people don’t do that, but hey, I guess that’s why we’re here and that’s why people do business with us

Todd W. Darroca

Right.

David Kakish

Now. You asked really. And that right there is the core piece. But again, we’re human. We make mistakes. What we have is we call it a smile back report, but basically it’s a customer satisfaction report. So at the end of every request we complete you and your employees, you can rate a green, yellow, or red at the end of every, and it’s easy. It’s just a little emoji. And so all of our clients are able to rate us, and we do really well. Our CSAT score tends to be like 98% plus, but in the event that we get a yellow or a red and it happens and it’s okay, our service manager is going to get on the phone and say, Hey, Todd, I noticed you gave me a yellow or red. You gave a team member a yellow red. We’re very sorry about that. Is there something that we can do to fix this? And then how can we prevent that in the future?

Todd W. Darroca

And your team actually looks at these things in these bigger companies, they probably like, oh, okay, there it was. But it sounds like you’ve got that, again, partnership feel and a relationship family kind of based internal team that does look at those surveys. It sounds like they do follow up. If something kind goes haywire there,

David Kakish

We obsess over that. That’s a great, that’s great. I didn’t even think about that. Other companies have it, but it is like, yeah, whatever. So we actually look at that every single day, every week, every month, every quarter, and every year. I can tell you our team, when we get a yellow or red, our team knows it and they’re like, oh my goodness, I got a yellow, I got a red. And that’s exactly what we want, right? Again, mistakes happen. It’s just that when it does happen, how can we catch it? How can we take care of it? And Todd, you’re going to laugh. Sometimes it’ll give us a yellow or a red because the internet south because of their internet service provider.

Todd W. Darroca

Oh, gosh.

David Kakish

And then they’ll reply like, oh, I’m so sorry. I did not mean to give you a red, but that’s the type of relationship that it is. And you get a sense of that, and that’s what a lot of RIAs want. I’m like, look, listen, I want my stuff to work, but when it doesn’t work, I want fast response and I want to work with somebody that I know. I don’t want to be calling 1-800-MICROSOFT or one 800, whatever. Yeah. And just to share this specific client, I’m looking at her report right now. She gave us a total of 39, so far, 39 reviews, I think for what in the last six months or year? In the last year, the team gave us 39 reviews. 39 are green, zero is yellow, at zero is red. And here’s what’s amazing. The response rate is 72%, so out of every two,

Todd W. Darroca

Wow, their response seven, that’s high if anybody’s like, well, 72 is a C. No, that’s high, folks. That is, yeah, exactly.

David Kakish

Well, I was showing this to a prospect once, and they saw that our response rate was like 33.3% across the board. And he goes, hang on, is that real or is that made up? Because he knows these smile back reports. Typically in other industries, it’s like less than 1%. And so actually to be fair, our average response time on those is one third. So about 33%, which is really, really, really high because industry average is more like one to 2%. But also we’re different because the clients we work with, I mean, we work with them on a regular basis, they know each other. But anyways, I digress. I talk about this stuff forever and here, here’s the piece of business advice. We rolled this out a really long time ago, and it’s three little emojis. It’s a green, a yellow, and a red. And when we rolled it out, I’m not a big emoji guy. I’m like, whatever. Let’s see what happens.

Todd W. Darroca

And you don’t send kissy face emojis or winks and all that stuff, David. Yeah, yeah,

David Kakish

Yeah. I feel like my seventh grade daughter sending out emojis. But it’s been phenomenal for our business because it’s a quick way for people to quickly rate you. And if you have way Todd and the listeners for you to implement something like that with three little green, a yellow, and a red, it’s amazing. And you track it and you do something about it, right? That’s the key. It’s amazing what it will do for your business. We let, again, we’re human. We’re not perfect, but we don’t let things fester, something happens, catch it, take care of it, and just don’t let things fester. And yeah, it’s had a really, really, these three little emojis, I can’t remember when we rolled it out, must have been like it’s been over 10 years ago. It’s had a really phenomenal impact on our business. It’s fantastic.

Todd W. Darroca

Nice. So at the top of the show, we tease that we have the secrets, the two things that you need to do before you enter into Mary’s world and avoid poor Mary what she did. So David, can you tell us the two most important questions that could have saved Mary from this and that current RAs should be asking

David Kakish

Before they Yeah, if you’re looking to work with a new IT provider, there’s a lot of really good questions that you’re going to ask. But the two top questions that you want to ask, and this will make the biggest impact, is, number one, do you have experience working with other RIAs? And here’s a typical response. No, but we work a lot with hipaa. No, but we work a lot with banks. No, but we work a lot with you fill in the blank. They’re like, it’s totally different, right? It’s totally, totally different.

Todd W. Darroca

So if they say no, it’s a quick, okay, thanks so much. Hang up.

David Kakish

I wouldn’t even waste time. Yeah, I wouldn’t. Because again, the challenges here are so unique. You’re small in terms of a headcount, but you require enterprise security and IT compliance and stuff like that. But yeah, that’s what I would do. I’d be polite about it. Yeah. Hey, thanks, bye. So that’s the first question to ask. The second one, which is also really important is, Hey, who makes up the team that’s going to be supporting us or supporting our RIA? So everybody we have on our team is an employee. We don’t subcontract with third parties or anything like that. And it’s really interesting, I was talking to potential new client last week, and they’re just really frustrated because they work with an IT provider where the help desk is clearly outsourced and there’s just a huge disconnect, right? Well, and stuff like that. So it is not uncommon for IT providers to pull in a bunch of companies together and then they have a help desk, whether it’s US-based or not, or whatever is kind of irrelevant. But I think you ask and to say, Hey, who makes up the team that’s going to be supporting us? Are they all employees? Are they contractors? What does that look like? And you’d be shocked by just asking that question because you’re making an assumption and it’s fascinating. And obviously there’s other great questions to ask. But these two I think are key questions because it’ll give you really a lot of insight into that business.

Todd W. Darroca

Right. Alright, well we covered a lot today, big case study with Mary. And so David, give us the quick highlights again of what we should be taken away from Mary’s story. Top three things.

David Kakish

Yeah, I think, listen, if you’re spending a lot of time on it and technology and it’s a headache and it’s draining you, not energizing you, it’s probably time to make a change. Especially if the provider you’re working with does not work with other RIAs and whether you reach out to us or somebody else, the two questions is, Hey, do you work with other RIAs? If so, are they similar to us in size? And then question number two, who makes up the team that’s going to be supporting us? Do we get an assigned team? Are they employees? And so on. And so those are probably the two most important questions to ask.

Todd W. Darroca

Got it. Do you still keep in touch with Mary?

David Kakish

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. I do. So the way we’re structured is I don’t talk to her that often because we’ve got a system in place, so there’s a primary support here, but then there’s a technical account manager, so he kind of does that. So I usually reach out to her twice a year. Oh, nice. I like her. And we usually get the feedback. So once a year we also like to get overall feedback and her insights and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean listen, I’ve got, here’s the deal, a lot of respect for her, but I’ve got testimonials like, oh my goodness, David, this is night and day where we were and where we’re at, and here’s what I appreciate. And I also reach out to her to say, Hey, we’re working on rolling out these things in the future. Would these be helpful for your business or not? So that’s the kind of relationship I have. I don’t talk to her a lot, but I do definitely connect with her twice a year at a very strategic level.

Todd W. Darroca

Great. Alright folks, well thanks again for joining us. A good meaty topic of our case study today here on Turning It Frustrations to Freedom. So again, there are several different resources that we’re going to put in the description, in the notes, so make sure you download those. Also, we’ll have it on the website. And so again, go to our resources and also you can see the more podcasts that we’ve done in the past@riaworkspace.com and check out the Learning Center. That’s where you’ll see the transcript and all the other goodies from this episode. And so also we want you to again, feel free to reach out to us with any questions or topics you’d like us to cover. As David said, we do read emails and so he does surveys. We do see these things. So please send us those in there. And again, we want to say thanks again for listening to the RA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. And so we’ll hopefully see you next time here in the next episode for more RIA Tech Insights and we’ll see you later. Thanks everybody.

David Kakish

Thank you.