Good afternoon, everybody. How we doing? Good. Good. I'm well, thank you. Well, thank you for joining us today. My name's Harley Nager, and I'm going to be your hype man, if you will, for the speaker, Stephanie Riley, who's going to be joining us in a moment. I'm going to give you a little bit of context on just who you're hearing from today in SEI Investments, why we're here at this conference, if you're unfamiliar with us or maybe you've heard of us and maybe don't know exactly kind of why we're here and kind of the context of what we're trying to provide today. That's my job. So I'm going to be here for five minutes, and then Stephanie's going to be up here kind of delivering the meat of the content, so to speak. So the presentation today is, does your tech stack help power wealth? My vote was for, is your tech stack whack? But I lost, clearly. But ultimately, our job here for you is registered investment advisors. We provide custody, technology, and investment services for registered investment advisors. We're the fifth largest RIA custodian in the industry. We've been working with fee-based advisors since 1992. And if you think about it in terms of our offering, in terms of our value chain, it's custody, it's investments, it's technology, it's practice management. So how do we help you run a more efficient business? Spend more time in front of your clients? Be better practitioners? And as you know, as you're all small business owners, this game's about leverage, right? How do you leverage technology? How do you leverage partners? How do you leverage tools? How do you find leverage in different areas for you to spend the time where you want to spend it, okay? And as you know, we've seen technology, I mean, I've heard statistics in terms of the acceleration of technology through the pandemic that we saw 10 years of technology acceleration in about a two and a half year time period. And we all had to adapt very quick. And frankly, it's been pretty impressive the way our industry has adapted, especially financial services has a reputation for being 10 years behind traditional kind of other verticals. But we've seen a very fast kind of ramp up in all of your businesses, our business as a provider as well, okay? So, Stephanie has been with SEI 12 years. She is one of our leading practice management consultants, and really focuses her time on technology, operations, workflows, and consults our most successful firms that we work with, right, in helping them run more efficient practices. So we are obviously exhibiting, if there's anything you heard about today, or you're thinking about a new custodian, you're thinking about ways to optimize your business, run a better practice, be more efficient, decrease your overhead, because, as you know, technology does not come for free. Custody, some might say is free, but nothing is free. We all know that, okay? So if you're thinking about these elements of your business and how you can be more efficient and find more leverage in the partners that you work with, we'd love the opportunity to speak with you. So with that, Stephanie, why don't you take us away here? Thanks, Harley. I said five minutes. That might be the first time I ever went under my time for lunch. And you got a clap, too. That was so nice. Yeah. Good afternoon, everyone. I usually get the time slots right after lunch, so hopefully I bring the energy up. Our head of practice management is a certified high-performance coach, and she would have you all jumping, so be glad that it's me here instead of her, because when she does that, I cringe. But it definitely works, so I'll try to keep the energy up. So like Harley said, we're going to talk about tech today. So who here is ready to think like a tech consultant for their own business for the next 60 minutes? Okay, cool. Let's do it. Okay, so today we're going to talk about how to keep it simple while also scaling and adding value to your business. If you're here, you probably are wondering how or if you're getting the most of your investment in technology. We're going to talk about how to get started, as well as how the most successful firms in this industry are thinking about tech strategy in order to make more time for what matters most, as well as keep their future of the business in mind, which is how we power wealth. We're going to do three main things, or the three learning objectives. You're going to have at the end of the 60 minutes is to number one, find opportunities today together to make improvements in our business, specifically using our infrastructure. Then we're going to learn about lots and lots of KPIs, best practices that you can use to make the most of your technology and to think about when you're making investments in technology. Then finally, how to implement a tech stack review process, which is one of my best tips to do to keep that future of your business in mind, and which, by the way, we make really, really easy, so we'll talk about that later on. Like Harley said, my name's Stephanie Riley. I am a practice management consultant. I am specifically a technology and operations consultant on our SEI Advisor Services team. I call it TechOps because I think that's cool. I've worked with hundreds, if not thousands of advisors, helping them build efficient processes using technology, SEI technology first and foremost, as well as industry technology solutions that fit their firm and their business and their clients. In fact, my favorite is that aha moment where I'm meeting with an advisor or staff member and they throw their pen on the table and say something to the tune of, do you know how much time you saved me? Guess what? That happens all the time. I get excited helping business owners solve those types of problems and reach their goals. We're going to start with three reality checks. You guys have your consultant hats on? Cool. All right. Reality check number one is that firms can oftentimes be a little reactive rather than proactive when it comes to their tech. On a recent operations community call, which I moderate, and at SEI we have four operations communities. We have RIA, growth, women's advisor, and operations. So I moderate the operations community calls that we have monthly. On a recent call, I asked the attendees, where do you get your tech? And the consensus among the maybe 45 attendees were that their advisors were typically finding tech at presentations or conferences, which is amazing. And we know that advisors find insights and ideas from other advisors very valuable, and we support that in a ton of different ways. But how are those same advisors thinking about taking that tech and incorporating it into the business? What's the tech strategy there? For many of those operations staff and managers, it can be a lot like this picture, trying to fit something into your processes, into your practice that just maybe isn't the right fit or, even worse, sometimes complicates things. Reality check number two is that, it's my favorite reality check, by the way, tech is cheap. Right? You know what isn't cheap? People. The 2021 pricing and profitability study, or 2022, sorry, the revisited pricing and profitability study shows that trends in the compensation specifically for operations staff is just going up. Now, technology supports that most important investment in your human capital, so it should be leveraged wherever you can to try and save where possible. And at about $1,000, maybe, per year, per smaller tech tool, advisors may be able to leverage more tech that can automate tasks that these operations staff are probably doing on a day-to-day basis. So the question is, what would you pay if you knew it would get 10 hours a week of your admin's time back? Because we can actually measure, right? And reality check three, a different investment new study, the advisor technology study, it's one of my favorite studies, showed what, probably around the same as what I see in the field, which is around half of advisors, oops, those silly animations, about half of advisors feel fully satisfied with their current tech. Come on, cool, okay, sorry, I didn't build this. And then only 56% of advisors are doing some sort of tech stack review looking for what's still working for them in some way or fashion. And then only 35% of them are going out and looking for new technologies that can help their practice or serve their clients better. Typically, I see advisors going to the very popular Kitsis tech stack map, you guys familiar with that? My favorite, though, if I give a little plug to something that I have no business giving a plug to, is the tech stack directory that Kitsis publishes, because it's really cool to see not only what technology solutions are out there, but what are in secondary categories as well, so additional features in the same tech. Okay, so not for nothing, but we can see how these things have happened. First of all, that technology innovation that's happening, that tech stack map I was just mentioning, I think Harley was alluding to this as well, doubled in size in five years. It's now almost 400, if not over 400 technology solutions that are just recognized by the advisor tech landscape. It's a lot to keep track of. It keeps me so busy, and it's my full-time job. Second, vendor consolidations of those same tech tools that are bringing additional features to current licenses that are great, right? They can definitely add value to the advisory business, but who knows they exist, right? That can be a full-time job, staying on top of what features are available with your current tech providers. With that, we see and often see a basic issue of adoption. I actually worked on the SEI adoption team, the technology digital adoption team, for five years. This was a problem that was really hard to solve, and we see two lenses, the advisors or business owners or visionaries of the firm that employ the technology, and then the staff members who have to actually use it. Next, changing customer expectations. We have an aging client base, we know, and then a next-gen client base who's coming up on a time where they're starting to have enough money and investable assets to evoke change in this industry. Are advisors ready and aware of the type of digital appetite that these investors are going to definitely have? And then, I have to say it, REA transitions. Maybe you transitioned from a broker-dealer. Maybe you acquired another business. That can lead oftentimes to tech in your stack that's stale or no longer relevant. Integrations, integrations, what a topic. Integrations can be mildly helpful at best, right, or not reliable at worst, right? We deal with integrations all the time on my team. And then tech spend transparency. What is the right ROI for the right tech to add value to your business? Does any of this sound familiar? Okay, good. A lot of nods. Good. I'm on the right track. So, let's make it a workshop. In front of each and every one of you, you're going to find a one-page tool. On the SEI Advisor Services Team, practice management is at the heart of absolutely everything that we do. We want to arm advisors and business owners with ideas, best practices, insights, and ways to take action in their business. Our culture is actionable. We never want to tell you the why. We always show you the how. We do this primarily through the use of our SEI Growth Lab, which is an on-demand, completely free database filled with one-page tools that will workshop-style lessons that are very short that focus on one-page tools that lead to actionable outcomes. Completely free on this website. Nothing will even ask for your email. That's how free it is. I'll get to a little bit more about Growth Lab later on. But in front of each of you, you have a one-page tool that functions similar to our Growth Lab tools that we're going to do today. So we're going to go through all of the questions on this tool together. And then we're going to focus on what the research shows us, how we can think about all of these different areas of our business. So my goal is that each of you have one or more takeaways that you can go back to your office and either work to improve if you have things going on already, or implement if you're newer. Sound good? OK, so we're going to fill out this tool together. So no need to fill it out all the time. We'll go through the questions one by one. So the first question. Do you use productivity metrics to make business decisions? You're going to answer on your tool. Does everybody have a pen? Raise your hand if you don't have a pen. We've got pens in the back. Alyssa, can you bring a pen up, please? Thank you. Great. Come on in. Sit down. Let us know if you need a pen. Specifically, productivity metrics on your infrastructure. So you're going to answer honestly, yes or no. Even a kinda or a maybe is just an opportunity. So you'll mark in the no field. So let's talk about it. There's great research that we can use to benchmark data. So I see two key metrics that I talk about in my firm consultations, specifically on technology. Clients per staff, or clients per professional, and revenue per staff, and revenue per professional. I was told this group likes to get into the weeds. Is that true? Like, give me the data, right? Good, because there's a lot of data in here. OK, good. I love to use clients per staff and clients per professional, but you can use revenue professional as well. You can even, on your paper right now, do a quick clients per staff or clients per professional and scribble it next to that line item. Where do you fall in these benchmarks? So sorry if this is hard. I'll read it off in a second. This is from the Investment News 2022 Pricing and Profitability Study again. And the cool thing about that specific study was, first of all, that it was primarily RIA. So it's a good benchmark for you guys to use. It was 67% RIA. But they also did this cool thing of pulling out what they called the top quartile performers. These were the firms with a 25% greatest profit margin against the peers. So I put it next to the RIA category in general, and you can see that these very successful firms that are managing expenses, they have high profit margins, are doing a clients per staff ratio of 56 and a clients per professional ratio of 138. If you wrote your results down, think about your results in a dashboard. Are you green or good from a capacity perspective? Are you a little lower than that? Too low could probably trigger that you need more growth or that you probably have too many staff. If you're yellow or getting close to capacity or red, you're over capacity. These are benchmarks that you can use to decide whether you want to scale your business with infrastructure, people, operations, and technology. Second, do you have a designated owner in your firm that drives adoption? Answer yes or no. Are you talking a business owner or a champion? A champion, yeah. Someone who owns specifically adoption. Good question. A different investment news study, this is the Advisor Technology Study, did a really cool thing where it analyzed businesses that they called innovators. These innovators are firms that are employing or purchasing technology and implementing that technology at much higher rates than their peers. And they found that these tech innovators are able to manage 37% more revenue. So our clients per staff ratio, we think about that. You could have a great clients per staff ratio, but as long as you're still being profitable, that's where that revenue per staff comes in. So I digress. But they're able to manage more revenue than their peers. So what makes an innovator? So not only are they employing and taking on more tech into their business than their peers, but they're implementing it like an innovator. And what does that mean? They have usually a designated technology owner in their firm assigned to every single technology that is responsible for a boatload of tasks. Mainly, what needs to be customized, what needs to be integrated, and how can we drive the adoption there so we can get that ROI from what we just invested in? Let's see if I've got anything. The other huge thing about the innovators was that they had very, very tight processes that they built around their technology. So integrating it into, my favorite word, workflows. OK, oh, it doesn't come up great on the screen. But I thought it would be cool to give more bar charts, because it's not like this presentation doesn't have enough bar charts. But I thought it would be cool to compare those innovators from the technology study to the top quartile performers from the investment news pricing and profitability study, which was awesome. Because what we found, or what I found from weeding through the indexes, pages in the back, was that the top quartile performers were actually spending less in absolute terms, so not just percentages, but absolute dollar amounts, both on technology and their human capital. Why? Well, because they manage their expenses really well, but also because they not only have technology, but they use the technology they have. They don't always just add new technologies like the innovators did from the other study. And then I found out that they are managing about, or able to manage, 29% more revenue than their peers, as opposed to the innovators that are managing 37% more. So it's just two different lenses. The idea is, if you want to scale with technology, you can do that. You can be more profitable with technology. If you don't, you can manage your expenses using your technology as well and be just as successful. Does that make sense? Sorry to complicate things, but I thought that was pretty cool. OK. So what makes a tech owner? Every, and we say this all the time, every product, process, and task in your firm should have an owner. The technology owner's responsibilities will include understanding that technology, being the expert, what parts of this technology are we going to utilize and why? Where does this fit into our workflows? What features are released in every new release cycle of that technology vendor? And what parts of those releases can we utilize? We do this at SEI. We do release notifications, and we hope that people read them. They're there for a reason, right? And all of tech vendors are doing it. Second, to train the team members and be that champion, thank you for that word earlier, the champion of that technology. Managing the vendor relationship, of course, and reporting on metrics. So we're going to talk a lot about metrics later on in this lesson. OK. Next, workflows, my favorite word, by the way. Do workflows inform your technology choices or the other way around? In other words, have you ever gone to a conference and found a technology and tried to make it fit? It's OK. We're being honest. Just opportunities here. OK. The first step we always talk about on my team is to figure out where you fall in the three drivers of scale. Step one is always to specialize. Specialize in something, right? This is what differentiates you. Most typically, this is going to be an ideal client persona or niche, right? Or a technical specialization, whatever flavor is yours. Then deciding what you can partner out, whether that's internally with a teammate or externally with an amazing strategic partner to gain a little bit of what you don't specialize in, right? Figuring out what you can juggle and what you can partner out. And then step three, which we're going to focus on, is to integrate. Integrating with technology and operations to gain additional capacity. So no matter where you are in the lifecycle of your firm, you're going to inevitably come to a point where you can no longer effectively manage all of the clients that you have, right? We as humans are limited in our capacity to service others. So we call that the capacity wall. What can you use technology, then, to plan for that capacity wall so you can build your scaled infrastructure? And there's an order of operations to it. So in a Pathways to Growth study, the Capital Group study, this study was identifying firms who were growing faster than others. The firms that they identified were going 65% faster than their peers. And then they analyzed those businesses. And what did they find? Well, in my bag, they mostly found that these firms have efficient processes in everything, from onboarding, to marketing, to sales process, to events. You name it, they have processes for everything. They then look at those processes and pull out reports that show them where their inefficiencies lie. Once you have workflows mechanized in a CRM or workflow application, I call it mechanized, like put into the technology, then you can run reports to see the efficiency of your steps and tasks. Where are the bottlenecks? What can you use? And finally, step three is to what can you use technology to make that more efficient? So step one, have your processes. Step two, mechanize them into workflows. Step three, look at them and see where we can improve. And then step four, add tech where it makes sense. Have the process, have your workflows, analyze your data, and then add technology. When we do these things, we can provide that accelerated growth at scale. It's a simple equation, but it's an important one. And it's not about just growing your business. It could be about serving more clients or providing more value more often, or what we call on our team or say on our team is whatever growth means to you. OK, this is a three-for-one question. Does your technology support your business goals, your ideal client persona or niche, niche, niche, and your mission and value messaging? Answer yes or no. OK, so welcome to the Growth Lab, by the way. Here is one of our tools in the Growth Lab that we use all the time, the one-page business plan, who here does goal setting or goal planning in their firms? Great. So what I see in my technology conversations or even in my goal planning conversations with firms is that it's rare to see a firm making goals in technology. Or what I like to say is having a digital mindset. In our one-page business plan, there's all of the different ways to get together a quick vision of the future of your firm and make simple goals and a short plan to achieve them. The toolkit in its entirety goes on to help you make progress towards those goals. It is a great toolkit, highly recommended if you're new to business planning. I then challenge firms to have a digital mindset when they fill out, there's no pointer, the ideal future state of their firms. What does your firm look like in the future? And where does technology fit into that too? So I was talking to a firm about a year ago. The business owner's name was Inslee. And she came to me and she said, Steph, I want to see what are other firms doing? What am I missing? What am I getting left out? I know technology can help. What am I missing? And it's not that easy, right, Inslee? I'm like, OK, well, what kind of operations you got? Where are the gaps? Where are things falling through the cracks, right? I have to have a conversation with her. And we came to the decision that she was going to implement workflows and get back to me. So a year later, she comes back and she said, Stephanie, I found it. So I know now that the two things that take me the longest time or the things that are the most inefficient in my firm are number one, scheduling meetings with clients, going back and forth via email. We all know the solution there. And then number two, gathering data for my Get Organized meeting. OK, great, let's work with you on this. There's amazing technology solutions that can fit that. Let's talk about which one integrates best for you. We filled out then a one-page business plan of how she can get to her future state of her firm, which was to be more tech-enabled and have more face-to-face time with clients. We then set, which is always a best practice, one to three goals to start. And when we set goals, I'll go on a little goal planning tangent, we make sure that they're SMART goals, right? S-M-A-R-T. You guys familiar with that acronym? Cool. Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Specific is we have to know exactly what success looks like. Our team has to know exactly what success look like. And we have to know when we get there that we're there, right? Relevant means that it has to be relevant to your purpose and mission, which is the top line, your ideal client persona, or who you serve and who you're going to that future state of your firm with, and your value messaging, the messaging that you're saying to your clients, right? We want to make sure they're very relevant goals. And then metrics, which I'll get to in a minute, which is the measurable. So we set one to three SMART goals. Her goal was to enhance and digitize her onboarding, because all of that was in her onboarding process. The strategies and tactics she used using technology were to leverage new technology. She wanted to look outside. Her tactics were to implement a digital data gathering tool. We have an amazing, we have lots of these, right? You guys probably use them too. She assigned an owner to that goal or that tactic, right? Because every task, process, and product has an owner. And then she assigned metrics, which for her was a success metric of one hour saved per client onboarded. Her second tactic were to adopt our custodial digital account open tool. It had been around for a while. She still wasn't using it. She assigned an owner to it, and her metric was to no longer have any not-in-good-order applications. Great goal, right? So when we do our annual goal planning from now on, we're going to have a digital mindset. What does the future of your business look like? And what are one to three measurable, attainable, relevant goals that you can set in technology? Cool. Next question. Are you aware of any recently added features from current tech providers? Recent meaning maybe the last six months. And speaking of goals, how about an amazing goal of reaching out to your tech providers and seeing what features have been released since the last time you checked that could add value or automate tasks that you're doing manually, right? It's a great goal. Let's look at the data. And I'm sorry, the little carrot's wrong at the top, but that's pointing to the 14%. OK, so we asked advisors in the investment news study, we asked the advisors what would be the most important to reaching their growth goals, specifically with technology. And a little over half of them felt like the new, what's new, what's out there is going to be the answer. I don't know what it is, but it's out there somewhere, and I believe it's going to be my key to growth. And then only 34% believed that their current tech was the key to their growth goals. And I will say, neither of those answers are wrong. Both of those answers are correct. It all depends on the digital mindset and the future state of your firm, right? Even more compelling than this research is that Capital Group study, the 65% faster going firms, were setting goals in technology investments, and all productivity, by the way, at much higher rates than their peers. So again, having that digital mindset. OK, are you using metrics, then, to validate all of your current investments in tech? Tech strategy might sound straightforward, but a lot of firms will do business differently, right? You are all going to be different, the answers to these questions in this room. What I like to do in my tech consultations, and I swear, every single time I meet with a firm, I ask them to finish this sentence, tech should allow me to. And I get so many different answers, right? So in this room, what do you guys think? And finish that sentence, tech should allow me to. What is that? Leverage your time better. Yeah, sure. Anybody else? Reduce keystrokes, yeah, automate tasks, right? Anybody else? Serve more clients, or meet with my clients more, right? Or maybe it's golf more, or whatever it is. Yeah, tech should allow you to do it. So now we can look into what your digital mindset is. So take a picture of this if you'd like. It's not innovative, or pretty, or anything, but it's pretty simple. Once you now know what tech should allow you to do, you can set some effective goals to get there. For example, saving time on onboarding, that's an amazing goal. What is the budget then for that goal, if you have one? And then who are those internal and external stakeholders that we need to keep in the loop of what tech we're thinking about, right? What's their input? What's their aptitude for technology, right? Everybody's different. And then hit it back, who's the owner? Every goal should have an owner. So when we think about metrics for anything, we see two different metrics, leading indicators and lagging indicators. We always like to try to lean to leading indicators, because there are things you can control, right? Activities, number of reports ran, number of campaigns run, the percent adoption of the tool, or the percent utilization of the tool. Those are things we can control, right? But a lot of times, your technology metrics are going to also be lagging indicators. So instead of data pointing to the future, this is more data that confirms a pattern, OK? So you could use productivity ratios. Are you improving upon, after you implement that technology, your clients per staff ratio? Or your revenue per staff, are you getting more profitable? How much time saved do you have using this new tech? Or just the feeling, do you have capacity for other things that you didn't have capacity for before? So again, you can take a picture of this, just the most commonly used metrics that I see assigned to tech goals. And then have you considered replacements to your current tech solutions? I say, maybe in the last 12 months. The most common reason I see advisors going out, and I see some nods, looking for additional tech of what else is out there, is because of integration. And 50% of advisors agree with you, because they claim that integration is their major pain point. You guys agree with that? Yeah, right? Wish they would just get me better, right? 67% of advisors feeling like they have some systems connected and others not. Yikes, right? If it's not connected, your data is not flowing, you're re-keying stuff, technology should work for you, right? This is an amazing reason it is for going out and searching the advisor tech landscape for alternatives, because it should integrate with your business well. And then I pull this specific example, because it was just so sad. Only 13% of the advisors in this study said that their digital marketing was integrated. Think about the missed opportunities there, right? That's so sad. Get them in the CRM, get them in the pipeline, get them on the email communications, get them in your events, right? Be able to track the source, if anybody's in that marketing meeting earlier, track the source. These are huge opportunities for advisors to be able to grow. And along those same lines, answer yes or no very honestly, are you able to document where your data is or isn't flowing today as it exists? Answer yes or no. I bet what everybody answered. Cool. Well, guess what? We make this one easy. On the back of your little questionnaire there, you're going to see our CRM integration diagram. You're going to see our CRM integration diagram, which is one of our Growth Lab tools. It's pretty easy, right? I do this all the time on whiteboards. Document where things are going. You guys do this with your clients, right? Document their financial lives. It's the same thing, just protect. This is one of those aha moments, right? Once you see what you're employing, where it's connected, and where it makes sense. So this is an opportunity of a little task where you can go into each of your different technology solutions that you list and draw one- or two-headed arrows. Did I set up my integrations first of all? Because I see that all the time. Going into each technology solution and seeing if you just check the box for connecting the two. While you're there, see if there's any features that have changed since the last time you were there, and if they could automate any of your current manual tasks, right? Because this industry of innovation in this technology space is happening so fast. And we, as tech vendors, are trying so hard to manage these automations for you and to automate more. Come stop by the booth if you'd like to hear how we make advisor businesses very efficient as well. Once you have them mapped out, you visualize your process. You think, where is my data coming from? Where do I need it to go? And is it getting there? If it's not, and it's not a possibility either because you researched it with your vendor, try someone else. Who can save you time? Again, 10 hours of your admin's time back a week. Who can save you that time? So we think about prospect data. It came in from our data gathering tool. Great. Now it's in our CRM, our operational hub, where it should be, by the way, should be. And then you flow it into your custodial platform. So you can do your digital account open. You flow it into your risk tolerance questionnaire so you can get your proposals generated. And then you flow it into your document management so your forms are at least partly filled out or as much as can do without an additional human interaction. Pretty simple, right? Have you surveyed your clients, say again, in the past 12 months for their satisfaction with tech? Answer yes or no. So I'll laugh at myself for this slide. I spent about two minutes on it because I just figured I'd put something in front of you. But you know your clients best. You can survey your clients to ask them how they feel like they're enjoying the digital experience that you're providing them. You do a survey with amazing tools like absolute engagement if you haven't checked them out, an advisory board, like the client-driven practice, sitting your clients around a table having nice appetizers and saying, hey, you like that new tech we just gave? Did it fill your appetite? Do you have any other questions or anything else I'm not providing to you that you wish you had? These are just example questions. But I do recommend filtering your questions into two categories, emotional needs and financial needs. So you guys in the values, of course you were in the keynote this morning, I think about this, what are the values of technology maybe that I'm not providing to them? Both emotional, because we have emotional needs as humans to have some sort of digital life. And then we also have financial needs as that, which may be different. Do I feel as comfortable with my financial data being in technology as I would just my interactions with you? Things to think about. So you can take a picture of this as well. We also do provide these slides into the app. But you'll know your clients best. You'll know what to ask them. And I saw a presentation once that was pretty cool when talking about your specific client's appetite for technology, where they surveyed and found really funny answers. So one was, I want you to know me like Netflix. Tell me what I need to do, because you've learned me so well so far. Or tell me what other clients, like me, are buying from you, like Amazon. What about give me status of my transitioning assets, like FedEx? Or what was the last one? I think I wrote them. Send my cash like Venmo. And text me like AT&T, on-demand stuff. I just thought that was kind of cool. Some tech mindset questionnaires. All right. We went over a lot of questions. And you may, or hopefully, have one or two takeaways where they were just opportunities for improvement in your business. We always want to identify those, because then we can work on what's most important. The really, really good news is we put this all together for you and made it really easy. At the bottom of your printouts in front of you, there's two QR codes. One is to my ready-made tech stack review workshop, or tech stack review spreadsheet, which you see on the slide here. These are all of the inputs to consider when doing a tech stack review process. So annually, you can write down all of the technology vendors that you're currently employing, come to a very quick cost benefit analysis using all the inputs that we talked about today. And determine a performance grade for that technology. Keep, you're happy with it. It integrates well. It's not over budget. You're adopting it. You have good client satisfaction with it. Replace, it stinks. There's got to be something better. I'm not happy. We're not using it. Review, meaning maybe there's something better out there, because I'm kind of not happy with it. Or remove, if it's no longer helpful, or irrelevant, or stale, or leftover from a broker dealer, or whatever the case may be. Redundant, et cetera. The other QR code at the bottom of your page is to the SEI Growth Lab, where you can see all of our Growth Lab toolkits. Again, totally free. We won't even ask for your email. That you can find all of our workshops and easy to use one page tools. We're giving away the information here. So your homework, because I always assign homework to my workshop. I challenge you to complete an annual tech stack review using the tech stack review spreadsheet. Save your results and come back to them at least annually to make sure that you're being proactive versus reactive with your tech. Review your metrics that you're assigning to each technology and make sure that it's still in line with your tech strategy, which can change over time. Your appetite for technology today or this year may be different than your appetite next year. Stay in touch with that and revisit, again, at least annually. And then finally, this is so important, share your goals and your plan to achieve them with your team. They are probably the ones using these technology solutions the most. So get them involved and celebrate progress as you go. And then remember that we're here for you. We've been around a really long time. We work with thousands, 11,000 if you include captive advisors. We work with 11,000 advisors nationwide. We've been there. We have over 50 years of combined practice management experience on my team. There are three legs to the SEI stool. Advisor services, which is the team that I work on, asset management solutions, as well as custody and technology solutions. I like to think of our practice management team being the wrapper around the other two, helping business owners determine what makes the most sense for you. For our technology solutions, we do offer choice to use our all-in-one technology, which is amazingly efficient and connected to the custodial infrastructure and all-in-one technology, as well as whatever external technologies fit your business and your clients. And we integrate really well with a lot of them. On my team, I work with firms every single day designing the best tech stacks for them, helping them integrate and figuring out what they want in terms of technology. I would love for you to be a part of that. I would love for you to connect with me. Harley's on here as well on LinkedIn. I love seeing your LinkedIn posts, your value messaging, who you serve, what you do best, and staying in touch. This is my first NAPFA, so I'm really excited to be here. And I do have time left for questions, actually. Yes, I do. Does anybody have any questions? Yeah, what's up? Hey. Oh, and we have a mic, too, because this is recorded. Thank you. Yeah, I have a question. Let's say you decide to adopt a new technology, and you assign a champion to the new technology, you do the training. Can you tell me a little bit about operations manuals? Because especially in a smaller firm, you might use a technology once in a while, but not every day. So do you have any recommendations on operations manuals, just to not have to ask the champion every time, how do you do this, how do you do that? I do. And you know how I mentioned I moderate the SEI operations community call? Oh, my gosh. We have just the, I just got goosebumps, because we have the best operations managers on those calls. They are amazing at figuring out the best ways to do things. And recently, someone said that they obviously use workflows where it makes sense. So that's always the best practice, and I will never stop saying it. But they do a, oh, man, I forget the name. But they use a manual that's a tech company, oh, my gosh, I will find you later and tell it. But they also use this technology called Tango, where you can screen record using different technology and processes, and then edit out client information. And it shows in Word form the steps that you took, step by step, automatically. And then you can save those in a file system, or you can save them right in your workflows, links to them. So amazing, amazing efficiencies. She built that out into an entire operations manual. But like I said, you could build it right into your workflows. Yeah, very cool. Easy, because things update all the time, and you can just get in there, go over what the updates are. Good question. Did I answer it? OK, good. Anybody else? OK, great. Well, thank you so much for having me. Enjoy the rest of the conference, everyone. Thank you. I hope it was valuable.

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