Fox and Redtail partner on work flow

Fox Financial Planning Network and Redtail Technology Inc. this week plan to announce a technology integration that allows for “one-click” deployment of FFPN's comprehensive “client service delivery work flows” onto Redtail's popular customer relationship management platform.

Many financial advisers have attended FFPN founder Deborah Fox's coaching seminars, webcasts or conference presentations on some aspect of financial planning or, specifically, college planning, a specialty of hers.

And hundreds of firms — and thousands of individual advisers — use Redtail.

In fact, among advisers responding to our second annual survey of technology usage and satisfaction (InvestmentNews, Aug. 27) Redtail's CRM platform topped the list as the most popular application of its kind, with 28.5% of participants selecting it.

When it comes to work flows, no two are alike, especially those produced by different types of pro-viders. It even can be difficult to come up with a universal definition of the term.

For our purposes, think of a work flow simply as the steps you follow in a specific order to complete a task or function such as opening a client account.

Design your day-to-day technology to help directs those actions, and you have a tactile work flow. If you need a visual reference, go to Google.com/images and enter the term.

As for what FFPN has created, think of it as action plans built in the form of Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and other types of files that assist advisers in carrying out tasks, step by step.

TEMPLATES FOR EVERYTHING

The files that make up the work flows are housed within folders created using a component of Adobe Systems Inc.'s Acrobat Version 9 called Portfolios. With the Redtail integration, the work flow templates can be opened directly from within the CRM system.

The work flows are also broken down by employee level (an adviser task versus what you might want an admin to tackle).

They cover a variety of investing and wealth management topics, including cash flow planning, education planning, estate planning and insurance.

Jennifer Luzzatto, a solo practitioner and owner of Summit Financial Planning Inc., has been using the work flows for four months.

“One of the reasons I wanted to go through and make use of [Deborah Fox's] whole process is because she has been in business a lot longer than I have,” she said.

Although Ms. Luzzatto said she doesn't always use every step in a given work flow, their scope makes it unlikely that she would overlook anything in her work.

“I can go through and see what is most appropriate for each client. It's a detailed road map, and you can always winnow the steps down, which is certainly preferable to going back and adding something you might have forgotten on your own,” Ms. Luzzatto said.

She finds the work flows particularly helpful because she has been using Redtail CRM for the past four years.

For her part, Ms. Fox said it simply made sense to pass along some of what she has learned over her 30-year career as a planner and adviser coach.

The financial crisis opened Ms. Fox's eyes to the effect work flows can have on a firm.

“I noted how many firms were adversely affected, and we really weren't, and I think it was due to our more holistic approach and model. The work flows we had already created brought it all together and made us far more efficient,” Ms. Fox said.

During her coaching seminars, she asks advisers how many have written work flow procedures in place at their firms.

After having asked the question of hundreds of advisers over the years, Ms. Fox said the tally continues to stand at a paltry 5%.

Brad Baldridge, owner of Baldridge College Solutions and Baldridge Wealth Management, was in that boat.

He is a certified financial planner who offers full-service planning, including college planning, and also is a registered representative of Cambridge Investment Research Inc.

BUILT-IN COMPONENTS

“All [work flows are] integrated into Redtail now, which has been huge for us,” Mr. Baldridge said, adding that he and his staff have used it for the past three years and have grown familiar with its many functions.

But work flows, as helpful as they are, aren't the end of the story.

“For me it is really the whole concept. [The work flows] don't work until they get customized — that has nothing to do with Deborah [Fox], but how we are organized and our system. You have to get it to be a repeatable process. You have to ask: "Which parts are, or do I even want to be, repeatable?'” he said.

Access to the package of work flows will vary based on a firm's size.

Ms. Fox said that a one-adviser shop new to her services could expect to pay a one-time fee of about $6,000 for the entire package, then six months later, a $100 monthly fee for access to the repository, which is updated regularly.

Discounts are available to current customers and to firms in need of multiple licenses. Ms. Fox sells parts of the work flow set separately.

[email protected] Twitter: @ddjanowski

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