We’ve been quite busy around the office lately. Our clients continue to share our name with their friends, family and coworkers. We are so incredibly thankful and overjoyed with the trust you place in our guidance.
To most, we’re a financial planning and investment management firm, developing and monitoring our clients’ personal finances and investments. To many more, we are also friends, guidance counselors, life coaches and confidants.
We have a group of clients that have been with us since Bill’s early career, some for over 20 years, many more being with us since the beginning of FSI’s start. We are also fortunate to have several generations of clients with us, an honor that we take to heart.
As we are celebrating our 15th anniversary this year, I wanted to share some insight and milestones we’ve had along the way.
Where We Started
Our founder and president, Bill Ramsay, CFP® is a pioneer in helping clients take control of their finances by offering services on a fee-only service model. Having once been a commission broker, Bill saw the need and true value of providing advice on what was in the best interest of clients—not on products and not on commissions. Soon after starting out on his own, Bill created our internship program, in which Chad Smith, CFP® became our first intern. Bill’s steadfastness, passion, technical skills (he’s built our in-house system, which is the core of our operations), and gentle (yet firm) demeanor have built our team of Advisors and Operations staff into the powerhouse of unique skill sets that our clients benefit from today.
I began my career with FSI in late 2006 as a young intern. I remember Allison Berger, CFP® and Chad Smith, CFP®, taking a chance on me, bringing me onto a team that at that point consisted of 4 full-time employees and one additional intern. I had never worked in an office before, but had worked my way up as a floor manager in retail. Their decision paved the way for our core belief in hiring interns: if a student is willing to put in the work to learn about our industry, we’re willing to put in the work to train him/her.
Will Holt, CFP®, CPA, had also joined us that year, changing career paths as a partner in a CPA firm, working towards his CFP designation. Chad had just passed his CFP® exam, and Allison was studying for hers. During this busy time, the decision was made to move our clients’ accounts to a new custodian, one that offered lower cost mutual fund options, better reporting and overall cost savings for our clients. I soon found myself working with Allison to onboard all of our clients to our current custodian, Pershing, from our previous custodian. My love affair with paperwork was born.
Towards the end of my junior year of college, Bill offered me a full-time position with FSI—one that I initially declined. I am so glad that I changed my mind! As I’m celebrating my 10th year with FSI, and almost 4th as a partner, it is truly incredible to witness the amazing change and growth of our company.
In 15 years, we’ve moved to four different office spaces, basically quadrupling our space over the years. Our team has grown to include seven Advisors, whom all are CFP®s, four Operations Team members and five interns.
Interns Keep Us Going
Typically, we’ll have three interns on staff, working alongside our Operations Team and Advisors. This month, we just brought our 4th and 5th interns onboard for the semester, something we’ve never done before. Almost overnight we’ve grown to 16 employees, a long way from just Bill and Chad. Our interns truly do get to learn the ins and outs of a financial planning and investment management firm. Our interns are the backbone of our firm…9 of our 11 full-time employees started with us as interns (I include Bill in there… he was our first and forever intern). Our entire team has worked on the ‘grunt’ work, adding a unique level of understanding of our services to our clients. Seven of those 11 former interns are now Advisors, with Grayson Blazek in transition to becoming an Advisor in early 2017.
During the market downturn in 2009, we made the tough decision to put our internship program on hold. We’ve learned a lot from that decision, namely that our interns keep our office running smoothly while providing us with new insights for improvements and efficiencies. Since early 2010, we’ve made the commitment of keeping highly talented team members with us full-time. This commitment led us to hiring Cameron Hendricks, CFP® and Grace Kvantas, CFP® in the summer of 2010. With their help and dedication to improve our processes even more so (Cameron with a focus on our Estate Planning and Grace on Financial Planning) we were able to also bring on Grayson Blazek and Haley Modlin.
Grayson now heads up our data management and is currently in the process of reducing the lag time in reconciliations across held away accounts. He also supports our in-house research alongside Mike. Grayson’s oversight of our clients’ data has greatly reduced the time it takes to deliver performance reports, while improving the quality and integrity as well. Haley overseas our cash flow tracking process along with assisting on financial plans. She’s become quite a pro with onboarding clients to our continuous services as well as handling account rollovers and transfers for existing clients.
Halting our internship program in 2009 also meant losing Angela Keely-White, too. Luckily, we were able to add her back to our team in 2013! With her help, we’ve been able to streamline our services to clients, specifically with how we process trades for our clients and transitioning their accounts to our management. Under Angela’s watch, we’ve been able to reduce trading errors to an all-time low: she’s only made one mistake in the past three years—a huge accomplishment!
Processes & Progress
Investments, Research and Tax
In our early years, our investment reviews were managed all by paper—from printing and stapling them before our Advisors reviewed them, to being mailed off to our clients with pre-stamped envelopes for recommendation approval. There was a lot of paper churning out of our office! I remember my days as an intern and preparing all of those reviews by hand. Now, we are able to get those churned out to clients in less than half the time as before, and with stronger data to back them up.
All of those investment reviews were made possible only after our Advising team made decisions on market moves and specific US to foreign allocation ranges. Our research process back then consisted of many piles of printouts and saved websites that we’d discuss each month, like clockwork. Our interns rotated in and out every semester, with our team learning more and more with each group on how to improve and streamline our processes and services.
Mike Eklund, CFP®, CRPC®, MBA, joined us in 2012 and began working immediately on refining our research process. With Mike’s guidance, we’ve developed core research teams within our firm that focus on specific market and economic sectors. Our research team meets twice monthly to discuss both macro and micro outlooks of the market and to review our core preferred mutual fund line up. These meetings help us reach decisions on how we manage our clients’ portfolios. Mike has built our research tools so that we have easy access to historical data, along with our thoughts and commentary from those moments. Our ‘Outlook’ section of our clients’ quarterly reviews are always unique to the current market and to our clients’ situations.
When Will first joined us, our Continuous Service system didn’t exist yet. He’s helped us build out the foundation for our highest level of continuous service, working to brainstorm additional workflows and checklists that we use with our clients now on a regular basis. Our tax planning and tax return reviews are handled by Will—and each new year brings out new changes and refinements to what we’re reviewing to spot tax savings and efficiencies for our clients.
Workflows and Communication
Besides the improvement to our research, we’re now operating off of automated workflow processes, more robust software programs, and a solid team structure that keeps our office working, well, like clockwork. Our internal processes allow us to offer our clients dedicated reviews and feedback on regular, repetitive schedules. We’re no longer working off of messy spreadsheets or printed checklists—we’ve built them in-house to help us provide the best service possible to our clients. Our workflows cover our core service offerings, like investment reviews and creating financial plans, all the way to little details, like reminding us to remind our clients that estimated tax payments are due.
Recently, we’ve deployed a new online Client Web Portal, that allows us to communicate faster with our clients, dramatically reducing turnaround time for critical feedback and data sharing. Allison has worked alongside Bill to design our web portal, which includes an easy way for our clients to approve investment recommendations, inform us of new financial goals they may have and view their Financial Fitness scores. They are currently working on adding even more interactive features to our portal and we’re excited to share those soon.
Our overall communications to clients have also improved. Chad and Angela work closely to keep our social media accounts up to date, our newsletters fresh and get our emails out to our clients on a regular schedule. We’ve redesigned our website a bit to help our clients navigate to important news and resources. Throughout the last 15 years, we’ve redesigned our website somewhere around seven times (or eight, it’s hard to keep track!) to make it easier for our clients to navigate. Angela is also working on converting many of our clients over to e-Delivery, which includes onboarding them to our new online portal as well.
What’s Next
The future is bright at Financial Symmetry. Our team is gearing up to welcome our 400th continuous service client in early 2017. We are also working on a refined service model that will allow us to offer a broader range of services to all of our clients. FSI believes that to be successful with your financial plan, all aspects of your financial life should be monitored, adjusted and celebrated. We’re hoping to bring our clients a clearer medium to simply see how they are doing with their finances and how to get where they want to be.
We’re also planning on several new full-time hires in 2017. This newer office space seems to be filling up fast!
Be on the lookout for our announcement on our updated service offering in early 2017—we are so excited for what the future holds for us—and for our clients.
All the best,
Heather
