AJ Financial Planning

The weight of your business on your shoulders

Priding themselves on cultivating one-on-one relationships and providing a personalized approach to their clients, AJFP (AJ Financial Planning) has many different processes in place to help them do just this.

But with many processes and a growing business, comes increased pressure to maintain every piece of the puzzle, while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
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Compliance is critical

More than just good customer service, the financial services industry is full of processes that need to be followed in order to meet regulatory compliance. In this industry, getting it wrong is not an option. An audit can take place at any time, making it critical to be diligent, and well organized.
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Team seeking operational efficiencies through technology

Tasks such as monthly client reviews, sending market updates, and scheduling strategy calls (for new and existing clients) was the key focus of areas of improvement for the team. Could the team focus more on 1:1 strategy work instead of manual admin tasks?

Enter Efficient App

In our first meeting, we asked their team to send us their current business processes. We reviewed the processes in detail and came up with a plan to overhaul what they were doing manually, by better leveraging software, integration, and automation.

In our second meeting, we shared our ideas with Alex (Founder of AJ Financial Planning), for what software could be used to help cut-out some of the manual work that they were currently doing.

"For the first time, I could see how much time in human capital this would save our staff by automating some of our systems. I could see that it would also remove tremendous stress from trying to manage the whole process and also the possibility of reducing the human error aspect as well. In our line of work getting it wrong, there is a massive amount at stake, and the thought that some of this could be eliminated with technology was a massive reality shift."

- Alex Jamieson, Founder at AJ Financial Service

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1. Automated Appointment Scheduling 🤖

AJFP's team was spending large amounts of time calling new and existing clients to schedule annual review and strategy sessions.

When coordinating a time, their team had to manually create each calendar invite, create video conferencing links, and if necessary, manually add new contacts to their CRM.
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To reduce time spent on scheduling, we implemented Motion

First, we embedded an easy-to-use scheduling form on their website for initial clients, and used Motion's message generator feature to suggest meeting times for existing clients each month. This allowed their clients to book online with no manual back-and-forth involved.

Custom team scheduling links were created for each Head Financial Planner and Support Start Team member, so that their clients' could easily select a time for their annual review meeting.

With automated scheduling, came automatic client calendar invites, Google Meet video-conferencing links, scheduling confirmation, and 24-hour reminder emails.

Finally, an integration was built so that when a new person scheduled a meeting, they were automatically added to the CRM. Further, existing clients have an activity logged in the CRM when a meeting is scheduled, along with any details the client includes in preparation for the meeting.

All of this resulted in less manual scheduling work for the AJFP team.
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2. Automated Email Communication 🤖

Initial forms sent to clients needed to be emailed manually, and this was costing time. When a new client booked a call, the team would have to manually send an email that consisted of PDFs that were required to be filled out and returned prior to the initial call.

We implemented Outfunnel so that when an initial client books a call, an email automatically sends out along with the forms that need to be filled out.

This ensures that every person who schedules a meeting gets the forms that they need to fill out immediately, right upon booking a time in the calendar. This not only saves the team time, but also makes for a better and more consistent customer experience.
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3. Automated Folder Creation 🤖

The team was using Box as their folder storage solution, and because they already had tight processes around this software, we agreed to keep it in place and build an integration with Copper (versus switching to Google Drive).

The integration allowed for automatic folder creation for new clients upon scheduling their first call, building out the entire folder structure, and then linking the unique Box link back to the client's individual Copper record.
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4. More Convenient Workflows 💃

In order to access client accounts within other software (e.g. Box and Sharesight: Stock Portfolio Tracker), the team would need to log into separate tabs with each software, and search for the specific client page/folder each time. Something that became quite time consuming as it would happen dozens of times per day, for each team member.

We recommended putting each client's profile/folder URLs from the other frequently accessed software into their respective Copper record.

This made Copper the sole place that each team member needed to login to, giving them direct bookmarked access to all of the important accounts for each client, all in one place. No more searching required.
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5. Bulk Email Stats Straight In Copper 📍

Previously, bulk market update emails were not being tracked in their CRM. The team at AJFP would use Mailchimp to send out bulk emails to their client base. This resulted in data fragmentation:

• New customers needed to be manually added to Mailchimp to ensure they were on the correct mailing list
• All of the data available was siloed inside of Mailchimp, and therefore not useful for the team to see which customers were opening, clicking, and engaging with their newsletters/market updates

Sending emails straight from Outfunnel allowed bulk email insights to be tracked right within their CRM.

Now their entire team can see which clients open, click, and view market updates, all straight from within Copper. This allows them to see which clients are most engaged, along with those who may require communication via other means (e.g. those not opening their emails).
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6. Precise Pipeline Management Improved Visibility 📈

We created 3 pipelines, each for a specific core process within their business, all to help them track the service offering status of each client.

The beauty of a well-oiled pipeline is that it allows anyone on the team to view the progress of each client. A new client pipeline is also helpful to better forecast and see business growth metrics throughout the year.

More than that, having a clearly laid out business process can be crucial for helping to make top-level decisions on how the business is operating:

"I think the realization from our conversation was that we were probably not pricing this service correctly with the amount of time spent on the work."

- Alex Jamieson (after realizing all of the micro-steps involved with taking on a new client).

As a result, AJFP decided to review their pricing to closer reflect the work being undertaken by the team.
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7. Reporting Dashboard 📊

What is good data in the CRM if you're not able to report on it? Prior to Efficient App, AJFP wasn't using Copper's new reporting features. After cleaning up some data points that were integral to their business, we built some custom reports to help in giving a birds-eye view of things like: how many clients required a review each month and how many customers fell in different category buckets (e.g. Pre-retirees/Retirees/Wealth Builders).

"For the first time in my life, I can see all this information in a single view, this is crazy stupid amazing!! Who would have thought all this information was there? I can't believe it!"

- Alex Jamieson (when we showed him his new dashboard)

He was now able to get insights into why certain periods of the year were busier than others, but more importantly, take actions to spread out the team's workload throughout the year to have a more consistent flow of work.