The Financial Advisor's Survival Guide To Working From Home

The one blessing of the COVID-19 outbreak is that it didn’t happen 25 years ago. Back in the pre-internet days, working from home would have been a non-starter for most advisors. Vital systems were typically only available at the office and literally everything was on paper.

Fast forward to today, and countless financial advisors are finding themselves in a work-from-home/self-quarantine situation with varying degrees of readiness.

By: Jason Periera Editor & Contributor: Alexandra Macqueen

The Cloud is no longer an option

Key Insights

• Just about everything an advisor does can be moved to the cloud.
  

• Working from anywhere has gone from being a nice to have to being a necessity in a crisis.
  

• Cloud bases solutions won’t break the bank and there are a variety of solutions to choose from at price points that often start at free.

Given my reputation as a technophile within the industry, I have had several advisors reach out to me asking how I am coping, and how they can better enable remote work for themselves and their co-workers. While my firm basically made the switch with no effort, many of the people I’ve been speaking with find themselves with no choice but to go into the office if they wish to keep servicing their clients. Unfortunately, there are limits to what can be done quickly, now that we find ourselves in this situation – but this guide will review what’s possible now, and how to enable remote work for the future.

Plan for the worst

Whenever my firm goes through a routine compliance audit I smirk when I get the question,  “what’s your disaster recovery plan in case this place catches fire?” 

The response: Go to the Apple store, buy laptops, hand them out, send the bill to insurance.

Yes, I use Macs for everything. Trust me, they may cost more, but they last longer and my IT costs have dropped like a rock since I made the switch. In case you don’t believe me, take it from the inventors of the PC itself, IBM, who has professed that Macs are the better option.

Frankly, your disaster recovery plan really should be that easy. Given the proliferation of cloud technologies, there is basically nothing you need to be on-premises for these days, making your location irrelevant. 

While most dealer-related software tends to be cloud-based, there is still a fair amount of technology that is left to the advisor to either figure out for themselves or discover how it could make their lives easier.

The following is my survival guide for how to make your office little more than a place where people meet.

But what do you use?

I get this question all the time when asked about what x type of software I use. I will, of course, tell the person asking, but I also tell them, “my solution is irrelevant.” Whatever you are looking for, you need to figure out exactly what functionality you need and test several players in the market to determine what is the best fit for how you operate your business. To that end, I will try to provide you with several options for each need, but just as in the Mac vs PC debate, sometimes my bias is too strong to not share.

Security: Locking it all down

The elephant in the room with all of this is security, and it’s often people's biggest objection to moving forward with making an “online office.” 

However, this objection is actually backwards thinking: the weakest link in your business when it comes to security is not your technology, it’s the people. Just consider the following questions. Do you or any of your co-workers:

• Require a password to log into your computer?

• Ensure your passwords are at least eight characters and include random sequences (like 3xe#WwI)?

• Use different passwords on every site?

• Change all passwords at least annually?

• Maintain a clean desk with no passwords written down anywhere near your desk?

• Avoid downloading random attachments?

If you answered no to even one of these questions, guess what, your security concerns don’t live in your tech; they live in you and your peers. 

So how do you up your security practices? A combination of two solutions.

• The first is a password manager. This is a program, installed on all your devices and browsers, that generates and stores random passwords, synchronizes them across devices, and lets you share them with your co-workers when needed. 

If you have a password manager, instead of remembering many passwords, you only need to remember one (difficult) password, which gets you into the overall system. Lastpass, 1Password, and Dashlane all offer solutions starting as low as $50 per user per year.

• The second is two-factor authentication. Most sites support some sort of two-factor authentication – requiring not just your password to log in, but also a second code, most commonly sent via text message. 

If you’ve opted for the text message option, however, I highly recommend finding an alternate solution, as sim cards (used to identify and authenticate your mobile number) can be spoofed to intercept this code – even if you're the CEO of Twitter! 

Instead, you should either use a random code generator like Google Authenticator, a free app that will generate a random code every 30 seconds, or you can use the most secure option: A hardware key. This is a physical USB key that needs to be plugged into your device in order for you to log in. A Yubikey is the best option, and costs as little as $27.

One last security consideration has to do with how you are getting on the internet. If you’re on the road and using public wifi, you can be easily hacked by anyone else on that network – but there’s a simple way to keep yourself secure: a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. This is a system that encrypts your traffic and sends it to a secure server. You can set up a custom VPN, or there are also some great, easy-to-use general services on the market such as Tunnell Bear, Express VPN, and Nord VPN starting for as low as $4/month.

It’s All About Contact

Your firm's contact relationship management (CRM) software should be the backbone of your business. From note-taking to tracking and assigning tasks, it should be more than just a digital Rolodex. In fact, many modern solutions are customizable and integrate with countless other programs, to enable you to store every form of client data in one place – what had better be in the cloud. 

The gold standard in the CRM space is Salesforce: highly customizable and integrates with everything, but can get a little pricey to develop. Alternatively, there are several modern financial-advisor-specific CRMs. The big US players are Redtail, Wealthbox, and Junxure. Meanwhile, Canada has its own homegrown solution, Equisoft. The best option for you will depend on your business and what you want to accomplish with your CRM. 

Productivity Boost

Be honest: are you still using the desktop version of Outlook and Microsoft Office? If so, stop. Just please stop. Office 365 has been enabling users to manage most, if not all, functions of the office in the cloud for over eight years and starts at $11/month/user. That includes storing all of your files in shared folders online, allowing you to access them anywhere in the world.

Alternatively, consider my preferred solution, G-Suite which starts at $8/month/user. My office has been on G-Suite for over a decade and today, no one at my firm could imagine a reality where we didn’t have access to everything, from anywhere, at any time.   

Both systems handle all our essentials – email, calendar, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, document storage, internal website, and several other functions – and allow us to collaborate on the same files in real-time without worrying about who has the latest version of the file.

Speaking of calendars, you can save hours of time going back and forth with clients trying to find a meeting time that works, by instead letting them book a time directly, using a client booking page. Don’t have a booking page? Schedule Once, Calendly, Acuity, Meeting Bird, and Microsoft all offer solutions that, in some cases, have a free tier. 

One additional “must,” depending on if your compliance permits it or not, is Docusign which enables secure and tracked digital client signatures starting at just $13/month.  

Communication

By now, odds are you have used at least some form of videoconferencing solution. From Skype to Facetime, videoconferencing has gone mainstream. Both G-Suite and Office 365 come with their own solutions – in the form of Google Meet and Skype for Business – but frankly both leave a lot to be desired. The current top player in this space is Zoom and it’s worth paying for even if you get the others for free (Zoom has a free tier, too). 

If you really want to liberate yourself from the office, consider moving your office phone system to the cloud as well. The right provider will give you the option to use either office phones, your cell, or your computer to answer calls, and will integrate with your CRM. Zoom recently launched a simple cloud-based phone system starting at $10/user/month, while Dialpad and RingCentral offer more robust solutions that can incorporate fax lines and the ability to text from your business line, keeping your cell number confidential.   

As for running your team remotely, collaboration platforms are the new “killer app.” These let you chat with your team, share and edit files, and integrate with other programs. Microsoft bundles Teams with 365, and Salesforce has a solid offering with Quip (free), but the company that invented this space, still remains the best: Slack (free). Again, don’t take my word for it, IBM thinks so too.

Yes There is More

Now I could go on and discuss vendors for everything from financial planning software to securities quotation, marketing, and countless other areas. But honestly, some of these warrant an article all their own, and several articles may be coming in the future. For now, if you want more ideas, feel free to check out my podcast episode entitled “Tools for an Efficient Advisor Office.”

For now, these solutions are enough to get any advisor looking to make the shift started. And if it’s too late to get started for this crisis, start planning for the next one.

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