By Anthony Schorling

Introduction

Many people choose to use the calendar flip to 2023 as a way to turn over a new leaf, make a positive change in their life, and generally motivate them to be more productive. While being more productive and efficient is always a top priority for us due to the nature of the industry, we have a couple great new offerings on the way for business owners to take advantage of: our "Automation Academy" beta, and a refined subscription-style ongoing maintenance package. We plan to have both of these out to the public before summer 2023 rolls around, if not much sooner.

Let's take a quick sneak peek at what each of these new offerings will include!

Automation Academy Beta

We've been fleshing out the idea for our Automation Academy beta for months now, with the idea of helping new business owners get off the ground more quickly and efficiently. This "academy" would be rolled out as a virtual, 12-week course with alternating live session weeks. So for instance, week 1 would be a live introductory session covering some of the basics of automation, identifying business goals, and the best tech to help you complete those goals. Then in week 2, students take time to work on the "homework" given at the end of the first session while also having access to office hours with Arielle before returning to a live session in week 3. We also plan to provide our students with various automation resources, including various form, zap, and email templates that they can utilize and modify however they choose.

The topics of conversation we'll cover throughout this entire 12-week course range from basics such as, "What is automation and why is it important?", preparation topics like setting up a scheduling system, all the way to building out your own complex projects, such as automated custodial paperwork packets and automated email reminder systems. Keep in mind, these are just a select few of the topics we'll be covering over the course of 3-4 months, so there is much more to come!

Subscription-Style Ongoing Maintenance

At the moment, this offering is a little less built out at the moment in comparison to our Automation Academy beta, but the idea behind the option is to ensure timely assistance for subscribers.

One of the biggest pieces of feedback that clients have shared with us was that sometimes they've been hesitant to engage in a project because either, A. - their idea was too minor to warrant a whole project, or B. - they feared that the project wouldn't be completed in timely enough of a fashion for their business. This unfortunately can lead to huge time-savers and efficiency-creators being pushed off, as well as having to either find workarounds or deal with minor issues that interrupt the natural flow of your workday.

With a monthly subscription-style ongoing maintenance package, we'll not only monitor subscribers' Zapier errors, but also block off time regularly to commit to subscriber projects and updates. With this time regularly factored into our schedule, we're confident that it will help those that rely on us feel more comfortable committing to new projects and new clients.

BONUS: Our Custodial Paperwork Packet

The beta for the packet was technically released in September of 2022, but we feel like we haven't done it justice in portraying the massive value it can add for financial advisors.

As you might already know, filling out custodial document after custodial document can be extremely time consuming, but it's something that needs to get done. Form fillers might dedicate hours to just entering information in these forms, not to mention a lot of which is repeated information. Our custodial paperwork packet can save a ton of time in filling out these forms, as well as automate the process of sending necessary documents to clients. And as an added bonus, the packet can also be set up in collaboration with Zapier to automatically send submitted data to the respective client's contact record in your CRM.

This packet is currently compatible with TD and Schwab forms, but others are on the way, such as Fidelity, SSG, and BNY. We plan to continue to add compatibility for other custodians as more of our clients request them. If our custodial packet interests you, be sure to check out this blog post for it that goes into more detail about what the packet entails and how the process of using it works.

Conclusion

To finish off our 2022, we'd like to thank you for not only taking the time to read this post, but for supporting our blog and company over the past year. Our main goal is to always make your workday easier and more efficient, and we're honored to have helped everyone that we did in 2022. Your support means the world to us, and we hope you stick with us for what we have in store for 2023! And yes - that includes many more blog posts!