In 2021, pressure to innovate and catch up with expectations means none of us can afford a bad decision. Loss of time, credibility and money is no longer an acceptable cost of doing business. Knowing how to make better decisions, and avoiding bad ones, is a skill few wealth executives have mastered.
Before you waste money or end up with another technology platform that doesn’t deliver on its promises, the following is a run-down of attributes of bad decisions and how to avoid them.
Tech Spend Doesn’t Match the Overall Value Proposition
What is it about your firm that makes clients pick you? And...why do they stay? The answers are your value proposition and it’s the backbone of everything you do.
When the money you’re spending on a technology project doesn’t correlate clearly to the overall value proposition, you’re headed in the wrong direction. Everything you do should ensure that the investment amplifies the value proposition. Changing an advisor’s value proposition with technology is a bad decision.
No Decision
You’re not innovating. You don’t have a CRM. You don’t have an automated onboarding program. It all means you don’t have a plan. You might be worried about making a bad decision so it seems safer to make no decision, but in reality, it’s worse. When you don’t make any decisions, you make bad decisions by default. You’re not learning from any decisions—good or bad—and not advancing your business or amplifying your value proposition.
An “US” and “Them” Culture
If there are two sides to your business culture—the business side and technology side, you’ve got a breeding ground for bad decisions. It’s like two people speaking different languages. You have a gap in knowledge. Neither side really knows what the other needs and the technology team becomes order takers instead of innovators which stifles business growth in the long run.
Technology Decisions Made through a Soda Straw
If you just make technology decisions as they come along—point by point—you miss the opportunity to look at the big picture. When you don’t think of the holistic nature of technology and simply chase top brands for the next great solution, you build a system of tools that don’t talk to each other. The result of this bad decision? A clunky user experience and grumpy advisors. Who wants either?
Technology Decisions Made in a Box
Going it alone can lead to disaster. It’s not better or necessary to reinvent your own wheel. If you don’t talk to your peers in the industry or study what others have done, you’re not learning from the industry best practices. You’re doomed to make bad decisions you might otherwise not have made if you had used the experience of your peers.
The best way to combat bad decisions is with experience. And the good news is you don’t have to make every mistake yourself to build that experience. Through our years of supporting advisors through all types of technology decisions, we’ve seen how bad decisions have impacted firms and worked to correct them. Contact us to learn more about our OCTO service.
