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When you're driving, your vehicle's dashboard provides a snapshot of important information that can be understood at a glance. Did you know that Investment Gold includes Dashboards that serve much the same purpose for your business?
When you're dealing with a client, naturally you'll be looking at the client's contact record. When you're interested in your schedule, you'll look at your calendar. But what about when you're dealing with the bigger picture? Perhaps a group of clients? Or a month of activities? Or a year of sales? Or a pattern of growth? Dashboards are the best way to look at large quantities of information in Investment Gold.
Imagine a Dashboard that clearly indicates your most important sources of new business. Or a Dashboard that makes it easy to ensure compliance information is always up-to-date. Or a Dashboard that finds clients older or younger than a certain age or within a range of ages. Or a Dashboard that tracks your gift giving. Or a Dashboard that measures won and lost sales opportunities. Or a Dashboard that displays revenue trends. Or a Dashboard that helps you balance the workload across your team. Or a Dashboard that compares this year's workload to past years, helping you decide if it's time to grow the team. Or a Dashboard that finds clients whose contact information isn't complete!
Dashboards can answer any questions you can think of that are related to the wide range of information in your Investment Gold database. If you capture a particular nugget of information for each of your clients, a Dashboard can organize, summarize and present that information using meaningful graphs and charts. Questions that would take hours or days to answer using other methods can be answered by a Dashboard in mere moments. And you can adjust and fine-tune Dashboards without the need for any technical support. So a single Dashboard can replace hundreds of filters and reports.
Prior to 2021, our firm preached the value of Dashboards to our clients for many years with little success. That's because most people are very visual and Dashboards are a bit abstract and difficult to visualize. So in 2021 we decided to become more proactive with Dashboards. We released a very unusual (for us) mid-year update to Investment Gold. That update was optional and the vast majority of you have already allowed us to install it for you. It consisted of close to 200 examples of Dashboards. These are all working, sensible Dashboards that you can examine at your leisure. Each provides a different snapshot of your Investment Gold data and thus your front-office operation in the form of a graph and chart. No two of you run your operations exactly the same and so not every Dashboard will be of interest to you. But there should be at least a dozen that your team will immediately find very useful. And perhaps more importantly, these examples finally help you visualize Dashboards and understand their value. Your Investment Gold records are quite literally a goldmine of extremely valuable information. Now you will be better able to envision other Dashboards that can help you be more successful. And if you can envision them, we can build them!
In your role as a financial advisor, your focus is on a client's needs as clearly documented in their contact record. But when you're focusing on managing your business, Dashboards are your best friend. A glance at a Dashboard can clearly answer important questions that would otherwise take hours (or days or weeks) to investigate. Would you like to know how your business did last month? Or last quarter? Or year-to-date? Would you like to know if next month looks as promising as the same month last year? Or next quarter? Or the remainder of the year? You could ask your staff those questions every morning. And they would tell you that they don't have time to answer them. Or you could glance at a few Dashboards while enjoying your morning coffee and begin your work day already knowing the answers to all of these questions. So as Michael Gerber asks in his famous book "The E-Myth", do you run your business? Or does your business run you?
A Closer Look
To watch a video that will help you navigate the long list of Dashboards, please click here (10 minutes).
To watch a video focusing on the look and feel of a typical Dashboard, please click here (9 minutes).
To watch a video demonstrating Compliance Dashboards, please click here (5 minutes).
To watch a video demonstrating Being Proactive Dashboards, please click here (4 minutes).
To watch a video demonstrating Sales and Marketing Dashboards, please click here (8 minutes).
To watch a video demonstrating a Minding Your Data Dashboard, please click here (6 minutes).
To watch a video discussing Dashboards custom built for your practice, please click here (3 minutes).
And as always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.