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What is your practice's most valuable asset? Is it your team? Your book of business? Both are very valuable. But ultimately your most valuable asset is your Investment Gold database of information about your clients, prospects and business practices. If you were to sell your database to another financial advisor, they could utilize Investment Gold to service your clients just as capably as you do. Yes, their team would need a bit of training. But you would be equipping them with all of the details of every relationship you manage along with a service history and the means to continue that same level of service.
Still not convinced? Over the years, a number of our clients have sold their business and shared the details of the sale with us. On average their business sold for three times the typical going rate for a book of business in your profession! The reason for such a high valuation is simple. The purchaser recognizes the immense value of your database and your tool for utilizing that database (namely Investment Gold). Unlike buying a simple book of business, they are buying a detailed history of each relationship your have build with an investor. They know the level of service that you have been providing to each client. And they have the means to continue delivering exactly that same level of service. So from the investor's perspective the transition to the new team's care is seamless, their level of service continues unchanged.
You know how much a book of business sells for in your profession. So you also know that selling your business for three times the going rate is a huge win. But your Investment Gold data is equally valuable today in its role as the foundation of your day-to-day operations. And you know how much your practice earns every year. Think about that for a moment. Your database is incredibly valuable to you both today and in the future if you sell your business. And it deserves to be treated with the same care that you would apply to other valuable assets (your home, your cottage, your boat, your plane, your investments, ...).
You should be protecting your Investment Gold data in the following three ways:
- it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL that you back up your data frequently
- prevent high risk staff (new employees, infrequent users, ...) from deleting data by limiting their permissions
- identify who is making inappropriate changes to your data
Back Up Your Data
If your Investment Gold is being hosted in the cloud by one of GoldMine's certified cloud partners, they will be performing backups for you. For those of you hosting Investment Gold in your office, you have many options when it comes to backing up your data. You can use Management Studio, a free companion product to MS SQL Server. Or you can use one of a number of different third party backup solutions. And you can do the backups manually or everything can be automated. This newsletter won't deal with these issues, they differ from one backup product to the next. Instead, we will focus on those aspects of backups that are true regardless of your choice of backup solution, namely:
- what to include in your backups
- the frequency of your backups
- how long to retain your backups
- where your backups are stored
- confirming that your backups are working
What to Include: Your top priority is backing up your Investment Gold database. This is a MS SQL Server database and requires special backup software (you can't simply copy and paste the database as you would a word processing file or spreadsheet). But it is also important to backup the contents of your GoldMine folder. It contains a number of important files including your licenses, your staff usage preferences, etc.
How Often to Backup: Your frequency of backups boils down to how much information you can afford to lose. For most offices, losing more than one day of input would be catastrophic. So they should back up their database every business day. Very busy offices may back up twice a day. On the other hand, your GoldMine folder changes very little from one day to the next so a monthly backup of that folder is typically sufficient.
Retention Period: As a general rule of thumb, you can dispose of database backups that are more than a week old, with one exception. Retain one backup every month. This will be a life saver if one of your best clients is accidentally deleted from the database and the deletion isn't noticed for weeks or months. It's possible (although it takes a bit of work) to restore that client from a previous month's backup. As for your GoldMine folder, just keep the most recent backup.
Backup Location: If your backup is stored on the same drive as your database then both will be lost if the drive fails (and drives do fail occasionally). Likewise, if your backup is stored in the same office as your database server then both will be lost in the event of a fire or flood. So your backups need to be somewhere safe. You can store them in the cloud and some backup software does this automatically. Or you can store them off site. A simple solution would be to use a portable drive and carry the backup home in your briefcase every evening.
Confirming Success: When your backups are automated, it is essential that you regularly confirm their success. There are multiple reasons why a backup could fail (the drive is full, the drive is bad, ...). It is actually quite common for us to encounter a client whose backup hasn't worked for days (or months). They would typically say "I've been meaning to deal with those error messages I see every morning but I've been busy" or "we get so many error reports, I guess we missed that one". We once had a client whose backups had failed repeatedly for more than ten years. They lost their entire database to a simple drive failure.
Prevent High Risk Staff from Deleting Data
GoldMine can be configured to prevent specific users from deleting information. By default, you have two classes of users, each with their own suite of abilities. There are the users that have Master rights, they can access to all of GoldMine's functions. And there are those users that don't have Master rights, they are prevented from using some functions that are considered administrative in nature and should only be available to a small number of knowledgeable users.
You can turn off access to specified functions for any individual in your group of non-Master users. So for example, you can turn off Sally's ability to delete information until she has been using GoldMine for a few months. Or you can turn off Fred's ability to delete information simply because he is only trained to look at client records and his calendar. Turning off a user's access to certain functions can only be performed by someone with Master rights.
To prevent a user from deleting contact records, proceed as follows:
- from GoldMine's main menu, select Tools
- select Users' Settings...
- in the Users' Master File window, select the user whose permissions you want to adjust by single clicking on their name in the list of users and then click the Properties button in the upper right corner of the window
- in their Properties window, select the Access tab
- in the Access tab, in the Contact Record section near the top, unselect Delete
- select the Menu tab
- in the Menu tab, click the + next to Edit to expand the Edit section and click on the green push pin icon next to Delete Contact, it will turn red
- click the OK button to close the Properties window
- click the Close button to close the Users' Master File window and save the changes
You will now notice that (a) when that user logs into GoldMine, the red x at the top left of a contact record that is used to delete the current contact is now grey and disabled and (b) when they select Edit from the main menu, the Delete Contact option has disappeared.
Identify Who is Making Inappropriate Changes
Perhaps someone on your team has mistakenly changed the contents of a client's Contact Type field. Just that one simple change can have huge implications. The client may now be missed in your filters and overlooked by the Nurturing Engine. And the change isn't necessarily carelessness. It may simply be the result of a misunderstanding that can easily be corrected by a teaching moment. But first you must determine who made the change.
GoldMine actually gives you two different ways of determining who is making changes to information in your database.
Sync Spy: Sync Spy lists the history of who made changes to the current contact record and what field they changed (but not what they entered or the previous entry in the field). So that is handy when you see for example that client John Doe's contact record now says Prospect in the Contact Type field. To display this list from GoldMine's main menu select Tools | Synchronize | Sync Spy... and the list opens in a new tab.
History: If you have Master rights you can tell GoldMine to create a History record whenever someone changes the contents of a specific field in any contact record. So for example you could specify that a History record is to be created whenever the contents of the Contact Type field in any contact record is changed. The History record will indicate who made the change, when the change took place AND what the field contained both before and after the change! To tag a field in this way, right click on the desired field's label or contents and select Properties... | Security tab. In the Field Audit section at the bottom of the tab select Log changes in history and then click the OK button.
So in summary, use Sync Spy when you discover a problem after the fact. Or prepare in advance for possible mistakes by tagging various fields for ongoing logging of changes to History.
As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.