How can financial advisory firms streamline their day-to-day operations and scale their business through strategic technology, workflow documentation and artificial intelligence?
In this episode of Action!, host Suleman Din (Advisor Intelligence Lead at AdvisorEngine and Editor-in-Chief of Action! magazine) sits down with 30-year industry veteran John O'Connell (CEO & Founder of The Oasis Group) to discuss practical operational strategies, smart AI integration and avoiding common tech pitfalls in modern wealth management firms.
Suleman Din: Hello again. My name is Suleman Din. I am the editor-in-chief of Action! magazine, and I'm Advisor Intelligence lead here at AdvisorEngine. Welcome back to Action!. We've been doing a number of conversations with seasoned industry executives on the operations side to kind of get their insights into some of these practical points that we're trying to share with everybody – these helpful tips and tricks to help you hopefully make your job a little easier. And so I'm so pleased to welcome onto Action! today, a good friend and an operations expert, John O'Connell, who is the CEO and founder of The Oasis Group, which helps a number of RAs optimize their technology and business. Of course, he's a 30-year veteran, and I love to say this about him: he was a one-time roadie for some really important rock bands, including Guns N' Roses. John, welcome to the show.
John O'Connell: Thank you very much for having me, Suleman. It's always great to chat with you, my friend.
Din: Yeah, likewise. And I got a couple of questions for you, so let's have some fun here, man. So, we've been talking a lot about productivity, and I wanted to hear from you. When you think about kicking off the week, there's a ton of things that come at you, of course. Do you have a productivity hack you can share with the audience for dealing with a crazy Monday morning?
O'Connell: Yeah, absolutely. So, you do know that I do a lot of stuff with technology and artificial intelligence. So I actually have a productivity hack that every week when we start the week, I have an agent that literally runs through all my email and all of my calendar. It takes a look at my calendar and my email, and it basically says, "Hey, here are the things you didn't get to last week that are either due this week or maybe I missed the deadline last week." And it says, "Hey, here's all the stuff you've got to respond to." So it prioritizes my email for me right away. And then the second thing it does is any meetings that I have coming up that week, it actually goes out to the person's website and their LinkedIn, and it pulls some details about them. So this way I can read up on them and be educated before I jump in a meeting with somebody that I haven't met yet. So I like to know a little bit about the folks I'm meeting just to have a connection with them. So it's pretty neat. It tells me about their firm. It tells me about them. If there's a bio on their website, it kind of pulls that and brings it together. So it is literally what I used to have a person doing each week for us, a virtual assistant, but now it's just done with the artificial intelligence for me. So, by the way, if you didn't have an AI agent, I still had a person that did that for me each week. So this way I knew, here's all the people I'm meeting, here's what the meeting's about, here's kind of a little bit about that person and about their company. So when I went into the meetings, I was a bit more prepared.
Din: Yeah. And basically you're prepared to just kind of hit the ground running. No need to ice break.
O'Connell: Yeah. I can hit the ground running with it.
Din: Yeah. Nice. So, you do a lot of work with a number of firms. You do white papers, you've got your own newsletter. You're on different shows. I've seen you talk at different trade conferences. You're doing a lot. So you get a lot of exposure out there, but when you think about the work that you do, what's one thing that you wish people understood better about what it is you do and the responsibilities and the tasks that you take on?
O'Connell: Yeah. I think a lot of people look at management consulting firms as if they give you a plan and then say, "Good luck," and you've got to implement that yourself. One of the key things that we do with the Oasis Group is we actually roll up our sleeves and implement those plans with people. So when people do a technology assessment with us or an AI roadmap or a cybersecurity assessment, you do get a set of recommendations, but then you have the option, right? The way I like to explain it to people is that's a level of work that needs to get done. You could do it. You could have us help you do it, or you could go to a third party to do it. But to make your firm better, this is what we recommend you do. So there's a lot of people that don't know that about the Oasis Group, and think that we're just going to give them a plan and then kind of walk away. We're never walking away. We're giving you a plan, and then we're going to help you to implement it. And in a lot of cases, we may introduce you to some other people who can implement things. I'll give you a really concrete example. We have a firm that we work with that they want to do some development on artificial intelligence. It goes a little bit beyond what we're going to be able to help them with. They have to develop a bunch of Python to do some work for them. We're introducing them to a development studio that can help them with that work. So even though it's not something we do, we're still turning to them and saying, "Look, that's not something that we're going to be able to do, but definitely work with these folks. They're great. We've worked with them before. We've introduced some other clients. They're going to do a great job for you." So it does help them to move the ball forward in every case, basically.
Din: Nice. Now, you talk about working with folks. You see a lot of different case studies that come across your desk, both in your working profession when you weren't in consulting and now. So let me ask you a question, without obviously naming names here. What's the most expensive mistake that you've seen a practice make?
O'Connell: Oh, over-customizing software is always the gift that keeps on giving. There's firms that we've worked with that have bought an off-the-shelf product and customized it to a point where it's no longer an off-the-shelf product. It's like you're running a custom development shop, but you don't have really the development team to do it. We see that a lot with really large enterprise software that's highly configurable. Not surprising, right? Take off like a Salesforce. You can customize that to a point where it's no longer viable, right? And it's not something that you can even use moving forward. You become what's called rev-locked. You're release locked on that. That's why we tell a lot of firms to look at software, not that I'm plugging Advisor Engine, but like Advisor Engine, right? Where a lot of those workflows come out of the box. You're not building all that stuff. Because you wake up one day and you say, "I've built so much around this, but I don't have the staff to support it that well." And then, when things start to break, you start building manual workarounds. And you're adding cost to your practice now twice. You've added cost developing it, you've got a cost that you had maintaining it, and now you're adding cost to do the workarounds because you can't afford to maintain it anymore. So I would say the most expensive mistakes we see firms make is over-customizing solutions. You bought the software for a reason. Trust the vendor. Have a good conversation with them about their product roadmap and about how you could be successful with their product as opposed to trying to build it yourself. It could become very expensive very quickly.
Din: Yeah, I can see the dollars just burning up in evaporation as firms stress out about how to try and use the software that they first of all bought out of the box or thinking that it was going to solve their problem, and then it flips around. By the way, I want to say this on the record. I did not twist your arm to mention Advisor Engine, but I'm sure everybody's very, very happy about that note. But you're talking about automation, you're talking about cost. These are things that obviously people are trying to achieve. So in your own practice, do you have an example of a single workflow automation that saved your team hours, or what saved your team the most time this year?
O'Connell: Yeah, actually, I'll give you two. So we used to have where our managing directors would-- We generate a lot of documents with The Oasis Group. Our observations and recommendation documents tend to be pretty long. We used to have where the managing director would write the entire observations and recommendations document, including the formatting and everything else. That became very tedious. We were adding hours to the production time to put together observations and recommendations at a pretty expensive resource for me. My managing directors are the most experienced people I have on my team. They've got 30 years of experience in the industry. For them to worry about formatting documents really became very tedious. So we began to work with a lot of college interns. We actually started with college interns, and we would say, "Look, the MD's going to create the document." The first college intern we had actually created Microsoft Word templates for us. So we said, "The MD's going to create the document, and then you're going to help to put that into the Microsoft Word templates and format it, and then get it back to the MD, let them review it, give you some feedback, and then boom, off it can go to a client." That saved my MDs hours and hours of formatting time, just aligning things and making sure it was indented properly, fixing table of contents, putting together the header and the footer on the document; it saved them hours and hours of doing it. It was an investment up front. We had to pay someone to put together the template. Then we had to test the template with a bunch of documents, right? So I don't want to say that it was – we probably spent about two weeks getting the template together, right? So that was money we had to spend where you're like, "I'm not generating any immediate value of this because we're just doing a template." But then when you start adding it up over the documents you create in a year, you're like, "Okay, I saved three weeks of time by investing two weeks in this template." Right? So I'm already three weeks ahead because it was five weeks of time we spent minus the two weeks for the template. I'm like, "We're already five weeks ahead, and I'm five weeks ahead on my MD billing rate versus my intern billing rate." Right? So I'm actually much better off. So this past year, we actually took those templates; now we've automated that with artificial intelligence. So now, instead of interns or some of my junior consultants formatting the document, we made another investment in an artificial intelligence agent. So now we just feed a Word document to it. It automatically formats that with our logo and a beautiful header and footer, and then brings the document back. That drove a second level of efficiency. But what I want people to take away from it is we didn't just turn on AI and make this happen, right? We had an entire workflow that we had. We documented that workflow. We figured out that we were spending a lot of time, effort, and money on the formatting. And then we said, "Okay, let's fix that problem first." And it was a low-tech fix, right? Let's create a Microsoft Word template first. Right. Then it was, okay, now let me move this from the advisor, my managing director equivalent, down to a junior analyst that can now do the formatting. And then we automated that with AI. Had we gone straight to AI, I'm not sure I would've had the best results. Do you know what I mean? We didn't have a lot of that stuff documented. We had to go through that process first.
Din: Yeah. So you blended a little bit of know-how and sort of a little bit of work to prep the automation to just work better.
O'Connell: Every time you do it, if you don't have your workflows documented, you've got to take that first step of, I'm going to spend some money to get this documented. Which, by the way, if you spend the money, now you can roll on junior people and teach them the process because it's written down. So every time you go through this, what I like to do is when we talk with firms, I like to say you've got two different worlds. You've got the change the business world, and you've got the run the business world. Anytime you want to reduce run the business, you're going to have to spend money on change the business to reduce that, right? It's not like you're all of a sudden going to wake up one day and go, "I'm going to reduce my run the business cost." It's there because you're running the business. So you've got to make an investment on the change the business side to reduce the run the business spend. Do you see what I mean? Which, if you're running a company, you want to reduce the RTB as much as possible so you can keep investing in CTB, right? New products, new capabilities, new people. So at some point you've got to bite the bullet and say, as a business owner, you've got to go, "I'm going to take home less money right now because we're going to invest on fixing this." And that's the biggest challenge as a business owner is the money's got to come from someplace. It's probably coming from your personal compensation, but it's got to come from someplace.
Din: That is some tough medicine and some tough love to give, and so I can only imagine, maybe to make it easier, you have Change and what was the other one? Change on here...Run the Business...Run the Business. Make them sock puppets, like, "Okay, which one is it going to..." No, but sometimes, what's the old saying? You got to spend money to make money, right?
O'Connell: Yep. You do. That hasn't changed.
Din: Yeah. So, with that in mind, let's go to that final question. And so, okay, so you got to spend a little money, maybe. Okay, you've made that argument. What's one operational task that you think that every advisory should outsource immediately? So spending a little bit of that money to just knock out something and free up some time.
O'Connell: I think you have to look at what brings you – there are two questions I would ask yourself first. What brings you joy? And then, what are you really good at? Right? And those are maybe two different answers. So a lot of advisors get into business because they really want to help people. So what brings them the most joy with a lot of people we talk to is the client meetings. They're like, "I want to do more time with my clients. I want to spend more time with them. I want to talk to them more about their lives and where they're going and their kids." So if that's what brings you joy, then what you need to do is you need to measure, how much am I really doing that, and how much am I doing the other stuff? And then you've got to take a look at, what am I really good at, right? So you may be really good at financial planning. That's probably something you want to keep then. You may not be really good at investment management; then that's probably something you want to outsource. Or vice versa, right? You may be really good at investment management, and you may not be very good at financial planning. Well, then think about: how do I outsource financial planning? How do I find a company that can do that for me? So when you look at your workflow, most wealth management firms have a very similar workflow from lead to annual meeting. There are these steps that we take. You make a financial plan with someone, you talk about what their investment strategy, you roll them into investments, you trade, you rebalance, you do all those steps. There are industries that have grown out of this, right? The temp industry grew out of the fact that a lot of people wanted to outsource that capability. So for your business, what you want to do is start with that list. And you can do that on a whiteboard, very low tech. What brings me joy? These things. What am I really good at? These things. What am I not really good at? These things. Whatever you're not really good at, and it doesn't bring you joy, that's what you want to target for outsourcing.
Din: It seems like such a simple exercise, and yet there's so much momentum behind getting to that frame of mind. But as I think, as we've expounded upon in this conversation, sometimes it's checking the oil, making sure you got the mileage in. Where you got to spend gas, you got to spend gas.
O'Connell: Here's the biggest trap. When people start a business, they start it, and they think they need to be great at everything. You're not going to be great at everything. Newsflash. You're not going to be great at everything. I'm not great at everything. Right? We outsource things at the Oasis Group. Like our SharePoint is a great example. I outsource that. Could we do it? Sure. Does it bring me joy? Absolutely not. Do I want to spend all the time staying up to speed on everything Microsoft does? No, I don't. Right? So I outsource that. Does it cost me money? Absolutely. But it's not something that brings me joy; it's not something we're probably great at, and it's not something that I want to spend the time investment in being great at. So we outsource that. Every business owner starts with this fallacy: you have to be good at everything. You don't have to be good at everything. You have to love going to work because guess what? You own the business, so you better love going to work there. So find out what brings you joy, find out what you're really good at, and everything else, you should really start thinking about: how do I outsource that? You're going to be happier going to work because you're going to spend more time on what brings you joy. You're going to be faster at doing it because you're already good at it. For everything else, outsource it.
Din: Yeah. I think you and I can come to an agreement right now since you mentioned Microsoft. If you want to be happy at your job and not have to do something, don't use Microsoft Teams. I think that's just a universally understood thing.
O'Connell: Microsoft makes so many changes to their software, and they're such a large firm that sometimes you get features in one piece of software that may not act the same as features in another piece of software. Find the person who loves being in the Microsoft world. That's the person you want to outsource to and want to work with because they love it. They're going to do a really good job at it for you.
Din: Yeah. Of course. All right. Well, we are at the end of this conversation, so I wanted to first of all thank you again, John, for, as always, an entertaining conversation. And a lot of great tips for financial professionals, especially those on the ops side. If you haven't, do take a moment to check out the Oasis Group and see all the things that John's team is offering. And as always, make sure you can subscribe to "Action!" magazine. It's entirely free and available. We do put out a newsletter. We've got issues online. So again, many thanks, John, for coming on today. Looking forward to our next chat.
O'Connell: Thank you very much, Suleman. It's great seeing you, buddy.
Din: Thank you. Bye-bye.