Schwab IMPACT & Beacon Roundtable 2019 Recap
I’m excited to share a recap of a busy, but great few days spent at Schwab IMPACT 2019 and the 2019 Beacon Roundtable in November. It turns out that our time here was best summed up in tweets!
Bary and I began the week by attending Schwab IMPACT in the always sunny San Diego, California in conjunction with many of our industry partners. We’ve been working alongside individuals from these incredible organizations this year to finalize our Signature Wealth Partners tech stack, including Charles Schwab, Envestnet, Wealthbox, MoneyGuide, and more. IMPACT was a great opportunity to meet with our strategic partners in person.
Schwab really rolled out the red carpet to ensure that we were able to meet with their onboarding and transition teams, allowing us to more discuss in-depth with them their expertise in serving advisors that are breaking away.
It was incredible and very informative to hear directly from these teams just how much assistance and practice management Schwab will be providing our advisors. Our Business Development Officer, Bob Holz was kind enough to go the extra mile by saving tables for us at events and making sure we met up with all the right people.
We also took the opportunity to sit down with my former colleague Danny Hamer with Envestnet to touch up the aesthetics of our advisor website and do some live functionality testing. It’s great to be able to capitalize on gatherings like these to connect with your industry ‘people on the inside’!
Next, we had the opportunity to meet with Wealthbox, which is run by an awesome leadership team, including CEO John Rourke, CTO Dan Ferranti, and our Sales Rep, Jomin Panicker, who all took the time personally to connect. Their focus on making a personal connection with us at the event has only reinforced our trust in choosing them as our CRM platform.
I also had some time reconnected with my friend Ryan Marcus of MarketCounsel and was glad to let them know how much I’m looking forward to their 2019 MarketCounsel Summit in December in Miami Beach. Their summit always offers great networking opportunities, and being in December will allow the ability to wrap up 2019 in a big way while preparing to launch into 2020 with a strategic vision.
Additionally, meeting up with MoneyGuide allowed me to ask questions and learn more about their new myBlocks prospecting tool which is incredible and, in my opinion, a true game-changer. It brings modern gamification elements to the planning process in bite-sized blocks which helps to engage prospects and clients in a more reliable, structured, but still personal way.
Our time at the 2019 Schwab IMPACT conference was filled with awesome connections and networking opportunities and industry-leading educational content. It was great to see so many former colleagues, industry partners, and friends throughout the conference.
The following day, I rounded out the week by attending the 2019 Beacon Roundtable ‘Tech Western’ Retreat in Sonoma with about 40 other attendees. These attendees were a mix of sponsors and executive-level decision makers at IBDs.
It was an amazing experience to sit alongside Presidents, COOs and CTOs of some of the largest industry firms. It was rather humbling that Signature Wealth Partners was seen and treated as an equal to these firms and their accomplished leadership.
The event was a full day, 8-hour discussion of opportunities and challenges to our industry. A key theme for this event was how many of these firms were working on solutions to get investment advice to the masses. With the rise of firms such as Stash & Square offering free trading (without cumbersome paperwork), what solutions would be out there to assist these new entrants that have never been served to make better investment and credit decisions?
I was given the opportunity to present “How to Create a Defined Ecosystem of Solution Suppliers”. I spoke at length about the Signature Story, and how we went about the selection and RFI process for those firms that made up our current tech stack.
What became very clear as the conversation evolved is that Signature Wealth Partners is in a ‘sweet spot’, because we are nimble and have the ability to create and select our tech stack with intention, including ensuring to seek-out the most up-to-date, industry-leading offerings.
This event wrapped up at Deerfield Winery for networking and dinner, which was fantastic. The weekend was full of making new industry connections, sharing amongst peers in leadership and hearing true experts speak, both on where our industry stands now, and where it’s headed in the future. We can’t wait to attend again next year!
Sean S. Mullen
Executive Vice President
SignatureWealth Partners, LLC