We Started a New Company

Here’s how the story began.

Accepted: Chart kid in office @ Tue Mar 5, 2024 12pm - 1pm (EST) (Michael Batnick)

He was “Chart Kid” from the jump. I’ll circle back to him in a minute.

There aren’t a lot of gaps in an advisor’s tech stack. One could argue that the industry has the opposite problem. There are too many choices.

Last summer, we took a look at the evolution of Michael Kitces’s famous FinTech Solutions Map. From 2018 to today, we have seven new categories and 352 new companies. 352!!

Look at this monster!

I have opinions on how we got an overabundance of wealth tech companies, but I’ll save that for another time.

Today, I want to discuss why we threw our hats into the ring and started the 353rd new wealth tech company. 🤣 

Exhibit A will exist in the top right quadrant of this chart in either the client engagement/business development universe.

I built our first prospective client communication deck in 2013. Over the years, it snowballed into a bit of a Frankenstein project. Sure, we had our logo on every chart, but each slide was different. A chart from Dimensional, another one from JPM, and others copied and pasted from our blogs. It was a mess.

Every year, updating and maintaining the 100+ slides was a big project. Sometimes, our favorite visuals from other companies get orphaned. You can’t show a client a chart that hasn’t been updated in four years.

The deck that you walk a prospect through is critical to the sales process. What you show them is arguably more important than what you tell them. When somebody walks you through a presentation, looking and listening simultaneously is impossible. In that scenario, our eyes dominate our ears. Your words might be on the level of Charles Dickens, but if the visuals look like Jackson Pollock, your message will fall on deaf ears.

Last year, we went through a routine audit with our regulator. When the marketing deck was approved and came back to me, I scrolled through it and said, “Okay. It’s time to up our game.” What I saw was not reflective of a serious organization. It was time to roll up our sleeves and build something that looked more professional.

That same week, I kid you not, I got this email.

Wow, cool email, I thought. And then I opened the PDF. It was 13 slides. Each one is formatted like the two below.

We brought Matt in immediately to build our new marketing deck—all 100+ slides of it. And then an idea was born. If we couldn’t make a world-class marketing deck, how would the average RIA do it? You have to understand that most advisors aren’t necessarily markets people. And they’re definitely not Excel and PowerPoint people.

Matt spoke with dozens of potential founding CTOs, and were lucky enough to meet Eric Diviney. Then we needed to find a product designer. Matt happened to go to college with Aram Festekjian. And a dream team was born. They spent the last six months, mornings, nights, and weekends, building Exhibit A.

The platform is super simple. We built over 100 charts that are updated every single day. You upload your headshot. Drag your logo and then have the charts formatted to your particular hex codes. Finally, add whatever compliance language your firm requires. It’s that simple.

Here is Matt and I unveiling Exhibit A to the world. The whole team crushed the assignment.

If you’d like to learn more, hit the link. We’re standing by to answer any questions you might have.