A Great Year For Advisors Assistant

Advisors Assistant was not a terribly communicative company this time last year, in part because the story we had to tell was all about the challenges we had yet to surmount.  The retirement of our founders was a major change to the company, and we had yet to guess the new traditions we would create and the new direction we would take.  This year we are a different organization.  We have a new way of managing our product development, improved processes for responding to client needs, and better systems for getting things done.  We have made huge strides toward a bigger, better product offering and have great plans for the coming year.   We have successfully risen to the challenge of continuing beyond our founders, as they wanted us to.

Perhaps the most telling sign of our success is that we are larger.  Not in every way, because that’s not always a good sign, but definitely in the ways that count.  We’ve grown the number of offices using Advisors Assistant by a few percent and, largely through the completion of enterprise projects, increased our total users by many times that.  In the last year we twice completed projects that became our new largest client relationship and, though we’re not solely focusing on the space, doubled our number of enterprise clients.  We increased the number of clients using our AAMobile web-app by nearly 1000%, many of those using a well integrated, white label version tied nicely into their firm’s overall technology package.

Not only have we grown, we did it amidst consolidation among major financial services firms, the entrance of new competitors into the industry CRM space, and conflicting reports about whether the total number of independent financial services professionals we cater to has begun to shrink.  We grew in a technology environment that seems to prize newness above all other features, even though we’re something of an old fashioned company doing our best to serve a clientele who’ve been at their professions for quite a few years

There will be a lot of exciting things coming to Advisors Assistant in the next year, from new integration with automated marketing tools to better ways to access your database on every web-enabled device you own.  The new Everywhere Update for AAMobile is just the beginning.  We’re going to make our product easier to understand and simpler to use.  Most of it will be a direct result of client requests, but we’re throwing some of our own ideas into the mix as well.

Thank you all for being a part of it!