Onboarding Your Office

Tons of teams use Nitrogen to efficiently share tasks, distribute roles, and effectively manage the client process from beginning to end. To continue the theme of being the hero to your client, we've documented below how effective teams incorporate Nitrogen into their practice to prevent tasks from slipping through the cracks to ensure a great client experience.

In this article:

Share the Workload

With Data Sharing, your team can collaborate on clients and model portfolios. Whether you are a team of two, five, ten, or more you can efficiently distribute the load. One person might be responsible for client intake, another for monitoring risk, someone else for client reviews—and so on. The important part is ensuring this process increases your team's efficiency.

Thousands of advisors more than double their effectiveness by tag-teaming. Here are a few popular duties we've seen shared:

• Importing or creating portfolios
• Sending Risk Questionnaires and monitoring completion
• Sending and reviewing Check-ins
• Portfolio review and management
• Monitoring risk alignment of clients

For example, some firms will have one person in charge of monitoring the alignment of risk for all clients, other firms will leave it to each advisor. Some firms will have their client services manager handle setting up new clients, assessing their risk, and ensuring they are 100% set up. Nitrogen is flexible to fit your practice.

Common Workflows

Have an assistant or a small team? Many teams share the responsibilities for client intake and client review meetings similar to the following:

Assistant - pre-meeting:

1. Create client
2. Import current portfolio
3. Send Risk Questionnaire or fill out Risk Target
4. Optional: print reports for client meeting

Advisor - pre-meeting: 

1. Gain a deeper sense or review the client's Risk Number
2. Review portfolio for hidden risks, stress testing, and reviewing the Risk/Reward Heatmap
3. Review client's long term goals in Retirement Maps
4. Prep for and meet with client

Advisor and Assistant - post-meeting:

1. Discuss next steps
2. Log discussions, decisions, and action points in CRM

Have a more complex workflow? It can help to create a flowchart diagram to define your team's process of how the handoff of responsibilities should flow.

Portfolio Management

Similar to the division of duties shown above, teams use Nitrogen to streamline their portfolio management. Whether you have someone dedicated to portfolio construction and review, or it's up to each advisor, Data Sharing allows you to share model portfolios across the team so one person can update them and the changes are immediately reflected teamwide.

For instance, a simple process could look like:

1. Day 1: set up and configure models
2. Quarterly: review models for:
   1. Risk Number drift
   2. Asset allocation
   3. Sufficient Risk Number spacing and adequate coverage of the full range of clients

Advisors also use this methodology by reviewing each client's portfolio to ensure they're within the firm's standards and policies.

For a deeper dive into workflows and tools, see the Portfolio Management Playbook and Best Practices for Using Model Portfolios.