Hello and welcome to Insight Orion Onboarding. What prospects need to know? My name is Renee Fast. I'm vice president of Onboarding and Professional Services at Orion, and I'm joined today by Jordan Dodge, who is content and solutions Architect with my onboarding teams, and also Scott Mackenzie of PFW Advisors. Scott, want to welcome you to this conversation. You're here to tell us a little bit about everything that you've done up to this point to get to Orion and use us. So first of all, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your firm? Yeah, wonderful. So I have been in the industry for about 30 years. I was with a regional bank for a long period of time and then an independent broker dealer until this spring when I set up the RIA and moved on to Orion and the other tech stack that I'm using. So that's kind of a quick rundown of my business. I'm based in Atlanta. A wife and three kids. Yeah. Yeah. What was the most difficult part about breaking away and what kind of planning steps did you do leading into that, going out on your own? That's a great question. So I think the hardest. Part of it is really before making the final decision, you know, is really kind of doing the homework and understanding the kind of subtle differences between, you know, tech providers and, you know, compliance and the differences between a broker dealer and an RIA. That that was the hardest part of it for me is before I actually pulled the trigger. Yeah, understandable. Did you have anybody in the industry helping guide you through those decisions, or were you did you feel like you're kind of on your own? Well, I'm very slow at moving, making these types of decisions. So what I did is I kind of went out to a number of different RIAS and and different individuals that I knew in the space to get a better understanding about what what they were doing. I also did quite a bit of research on the different, you know, custodians, broker dealers to affiliate with and and then got involved with their experts to get their opinions about the different options that I was going to face in the in the move. So that's kind of sounds like you did some really good homework there. Tell me a little bit about how you found Orion and decided to move forward with your journey partnering with us? Well, that that's interesting. So prior to really getting into do this research, I really don't think that I'd ever heard of Orion before. So the other companies out there that I was kind of reviewing that were more familiar to me. That's kind of the path that I first started going down. But again going back to the process that I went through and talking to other. Custodians and Rias and so forth, Orion kept coming up over and over. So, yeah, I put it on my list of firms that I wanted to use to kind of compare and contrast the different different firms. And that's that's what caused me to kind of look into Orion initially. Great. So did you have any initial expectations when you started on boarding with Orion? Expectations onboarding. No, not not necessarily that I was coming about. I mean things were happening so fast during the onboarding that that I I guess I was, I was, I expected the experience to be more like typical learning where you know, you're given a website or you're given a manual and you and you, you just kind of learn it. So that was kind of my initial expectation about what to expect. So if that answers your question, yeah, Thanks so much for that, Scott. Jordan, do you have any questions that you want to talk about with Scott about the process? Yeah, Scott, thanks for kind of sharing how your journey LED you to Orion and now I want to shift the focus to. You know your actual onboarding with our teams, so how did Orion's teams communicate with you during the onboarding process and how do you think that impacted your experience? So they initially I'm so used to picking up the phone and and using e-mail. So initially I was a little confused about the use of cases and the project and. So that was, I wish I understood that process a little bit better because I came to, I ended up falling in love with the process because as busy as I got it, you know, I was too busy to take phone calls or you know, in an e-mail in what's happening in e-mail is that you end up getting so many that some of the stuff gets lost in there. So when it came specific to addition, you know, to the training that I was going through to be able to communicate through the project. Real focused or through cases was was a wonderful benefit. Awesome. I love to hear that. What would you consider some of like the key stages or phases that you went through for onboarding? Great question. So I knew when I made the decision to make this transition that that it was going to be a a heavy volume of stuff that I'm going to be introduced to and have to learn. So when I first made the decision to use Orion, I decided that, you know, I wanted to get on the demo to be able to play around with it. So I really spent a lot of time in the support app and then in the demo getting at least the basic understanding of being able to navigate around the different system. So. That was one of the things that I would highly suggest that people do is really play with the system early on so. That's awesome. Yeah, we do have a lot of resources out there. I know you've alluded to, you know, the project plan and cases and the support app. Were there any specific other tools or resources or even just support from our teams that you found helpful? Yeah, so. I I think that one of the things, you know, I'm small firm, there's three of us here. One of the things that that good and bad about me is I like to kind of be hands on with stuff. So I really spent a lot of time focusing on the entire Orion platform myself, getting deep, deep into it and going through the training directly. The This was sitting on my behind my desk. But there's the onboarding checklist. That's phenomenal. That's a great piece of information to tell you the different levels of, you know, whether it's essential, advanced or expert. I still kind of reference that to kind of go back and and understand different areas that I need to be able to kind of brush up on or learn and learn deeper. The the other thing so I I spent a lot of time myself getting the training and I'm doing that before delegating to other people. The the the scheduled calls, zoom calls with the different experts were were just phenomenal. They're not only. Every time I got on the phone with them, they knew what we needed to be focused on at that time, but they were, they were very easy to deal with and obviously well trained on the on the system. So that's that was a huge help. Awesome. I know our teams and myself appreciate your willingness to dive into all of the different avenues of our support and really take advantage of those training opportunities. So now that you're kind of getting more comfortable with the system and trained up, what is your plan to roll out Orion for the rest of your staff? That is a great question and what I've done is depending upon what. Somebody is going to be assigned to, let's say, you know, billing. I assign it to a person and then we'll go through the process with them and then there will be additional training that the trainer that trained me will do with them, so they get familiar with it. Same with the performance reporting. So, you know, it was great that I was able to understand. The capabilities of the different systems. But in in by doing that I then can kind of help point the people that are going to be responsible for handling those different aspects of it in the way to to kind of be trained on those. Which again, one of the first things that I did with with all my employees is that rather than pick up the phone rather than. Call somebody, learn the support app and learn cases because it is just the support app, very well designed and the cases is just such an efficient way to learn or to address issues that you're having. Just much more much more efficient than than than picking up the phone and trying to call somebody. The chat feature too is. The other thing is that you know, I've had situations trading or whatever. Where I've run into something that I'm not familiar with and I've been on and off the chat feature with the issue resolved in less than two or three minutes. So all of those things are kind of important and those are the things that I'm trying to make sure that that they understand are available out there. What an awesome like leader that you are for your business, Scott, that you're, you know, taking the initiative to learn all of these things and then. Turn that over and kind of teach them. I think that's really awesome. Renee, I'll turn it back over to you if you have a couple more questions for Scott. Yeah, I do. Thanks, Jordan. Scott, this, I love all the feedback that you've been giving to us. It it not only just tickles my ears, but like just makes me so proud of my team. So thank you so much for all of that feedback. I guess one question that I have is now that you've gone through onboarding, what would you tell firms to do now to prepare for a smooth experience? You know, well the number one thing is I've been so impressed with the processes that Orion has in place. To kind of get you up and running that I felt as an example, you know, trading the system was so much more robust than anything that I've used before that when I initially started using it, I was like, I don't know if I'm going to be comfortable doing this on my own in a year. But the training that I got got to the point where then the person who was training me said, you know, this is usually where people feel. You know good enough about the system that they start doing it on your own. How are you feeling? And I mean, we're talking 6 to 8 weeks into the transition, all of a sudden it kind of hit me. I was like, whoa, I actually do feel pretty good about this, so. I do think that getting on the demo, getting on the support app in advance to just kind of understand it is a is a great tool. But there's nothing like actually doing that, you know, being involved in the transition and make sure that you're following the guidelines of all the trainers exactly, because they they've done it before. Yeah, they sure have. That's great feedback. So now I'm just curious, have you found is there one favorite feature that you have in Orion that you're just like that's that's my favorite? I I I was thinking about that actually that question the other day and so the performance reporting is, is obviously that's what Orion is known for and it's out of this world, it is phenomenal. But the training like compared to what I have been used to using the past 20 years, it's so it's so much more intuitive and advanced, but specifically in the trading tool, the tax loss harvesting, once you understand it, it makes it so simple. So out of all the tools, that's probably the one where. I really, I kind of scratched my head that I didn't have access to something like this before, so I love that tool. That's awesome to hear. Scott, again, thank you for joining us today. I am incredibly happy to have you as a partner with us and look forward to watching just your incredible growth happen over the coming years. So again, I just want to thank you and for all of you attending. Thank you for joining us if you have questions. Please reach out to in the link below and we'd be happy to answer those for you. _1725761435346