by Kevin Slater, CEO, Lead Advisor, CFP®
Despite the markets, 2022 was a good year for the SVA team. We made two fabulous hires (Nichole Harrison, CFP® and Austin Boyce) and had three people make significant advances in their roles. Julie Gibson became my Executive Assistant, immediately improving my ability to serve clients and our team. Lisa Graber is now our Client Operations Manager, coordinating client support to improve our responsiveness to our client’s needs. Vicki Simpson earned her Certified Financial Planner™ certification and is a Financial Advisor in addition to her role with investments. Please congratulate each of them!
To improve our service to you, we are restructuring roles and changing some client assignments. Many of you have already received some communication on this topic. Every client has an assigned Support Advisor (Deb, Sophea, or Austin) to handle administrative needs. Every client will also have either an Advisor (Krista, Nichole, Vicki) or a Lead Advisor (Kevin Rigg, Ben, or myself) handling strategic planning—in some cases clients may have both.
Since all of our Advisors and Lead Advisors are CFP®s, we are taking this opportunity to reallocate client assignments in order to increase time for further investment research and more advanced planning analysis. Thanks to the abilities of our advisors, I will significantly be reducing my client load and spending more time digging into alternative investments, such as real estate partnerships.
A few other changes are worth noting as well. We will be replacing our 20+ year old CRM (customer relationship management) system in the first half of the year. While we are excited about the new system, we do have a lot of information in the old system. Austin, Nate, and Julie will be spending a lot of their time making sure the important information is carried over so we can continue to serve you well!
We are also replacing our financial planning software. The new program will give us a deeper level of sophistication in long-term planning and enable us to better communicate the broad impacts on clients in numerous new ways. We are incredibly excited to roll this out to all of our clients in the latter half of 2023.
2023 will be a year of significant changes—our goal is that the only things you notice in the process are an improvement in the depth of our relationship with you and the quality of our work for you. Happy New Year!