About Ashwood Metrics
Where it Started
In October 2020, I joined the team for an independent financial firm in Jacksonville, FL. I had experience processing applications for another firm in town and aspirations to be a financial advisor myself.
Within a few months working in the operations & marketing department - it was a small firm then and the four people in the office all wore multiple hats - I identified opportunities to improve the spreadsheets that were being used. At the time, the firm used 10 unique spreadsheets to keep track of the day-to-day activities.
The spreadsheet that was a particular pain-in-my-side was the Marketing Event spreadsheet. My tasks associated with this behemoth included entering all the contact details, which were entered into our CRM as well - love doubling down on the data entry! Simultaneously, I had to add the marketing cost, notate the result for each buying unit after the event, add the food and venue cost, color-coat the spreadsheet in relation to the live status of each prospect, and calculate the total new money and revenue from the event to track our ROI. I always seemed to forget what was already included in that number so there was additional work making sure the information was correct. Mind you, we did about 2-4 events per month and there could be multiple people still in the pipeline from events in the past.
The first two opportunities to expedite my time spent in this monster were to automate the color coating (conditional formatting) and have a formula set to calculate the new money & revenue so I didn’t double-dip. Those two were relatively easy, but it was a slippery slope. I quickly desired to make the spreadsheet more user-friendly yet automated, so I could focus my time on improving other processes in the firm.
Over two and a half years, the marketing spreadsheet was built out and unrecognizable from when I first started. I created a yearly summary page to compare the different marketing funnels and advisor performance. The Key Performance Metrics sheet was my next automation, designed to decrease calculation time for the CEO. Eventually, I created a Year-over-Year summary of both the marketing and KPM sheet to look for long-term trends.
While I was proud of my work, I learned that it was not transferrable as new team members were added. I will ALWAYS have to have access to the sheets. The lines were getting deleted and ruining the calculations. As new years and new advisors came it required me to completely overhaul the formulas.
I needed a system that would allow a computer novice to operate in without fear of turning the data against them.
Here enters Ashwood Metrics and the Ridgeline Software.
Jenna Simpson, CFP®
Owner/CEO