The COO Roundtable: Episode 89

While Episode 89 clocks in at 43 minutes, you are going to want to allocate 86 minutes so you can listen to it twice! Livia Ramirez and Stephen de Man offer actionable advice that can be incorporated at your firm today. Both Regional Directors and Vice Presidents in Dimensional Fund Advisors’ practice management division, Livia and Stephen have a front-row seat to what’s working, and not working, at RIAs today.  They work closely with RIAs of all sizes to make their firms more efficient and profitable.  Livia, Stephen, and Matt dive into:

• Both guests’ fascinating career paths: Stephen’s journey from Teach for America to hosting a practice management podcast, and Livia’s impressive operations career including two stints at Alliance Bernstein and time in the RIA COO seat
• How DFA supports RIA firms through practice management consulting, peer-to-peer study groups, and benchmarking research, and what participants love so much about them
• What separates firms that execute against their strategic plan from those that write a great plan and let it collect dust all year
• How high-performing firms think differently about running their business, and what the data reveals about what the most intentional firms do differently than their peers
• The most common workflow and process breakdowns and where to start when it comes to policy & procedure documentation (and why it’s so hard to get right)
• An honest take on AI adoption across the industry – are firms actually moving the needle, or are those claims of saving advisors 8 hours a week too good to be true?
• How to think about AI intentionally rather than reactively, and where AI should show up first in an advisory firm’s operations
• The single biggest lever an RIA can pull to grow more effectively, efficiently, and profitably

A few articles Matt has written about topics discussed during this episode:

• Do Your Team a Favor, Learn to Delegate
• How I’ve (Casually) Used Time Blocking to Boost Creative Output
• Why is an Ops & Tech Consultant Writing About Client Segmentation?

We hope you enjoy, share, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

You can read the full transcript here.

The views and opinions expressed by guests on The COO Roundtable are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Coldstream Wealth Management. Guest statements regarding their firms, including assets under management and business performance, have not been independently verified by Coldstream.