More Comments from the field

Finally have some time to catch up on the new posts and also provide an update. 

First off, we've got a green light for Envestnet to do a survey of the thousands of advisors on their platform. We are figuring out logistics now and may have it executed by my second visit. This is a short, PR survey, meaning it is not Guth and Marsh style research, but rather a quick capture of advisor opinions on tax to push out to the press. 

We also did an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday and are hopeful John will be quoted in tomorrow's paper. The reporter found M3 in either the Forbes article we were able to get published or it may have been the Financial Planning article, Seeking Tax Alpha. Either way, it's a big win if it runs. 

We've also written 5 articles for 5 different advisors that we are attempting to place in their markets. 70% of each article is basically the same text on tax management, but we customized each to the advisor's commentary on investing. We'll see how that goes.... 

As for a couple new comments... I saw a little more discussion about the website in later posts. In particular, 25 uniques was criticized. Not so fast, for such a niche product that "cures a disease you don't know you have" with a total audience of less than 20,000 primary targets, you can't expect a website to drive marketing. While I would like to see more hits, we are not spending for any advertising or serious direct mail. At this point, media articles and individual meetings are the primary drivers of traffic -- and neither is going to create mass interest, especially from a niche audience So remember the size of the audience, the budget behind the tactics, and the key goals when looking at the web - we'll discuss more in class. 

Now I found O.G.'s post about long term relationships and back office support, interface interesting. I'd say all of the bullets you have on what an organization needs and customers need hard to argue with. BUT these comments really apply to larger organizations that deal with hundreds if not thousands or millions of accounts like an E-Trade (which River launched back in the day believe it or not). M3 has fewer than 25 individual clients and they do not access account information via the internet -- it's not that kind of service. They generally call their advisor who has everything at his fingertips and if he doesn't, he calls M3's CEO. Remember, these are affluent people -- not the do it yourself crowd. Good thoughts though