How to Take Networking, Problem Solving to the Next Level

I could ask them questions like: "How did you get Salesforce to work? Who have you worked with? What are you paying for all this stuff?" And I couldn't get that anywhere else. If you're a CTO, it's a really lonely job, especially in wealth management, where you can be the only person in the entire organization that really understands technology and its impacts on the business.

So to get together with people that have the same challenges, have tried things and [whether] they've been successful or not, this contact was incredibly valuable, and it's also just like group therapy to some extent. 

I realized that there was probably a lot of value [in such an effort that could]… help my team be better as consultants. The more we know about best practices in the industry, what wealth management firms are doing and how models work and don't work really makes us much better consultants for our clients. 

We started off about three and a half years ago, initially in partnership with the Money Management Institute, and it was fun. People really loved the fact that we weren't making money off it. We weren't selling their data anywhere. 

It's like "Fight Club" — a secret, you-don't-talk-about-it tech board. We don't have a LinkedIn page and don't want a lot of publicity. We do share our research. We just don't share who is in that group.

Collectively, F2 takes information [from the group], aggregates it, anonymizes it and says, "These are the trends that are going on in the space right now across a very large set of diverse companies." 

Hopefully it's valuable to the rest of the industry. We use it as a way to share our findings and help the industry move forward. But really it's a result of the fact that we collectively love being in the room with our peers and sharing and hearing about how we've navigated challenges.

How do you see the impact of this effort on the industry? 

That's really where a lot of our published research comes from. If you go to F2′s website and you click on our research and then our insight sections, a lot of those insights come from our aggregation of knowledge about what's going on in the industry. 

We just published research on data aggregation, for instance, who's doing it and how they are doing it. There are very different ways to aggregate data through different mechanisms. If you don't know what you're looking for, you're going to get the wrong information. 

We have another tech board session coming up in October. That's going to be around workflow automation and how to automate great experiences. 

Until now, no other consulting firm had really been able to address the mid-size market because it's not really scalable to do so in a traditional consulting sense. The outsourced CTO model, the sort of retainer-based fractional share sort of participation in this bigger team, has been a game changer for our clients. 

That's where the majority of our growth has come. And we are growing in this space. … We're hiring former CTOs and former executives from well-known wealth firms. Going into 2022, the larger firms are starting to say, "Hey, now you're big. Can you be a big consulting firm and work with us?" 

Unintentionally, this growth has led to more growth. Now we're in a mode of saying, "We want F2 to be the place where all of the best implementation design strategy minds in our industry come and to have a monopoly on the best technology, wealthtech advice, tech planning and tech people in the country."

I'm actively looking at hiring former CTOs, former heads of digital and former heads of advisor technology from well-known firms, small and large.