Josh Miller:
My name is Josh Miller. I'm the president of Colorado Financial Management. We are a small registered investment advisory firm in Northern Colorado servicing about 220 households and about $260 million of assets under management. For our firm, the benchmarking study is extremely important. I mean, we are a single firm so we don't have any other firms that we can learn by, get best practices from. So, for the amount of time that we put into the Schwab survey to complete the data, we get way more out of it than we put into it. The peer analysis, the composite income statements, the executive summary kind of highlighting what's going on in the industry and also what's working for other advisors. It's invaluable.
Josh Miller:
I think the "aha moment" for us is just the amount of revenue growth that firms have seen since the 2009 downturn, and then kind of the steps that they took in order to get to that, or what they did and the best practices that they date they did to actually grow beyond 2009. As a sole firm, you don't know kind of where you're at versus your peers, but the composite income statement provides kind of expense ratios, it provides profitability analysis, revenue growth. Gives us a great idea of where we're at, the quality of the data, the quality of the survey that Schwab does is far superior to anything that you get out of other publications. Definitely hits home to what you're doing and what other firms, again, in your size group, bigger than yours, and where you want to be. The time commitment is certainly not to be thought of.