Pulse360 - Note Taking Made Easy

New Speaker:

Welcome to The Financial Planner's Desk podcast. A podcast designed for you, the financial professional. We'll keep you up to date on industry trends in technology and marketing and we'll always keep you in the loop on new regulations. Here's your host, independent advisor and OSJ, Richard Oring.

Richard:

Welcome to the Financial Planners Desk. This is Richard Oring, your host. And today, I have a guest named Anand Sheth. He's the CEO and founder of Pulse360. If you remember, in the previous episode, when I was talking about the eldercare abuse, one of the steps I said you must do is document, document, document, can't say it enough, your notes, because the first thing your back office, a regulator, is going to ask for is your notes. And they're not only going to ask for the notes from your last meeting, but probably from the very beginning of the relationship and they expect them. And that's the number one thing which is going to help your case, to make sure that there's no fault on your end.

Richard:

Now, I don't know about you guys. I have like a stack of pads where I used before I started using Pulse360. I used to have like a whole bunch of pads on my desk and I would start writing notes throughout the day, and then the week, then maybe two weeks, three weeks. And then before I knew it, I had about 10 pads and I would go home on a weekend and I would just spend hours typing those notes in. And I've tried everything. I've tried like Microsoft OneNote. I've tried digital pens, which would go right into a PDF file. Nothing has worked until I discovered this program. It's a one-stop solution. It goes into your CRM. I mean, I'm not going to ruin it. He could explain it a lot better than I can. Anand, do you want to talk a little bit about yourself? What made you think about this, your background?

Anand:

Yeah, sure. Thank you, Rich, for having me here. I appreciate that. So yeah, my background is, I tell financial advisors I was in the field for about 20 years. I've done everything from serve coffee to clients to sit in front of high net worth individuals. I've also worn the compliance hat. So something that you mentioned about the elder care, compliance is huge in that area, of course. And what's interesting is we only think about the regulators in compliance, but I've had experience on the other side, which is the heirs and the attorneys coming back after saying, "Hey, why is something this way?" And if we didn't have a set of notes, I mean, obviously we didn't have Pulse back then, but I know I've spent hours searching through previous notes just to justify why a long-term care policy was recommended at $100 a day or versus $150 a day. Things of that sort.

Richard:

Hey, Anand, what's really worse is events where we were paperless so we just took all our old folders and just scanned them. So now when you have to find your notes, it's like going through 1500 pages.

Anand:

That's right.

Richard:

Got to go through the application, all the scanned doc confirmations, everything.

Anand:

That's right. Yeah. So, that's just one use case, right? But the other, for me, the driving force for me has been advisors provide a tremendous amount of value. And there's a disconnect between what we provide as value versus what is perceived by the end client. The clients leave your meeting, now with Zoom, they end, they go about their lives. They forget how much work you do for them. Right?

Anand:

So I figured out that we constantly are emailing them summaries of meetings and it takes a long time. It ties up the senior persons, because you have to obviously write it the right way, right? And many times, we don't even bother doing it. We're backlogged so much, like you mentioned, we don't even bother. And your value is disappearing. And to me, that's not okay.

Anand:

I know we have this industry conversations all the time about margin compression, fee compression, whatever you want to call it. The pressures on fees are there and real. And I want to be able to help financial advisors not only be more productive, but also show the value that they actually provide, because I think you all need to serve more clients because more clients need our services. Well, I'm not an advisor anymore, but it's in my blood now. Right? So.

Richard:

So I know everywhere I look, where I research your name, on LinkedIn or whatever, there's a little tagline what your goal is.

Anand:

Yes.

Richard:

Do you want to share that?

Anand:

Yeah. My goal is to make all financial advisors at least 50% more productive. And I think that was actually doable five years ago, but since not a lot of people were looking at this particular area of our operations or our practice, specifically meetings and meeting notes and meeting documentation, I decided to take that on. Especially with the experience I've had being in thousands of client meetings, I see where we can help all advisors be a lot more efficient with their notes and communicating that out to the end client. So yeah, my small goal is 50% more productive for all advisors over time.

Richard:

Okay. Let's dig right into the software program, Pulse360.

Anand:

Sure.

Richard:

I know when I first started using it, probably almost a year ago, I think it was almost, it was in the beta testing. Right? Almost. Yeah.

Anand:

Correct. You were one of the first early access group, as I call it. So you provide a lot of good feedback.

Richard:

You know, I laugh, because we talk every couple of weeks about something and you're like, "Did you try this? Did you try this?" I'm like, "What are you talking about?" "Didn't you see the emails, the video, on this upgrade?" I'm like, "I'm just focusing on what I'm doing right now." And then I'm like today, I'm working in the program like, Whoa, I didn't know you can do that.

Anand:

Yes.

Richard:

So why don't we start with the very basics, like how I started, and then where the program has developed into?

Anand:

Sure. So the basic concept of how we developed Pulse360 is I look at meetings and meeting notes as the lifeblood of a financial advisor's practice, right? Everything happens from there and we want to be able to communicate to the client. So going back, rather than rewriting and reinventing the wheel all the time, how many different ways you can tell a client that I recommend you get a life policy with a $1,000,000 benefit versus another one at $500. Or if it's investment related, I recommend you invest in this SMA program, for example, or another investment. So we decided to say, why don't we allow you to add your own language in, what I call them, you're making them into micro templates literally, so that we can repeatedly use that across different client base.

Anand:

That's the core of what we built in the software. And then we're adding lots of power to each and every one of those micro templates, like, you know.

Richard:

I think those micro templates is what sold me when you showed me this product, when I was just exploring it. I would say at least once or twice a week, I have someone in my office calling up and I have a form, I created a PDF, where they have to call and get all the variable annuity information, inception gig, qualified, non-qualified, the product name, M & E, you have living benefits. You don't always remember. You want something quick to look at.

Richard:

What I always tell clients when they buy a variable annuity, that they're buying it today, they understand the benefits and it doesn't matter if they buy it from me or someone else. But a couple of years from now, they're not going to remember everything. So when we do our annual reviews and if they own an annuity, we're going over it and it's nice to have that micro template because there's probably about eight things in there and it literally takes me like 30 seconds to put stuff in. But on the report the client gets, it has all the verbiage they need to understand what that data is and it's nice. And that was the number one reason why I went to your program.

Anand:

Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the biggest things that we thought that we could add in and allow you to customize it based on your practice. Right. So yeah, that's been a huge time saver for our financial advisors already, actually. So, and then of course, we're adding ability to attach PDFs and create tasks. Soon, we'll be launching workflows, which are all created in your own CRM, Redtail or Wealthbox, for example. So, yeah.

Richard:

That's neat. You mentioned tasks. I don't think task was there day one when I started using it and we were talking this morning, before the podcast, and you asked me, "Do you use tasks?" I was like, "You know what, it's funny. Last night when I was typing up some show notes for today, I looked at it. I just assumed it was like a little flag and it went into the summary or the agenda of what the tasks were." You're like, "Oh no, no. It does a lot more than that." Do you want to talk about that?

Anand:

Yeah, sure. I mean, as advisors, we generally, email, we're always emailing advice over to our clients, right. But email is, the way it was prepared, it's just not meant for the efficiency. For example, you cannot harvest the data out of an email that easily. You have to basically manually copy what you put in an email. If you tell a client, "Hey, I'm going to send you some paperwork." You have to manually create a task in your CRM.

Anand:

Well, now, with a micro template that you just use and say, Hey, I'm going to send you this paperwork, you can have an automatic task created in your CRM and it saves you and it completely eliminates the double work. You don't even have to go into a CRM to set that up anymore. Of course, you obviously manage the task and all of that in the CRM, but it's all being created at the point when you're emailing a client. So that was the thought process of the adding the tasks there.

Richard:

So you're talking about that you can actually enter a note and automatically, it's going to go to your CRM. So you offer integration?

Anand:

Yes.

Richard:

What companies, I mean, I assume it's mostly financial CRM programs?

Anand:

Yes. We started with Redtail and Wealthbox, as well as Salesforce. With both Redtail and Wealthbox, we've been able to, both teams have been great in response for what we want to build. So they have enabled some things for us to be able to actually have bidirectional and deep, deep level of integration.

Anand:

Personally, I feel the integration that a lot of advisors are used to and actually, they're not exactly happy with is a lot of those single sign-ons. And I think the days of single sign-on are in the past, and we really need to look at deeper integrations with all the different industry providers. So information can flow both ways, backwards and forwards, making you as an advisor, a lot more efficient.

Richard:

We mentioned summary, emailing a summary or printing a summary off to the client about the meeting.

Anand:

Yes.

Richard:

Which I think is great, but there's two things we didn't talk about what it also does. When you type up your notes, they come in blocks. Each individual thought is a separate block and their categories, like if you are talking about taxes, all your tax notes goes in one section and it prints really, really nice bullet points, with a header, then the bullet points are underneath of each category. But there's two other things we should probably talk about is meeting agendas and also the annual review. So.

Anand:

Sure, absolutely. Yeah. So meeting agendas, I've done the generic agendas before. I've even also not sent out agendas before, right? I've been part of larger teams where it just is, the volume is so much that we don't get around doing these things. What ends up if you're not sending an agenda to a client, is that eventually more work is going to come out of your meeting because you're going to find out like, Oh, we were supposed to be doing this or we were supposed to be asking for tax returns or whatnot and we didn't. So now, in a meeting, now it becomes work afterwards.

Anand:

By sending an agenda and having that as a best practice, it allows you to send out what you need from the client ahead of time so they are prepared mentally for what you're going to discuss as well. But it takes a long time. Well, now, I just spoke with another advisor that put an agenda together, very customized agenda, in less than 20 seconds. Right. And that's all because of the way we've built the platform.

Anand:

The annual summary that goes back to the conversation about what I said that I think we provide a lot of value to clients and it's not perceived or it's lost. Right? Well, now you can run, if you've been meeting with the client throughout the year, one time, 12 times, you can run, at the end of the year, I'm telling advisors to do it like a Thanksgiving tradition almost, to send out a thank you email to them saying, "Hey, thank you for the trust. And here is how much work we've done for you the whole year." And actually, now you can do it in less than 20 seconds. I had one advisor that basically was spending the whole month of December during that. And basically he said, "You gave me December back."

Richard:

That's nice. One of the things you gave me, which is a new future, which I figured it out, is tags.

Anand:

Yes.

Richard:

So I'm a Wealthbox user and one of the reasons I like that particular CRM is not only can you put tags on the client or household level, but also on your notes. And I was really happy to see the tags and you can create your own tags. I don't know how many you can create. They're color coded. They're nice. So I'm going to assume, because I haven't tried, I just used it today. I'm going to assume I can filter reports or just things I want to see.

Anand:

Yes. That's the idea about tags. Tags is actually really, really a game changer, I think, for advisors when it comes to these type of notes. Imagine you're tabling something in a meeting and you're tabling something for our next meeting, for example, with a client. Well, getting ready for that next meeting, you're going to have to go back and read, find all your notes to say, what are we supposed to be talking about? Well, if you apply the next meeting tab, for example, then in less than a second, you can pull up everything that you said, "I am going to talk about at the next meeting."

Anand:

The other ways tags that are rich, other advisors that I want to recommend using is, cash needs. Apply a cash needs tag, because a lot of times you know ahead of time a client is going to have a cash need at some point in the year. Well, if you've already made a note of where are you going to take that money from, right, apply that tag so when that need comes, you can just pull up, show me all my cash needs, and now I know the context of, Hey, where I need to go pull it from.

Richard:

That's a great idea. I never even thought of that. Because right now, I might have a conversation with a client saying, "Oh, yeah, when we started taking this money out, we're going to have to look at it. Most likely we might want to take it from the non-qualified. You're not working. Your tax rates are low." And then when it comes time to do it, I'm like, Oh man, I think we talked it. I'm not really sure. Let me check my notes, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, crap. Did I not put it in? Let me check an old pad. But that's a great idea. I'm going to start doing that tomorrow, actually.

Anand:

Yeah. Yeah.

Richard:

That's a great one. It's funny. You were so excited. I remember the phone call. You said, "Rich, do you have an iPad?" I'm like, "Yeah." I said, "I don't use it ever." And you're like, "Oh, okay. I would say I have a surface, Microsoft surface with a stylist," because I knew what you were getting at, and you're like, "You got to try this. Now you can take handwritten notes and then upload them within the Pulse360 and be part of that summary or your client file." And I said, "Why would you ever do that? I don't want to take electronics out and start [inaudible 00:16:00] with a client."

Richard:

But I'm also 48 years old and I'm realizing I'm not that young advisor anymore. And the newer advisors out there, are so tech front. They're all about tech being in front of the clients, doing the presentations with their iPads, taking notes.

Richard:

How's that going with you guys, with that? Do you want to talk about how that works and how it's going?

Anand:

Yeah, absolutely. We built the digital notepad, again, going back on my experience, managing different advisors and working with them. Everybody has stacks of note pads everywhere and yeah, sure, you digitize them by, in quotes, scanning them as a PDF, right. But then you have to have a file system to store it somewhere. And I figured out that by holding onto yellow pads and whatever, the notes are not getting passed to the team member to actually start working on whatever it is that came out of the meeting. So we built the digital notepad in it, which automatically ties to a client, automatically ties to an event or a meeting, for example. So you always have context about, okay, these were what my handwritten notes were and then I can create follow ups. So that's why we built that in.

Anand:

The second angle is actually I, in my experience, we've bought over three or four different practices over time and notes are really, really important. And if it's handwritten notes, they're all over the place in the folder system. It's just not usable really. Now, by attaching it to a client automatically, you can actually open up a client and have a full history of what was conversated, what was the handwritten notes? Now when you acquire a practice, it's a lot easier if they have those type of notes available immediately. So that was kind of the thought process.

Richard:

So I think what's also really nice is timestamp notes.

Anand:

Yes. Yeah.

Richard:

Being able to put your notes in and the regularly says, run over, portal all your notes, and they know you didn't doctor them up, because you can't once they're created.

Anand:

Right.

Richard:

Whereas paper files and stuff like that, you take this one out, put this one in. It's wrong and it's not going to help you if they think that that's what you're doing. So I like having it digitalized with the timestamp on the note.

Richard:

I know when you first came out, you would start typing your notes. And if you aren't done in time, they went to your CRM. Which is nice now is your program puts temporary notes in, and then after a certain amount of time, when it realizes you're done, then it consolidates those temporary one into one master note, which is really nice.

Anand:

Yeah, yeah. We're constantly evolving on that and trying to work with the CRM so that we can send the information and it's for record keeping purposes as well. Right. So yeah, we're consistently getting feedback from different advisors on how they would like it and we're going to make those changes so that everybody is happy with the way the notes are going into the CRMs.

Richard:

I could see things, like I know now you can attach documents, but there's two ways you can attach documents. You can attach a document from like your desktop, like for, let's say a portfolio review and you want to include the report. The second way is you can actually upload a document into your program. Wouldn't be for a client specific, but a general one. So it's a great place, like if you have to send out your CRS, your annual disclosures.

Anand:

ADV part two. Right.

Richard:

Exactly. As long as your client has accepted electronic delivery, but it's a great way. Like you said, you saved that gentlemen all that time in December by doing the annual summaries. Imagine how much time you can save by not having your staff stuffing envelopes and how about the money you're going to save with the postage? Probably the postage itself, the savings in the postage will pay for the program.

Anand:

Right. Yeah. And one of the reasons, by the way, that I think more and more advisors are ... The way we built this Pulse360 program is to kind of use these micro templates and they're supposed to be short, but client facing language, right. Is because with my experience, what I've found is clients don't want to spend time reading a book. While we may have it for our justification and our compliance side of things, for example, a financial plan, right. And you need to attach it and send it to the client, you can, with the Pulse. But it's those bullet points that clients really, really read and say, "Okay, I digested what you've said and fine." We're good with it or we're not.

Anand:

So the whole idea is to enable you to email out your value to the client, but attach these necessary documents, right? Like you said, there's general documents, ADVs and form CRS, or how does a Roth conversion work for example, right? Those you can upload into our system and then automatically it gets attached. So you don't even have to pick it again once you have set it up in the system.

Richard:

That's nice. That's nice. We've gone over so much stuff today and I have to, one of the things I asked you, I said is, "Do I have your permission to put your video of the demo of the product on to the show notes?"

Anand:

Sure.

Richard:

And you said, "Yes," because this is something you really have to see and then you got to touch. I'm telling you, you start using it, maybe the first couple of times, it's going to be a little confusing. Actually, it's probably a lot easier now than when I first started. It's a lot easier to find the micro templates. But a lot of times, I hate to say this, but a lot of times I just go right to the category. I go I need to put a tax note in. And I'm just typing a quick note because there's no way there's going to be a micro template simply just for that one need.

Anand:

Sure.

Richard:

But again, the times when I have to fill out all the annuity information, it saves me so much time than having to type every single thing. So I encourage everyone to go to the show notes, look at the video, go to the website. It's www.pulse360.com.

Richard:

I got to ask you a question.

Anand:

Yes.

Richard:

How did you go from being in the business with us, sitting on our side of the desk? I don't know when you were sitting on the compliance side. I like to think that's a different desk, but I mean, I'm joking, it's a very important department and especially when I'm an OSJ and I supervise. I'm just joking.

Anand:

Yes.

Richard:

But whenever we hear compliance supervision, we all cringe, but they're there to help us. But how do you go from that to rolling the dice, seeing the need for something. And I know you have children and taking that risk to do a career path and invest money to develop this.

Anand:

Yeah, yeah. It was interesting. People say, "Oh, this is a difficult decision." It was actually, for me, it was a difficult decision not to do it. So everything I was thinking about is, for me, I would have regretted not doing it. And I was like, I don't want to be 65, turn back and said, "I could have helped lots of advisors and I decided to choose the safer route." So.

Richard:

What did the wife say, when you told her?

Anand:

Well, it was interesting. She was fine because originally, so the backstory of this is I created a version of Pulse in 2012, 2013 in Excel. So with that experience of me coding it myself, I said to my wife, "Hey, this is probably going to be 10 or 15 grand to build." And so she was fine.

Richard:

You have really ... I'm going to assume you totally underestimated that cost.

Anand:

Yeah. It's ...

Richard:

I've had software written from my company and there was no way it was coming under that and yours is much more complicated than mine.

Anand:

Yeah. Yeah. It's tens of multiples of that, I found out, and I bootstrapped.

Richard:

So you were really good. So, as an advisor, you were really good on the compliance side, not the numbers side.

Anand:

The numbers side, what was interesting is because I was going to build it in Excel and then I started recognizing that my vision is just so much bigger and Excel is not cut out for as much of what we need. So then we had to jump over to web. I went through a lots of developers who kind of kept me going and saying, "Yeah, yeah. We'll be able to do it." And then I found out like, "No, I need to go and change my mind to say no more Excel. It's going to be on the web." And with COVID, I just realized that was probably one of the smarter decisions because it's remote. Right. So.

Richard:

Yeah. Right. So did you go from Excel and then you like looked at Access and said, screw this. And then, right to web.

Anand:

Yeah. It was going to be a combination of Excel and Access, actually a bigger brother of Access, called SQL server. Microsoft has that. They have a free version of that, I think. So we were actually setting up on that and we did. One of our first, version 0.1, was on that and just realized that that was a waste of money and time, unfortunately, but it's a lesson I learned.

Anand:

So my wife was okay and now she's like, "Okay, well now you're in it. So shoot, you better make it on the other side."

Richard:

So you know what, we want to help you. I hope our listeners take the time to go look at your site, look at the video on the show notes. Is there a teaser you can give them, maybe a little financial incentive, a discount or something?

Anand:

Yeah, absolutely. For the folks that listen to your show, they can go to our website and select the premium plan, which is right now about $79 a month for a couple of users. You can add in a code.

Richard:

When you say a couple users, that's not per user, where you need to buy multiple users. That's for a couple of users, included in that license.

Anand:

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Up to two people for $79. That's the premium. That's the most feature rich plan that we have. And you can take $20 off for about 12 months and you can use this code TFPD. So that's again, Tom, Frank, Police and Department. If you use that ...

Richard:

Is that for The Financial Planner's Desk?

Anand:

Yeah. Exactly. The Financial Planner's Desk. If you put that code in, you'll get $20 off the premium plan for 12 months.

Richard:

That's great. That is great. I want to thank you so much for being our guest. Hopefully our listeners are going to take that time to go check out the program. If they were smart, they will. Because if they want to save time and get home earlier, spend time with the spouse, their kids, this definitely will do the trick. Thank you so much.

Anand:

Yeah. Thank you so much, Rich. I appreciate the time you gave me here.

New Speaker:

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New Speaker:

Richard Oring's branch office is 1 Airport Place, Princeton, New Jersey, 08540. The branch phone number is (609) 924-2049. Securities offered through Royal Alliance Associates, Inc, member FINRA SIPC. Advisory services offered through New Century Financial Group, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Not affiliated with Royal Alliance Associates, Inc. New Century Financial Group, LLC and Royal Alliance Associates Inc do not offer tax advice or tax services. Please consult your tax specialist for individual advice. We make no specific comments or recommendations on any tax related details.