Fast-growing advisor attributes $20M+ revenue increase to using Nitrogen

Charlotte Geletka, managing partner at Silver Penny Financial, has always believed in the power of technology to efficiently scale a business. And in 2017, after purchasing a financial planning firm and undergoing a rebrand, Nitrogen played a key role in transitioning clients – in fact, Charlotte attributes close to $20 million to the streamlined onboarding process and has since upgraded to Nitrogen Elite across her entire team.

A business revolution

Silver Penny Financial, a wealth management firm based in Atlanta, GA, has a long and rich history of serving hard-working families and is the successor of two financial planning practices. As the daughter of one of the original founders, Charlotte Geletka, CRPC joined the firm in 2007 to work alongside her father and continue the firm’s legacy of serving the community and building strong bonds with the clients they serve – including 403(b) education professionals and a diverse mix of clients focused on their retirement goals.

But Silver Penny hasn’t always gone by that name. In 2017, Charlotte purchased the firm from the existing partner and underwent a major rebrand. As part of this evolution, it became an important business objective for Charlotte and her team to introduce many of their participant clients to the financial planning side of the firm.

Enter Nitrogen.

Charlotte first heard about Nitrogen via a mastermind group at Lincoln Financial, and decided she’d give it a try to see if it would help streamline her meetings with participants. “Immediately, I had more engagement using Nitrogen with the client,” said Charlotte. “I used it to help engage them in the planning process.”

During that first year, Charlotte ended up using Nitrogen to quickly forge relationships with many participants to gain deep awareness of their risk tolerance. “I had never seen anything from a tech standpoint be able to so deeply assess a client’s investment comfort level,” said Charlotte.

The power of process

Since the very first meeting using Nitrogen, Charlotte has made the platform an integral part of her client experience.

Risk assessment

Every prospect or current client of Silver Penny first completes a Risk Assessment, which Charlotte conducts alongside them in person. “The questionnaire is the number one feature we use, in its simplest form. It’s the most basic form of high tech, high touch, and helps us have goals-based conversations moving forward,” said Charlotte.

Charlotte said the indicator for her that Risk Assessment was a powerful tool, was when a client came in with his wife, who was not a client. By the end of the conversation, after using Nitrogen, the wife moved her entire 401(k) over on the spot and said, “No one has ever taken the time to learn about how much I know about my money before.” That was a pivotal moment for Charlotte.

At Nitrogen, we call that moment the “ACAT Form Moment.” Way to go, Charlotte.

“I view my role as a coach. The days of telling a client what to do are over – Nitrogen helps us empower our clients so they can feel more in control of their finances.”

Portfolio risk

Charlotte uses Nitrogen Elite to conduct deep analysis of portfolios before a client review to get a sense as to what risk level they’re currently at. For prospects, Charlotte does this first to say, “We’re going to design a portfolio that aligns better with your Risk Number.”

Portfolio analytics enable advisors to analyze the risk of over a quarter-million securities, products, and strategies to see how accounts roll up into a portfolio-wide Risk Number. Silver Penny leverages models from Morningstar, so Charlotte is easily able to see how those models correlate with her client’s Risk Number and 95% Historical Range™.

“This makes my asset management really streamlined and gets everyone on the same page,” said Charlotte.

Investment policy statement

Charlotte likes having her clients’ Investment Policy Statements in hand when running a financial plan and holding client reviews. These white-labeled PDF and printed reports enable Charlotte to reinforce Silver Penny’s brand and provide the update her clients expect, without the muddled data or industry jargon.

Detailed portfolio stats

Charlotte also taps into the Modeled Performance feature of Detailed Portfolio Stats, a key part of Nitrogen Elite. Stats provides in-depth analysis of everything from modeled performance comparisons and sector breakdowns to a fresh new way to see correlation. It offers a variety of other tools such as risk/reward scatter plots, and data correlation to help drive better decision making.

“Nitrogen allowed my firm to shine in a way that showed our values. We care about our clients’ goals.”

Nitrogen Elite

The incredible growth of Silver Penny since 2017 is testament to the important role technology plays when executed at every level of a firm’s process. That’s why, Charlotte said, it’s important that her entire team have access to the benefits of Nitrogen. “Now, the main objective is for us to have consistency of process. I needed to have other advisors adopt Nitrogen, so getting them access to Nitrogen Elite is important.” Office Pricing enables firms to provide the benefits of Nitrogen to their entire staff at a reasonable price. When Charlotte enabled firmwide access to Nitrogen Elite, she gave her teams access to:

• Detailed Portfolio Stats
  Stats is data analytics taken to the next level. It offers a variety of tools such as modeled performance comparison, sector breakdowns, risk/reward scatter plots, and data correlation like you’ve never seen before. Powerful portfolio analytics help you analyze the data that matters so you can make informed decisions. From Sharpe Ratios, Beta, Drawdown, and everything in-between, Stats has it covered.
• Individual Security Analysis
  The search bar isn’t just for clients and models. Quickly pull up a rich set of data for individual stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds, and analyze those metrics to your heart’s content. Nitrogen assesses risk from the individual security level instead of making common assumptions at the asset class level. Now, you get direct access to much of the data at the foundation of “risk analysis done right.”
• Timeline
  Advisors love using Retirement Maps to assess risk capacity and calculate a client’s retirement probability. With dynamic Timeline events, Retirement Maps becomes an incredible precursor to a comprehensive financial plan. Whether a client is planning on getting a vacation home someday, tapping into social security, or changing their Risk Number in retirement, you can plot events onto the Timeline and see them reflected in the Retirement Maps calculation.
• Advisor Marketing Kit
  Dive into personalized client-facing videos, templates for presentations, brochures and press releases, social media image generators, print items with free delivery, and best-practice guides for compliance approval and online advertising campaigns. There’s no more powerful question than “What is Your Risk Number?” to convert traffic into leads. The Advisor Marketing Kit empowers your brand to generate meaningful traffic in the first place.
• Retirement Plans
  Most plan participants don’t understand their elections, and most advisors serving retirement plans simply don’t have the bandwidth for excessive hand-holding. The Risk Number creates a common language, allowing you to bridge the gap between advisor and participants without flooding your to-do list. There’s nothing better than the power of Risk Alignment to build trust with clients, make sure you’re acting in their best interests, and be able to prove it quantitatively. When participants discover their Risk Number and align their elections accordingly, they’ll seek your council to analyze the risk of their held-away assets.

Get started

Want to see how other wealth management firms like Silver Penny Financial are deploying Nitrogen Elite? Sign up for a product demo and get to know the power of risk alignment. Special thanks to Charlotte Geletka for her candor and commitment to empowering the world to invest fearlessly.