Meet Meghan

Meghan Rutherford is the Managing Director of Operations at Ridgeline Financial Partners, a comprehensive financial planning and wealth management firm based in Avon, Connecticut. Meghan has 20-years of financial service experience and a diverse background from working in both small and large businesses. With her extensive experience, she understands the importance of providing a high-touch client experience and the challenges that come with it.

The Challenge

The team at Ridgeline Financial Planning Partners is small in terms of numbers, but large in terms of assets and responsibilities. The small but mighty team of 5, two being financial planners, was responsible for an astounding amount of active clients — 700 to be precise. This number didn’t even include the additional 150 clients that they were getting ready to retain from a firm that they acquired in 2021. Beyond taking on a surplus of clients, they were also getting ready to welcome  three additional team members. This exciting next stage of growth brought about increased responsibility and the need to get their home-base organized. 

Known by their clients for their stellar client experience, Ridgeline Financial Partners had to ensure that they could maintain their high-level client experience with this new surge of growth. However, without the technology to efficiently document their existing processes, track client progress, and train new team members, they risked having things fall through the cracks.

“I had to try to ensure tasks were getting done and being documented. I felt the stress of this because I was the hub that everything was coming through and it wasn’t sustainable.”

For years, Meghan’s team had solely relied on their CRM and an “Excel spreadsheet matrix” to manage everything in their firm, from meeting preparation to annual RMDs. Without a central hub to operate their business from, it became difficult to stay in sync and feel in control — a problem they knew would only multiply with the addition of 150 new clients and three team members. 

The Solution

Meghan came across Hubly when she watched Redtail’s Integration Announcement and saw how Hubly tracked every piece of the advisory puzzle. She immediately thought, “this is the answer for us.”

Hubly has allowed Meghan to group the firm's clients to provide different service models based on a variety of criteria, beyond typical A-B-C-D segmentation, and identify clients that were no longer a fit for the business. Instead of trying to document everything for the firm in one chaotic spreadsheet, Hubly allowed Meghan to organize the team's work more methodically. This enabled her and her team to easily stay in synch while working on the same project for multiple clients at once.

“How much we are managing, from an ongoing client service standpoint, simply wouldn’t be possible without Hubly.”

As the Managing Director of Operations, Meghan loved that she could see all overdue items for her entire team in just one place and easily manage their workloads without time consuming meetings. With Hubly, Meghan could see who was falling behind on client tasks and proactively step in to provide support. Hubly went beyond the capabilities of a spreadsheet because it tracked project progress, clarified task details, set reminders to prioritize urgent items, and allowed her to quickly delegate tasks.

The Results

As Ridgeline continues to grow, Meghan is now able to ensure their entire team is on the same page and that knows exactly what’s in the pipeline for the next day, week, and year. With Hubly as their central hub, the excel spreadsheet matrix has been retired and everything - past, present, and future - is  now tracked in Hubly. Ridgeline Financial has achieved the following results since using Hubly:

• Reached a target milestone of $500MM in AUM
• Continuously onboard 5-10 new clients per week
• Created tag groups to provide customized service models