By Timothy D. Rice
Our industry is notorious for churning out large reports for investment committee meetings that, for all intents and purposes, are thrown by the wayside an hour or two after the committee meeting. For our firm, the decision to “go green” in other aspects of our business was an easy one, but for some reason we had been slow to act in our investment committee meetings. As we conducted an informal survey of our qualified plan clients, we were pleasantly surprised with their positive responses to going green in these meetings.
We elected for a soft transition to tablet technology, meaning we’ve continued to prepare a small amount of paper booklets, in addition to tablets, for our meetings with a full transition expected soon. The following is the cost/benefit analysis we ran:
The purpose of this article is to share with you one firm’s experiences with going green and hope that you’ll able to take away some helpful ideas on how to implement this.
Some helpful hints and ideas to get you started:
• Assemble your presentation in an Adobe PDF and then use iBooks to present.
• Password-protect both the tablet and each presentation. Most likely you’ll have several companies’ presentations on your tablet. We’ll often have three reviews in one day.
• Be careful on the timer that causes the screen to lock up. Set it for 30 minutes of inactivity to avoid having to retype passwords.
• Coordinate your page numbers on the PDF with those of the printed version.
• Use a nice picture of your team as your screen saver.
• Set your company’s website as the home page on the browser.
• Be diligent about charging the batteries. There’s nothing worse than running out of juice in the middle of a meeting!
• After several meetings, we learned that if we started sending the PDF out ahead of time, many of our committee members would load it on their tablets. Obviously, you can’t count on this everywhere, but it has lessened the burden on the number of tablets we’ve needed in our larger meetings.
• Be sure to label your tablets. We’ve found that by having “Tablet #1” through “Tablet #8,” it’s a little easier to keep track of them.
Our experience with the tablets in the investment committee meetings has been extremely positive. After working through some of the initial glitches—such as having security settings set for too short a time and not coordinating page numbers for tablet versions with the printed versions—we’ve received extremely positive feedback. We’ve found that it reinforces the “market leader” message we want to communicate to both clients and prospects.
Timothy D. Rice is president of Lakeside Wealth Management Group, LLC in Chesterton, Ind. Tim can be reached at [email protected] or 800-926-0494, x112.
The purpose of this article is to share with you one firm’s experiences with going green and hope that you’ll able to take away some helpful ideas on how to implement this.
Some helpful hints and ideas to get you started:
• Assemble your presentation in an Adobe PDF and then use iBooks to present.
• Password-protect both the tablet and each presentation. Most likely you’ll have several companies’ presentations on your tablet. We’ll often have three reviews in one day.
• Be careful on the timer that causes the screen to lock up. Set it for 30 minutes of inactivity to avoid having to retype passwords.
• Coordinate your page numbers on the PDF with those of the printed version.
• Use a nice picture of your team as your screen saver.
• Set your company’s website as the home page on the browser.
• Be diligent about charging the batteries. There’s nothing worse than running out of juice in the middle of a meeting!
• After several meetings, we learned that if we started sending the PDF out ahead of time, many of our committee members would load it on their tablets. Obviously, you can’t count on this everywhere, but it has lessened the burden on the number of tablets we’ve needed in our larger meetings.
• Be sure to label your tablets. We’ve found that by having “Tablet #1” through “Tablet #8,” it’s a little easier to keep track of them.
Our experience with the tablets in the investment committee meetings has been extremely positive. After working through some of the initial glitches—such as having security settings set for too short a time and not coordinating page numbers for tablet versions with the printed versions—we’ve received extremely positive feedback. We’ve found that it reinforces the “market leader” message we want to communicate to both clients and prospects.
Timothy D. Rice is president of Lakeside Wealth Management Group, LLC in Chesterton, Ind. Tim can be reached at [email protected] or 800-926-0494, x112.