Exiting a business means exposing your firm to heightened scrutiny. Potential buyers will want to dig deep into your financials and client data as they seek to understand your business and its value. To help this process and show your business in the best possible light, you’ll need clean, consistent data that tells a clear story – and this means that if you’re one of the many UK financial adviser firms with patchy data and limited MI, the time has come to tackle these issues.

This article shows you how Evotra is helping retiring IFAs do exactly this. 

It’ll take more than a sleek, digital dashboard 

There are several providers – including Evotra – offering digital dashboard solutions that can help turn your data into the kind of MI that buyers are looking for. These dashboards can be incredibly powerful in supporting your sale and positioning your business but if you’ve got underlying data issues, no dashboard can magically fix these.  

Time and again, we speak to financial advisers who have signed up to a dashboard service and discovered that instead of providing the MI they need, their dashboards expose and amplify their ongoing problems with data. They can’t even get accurate headline metrics such as AUM and client numbers let alone anything more granular. And as most dashboard suppliers can’t fix underlying data issues, they’re back to square one. 

Evotra is unusual as a firm because as well as building the dashboards you need and getting your data flowing into them, we also have the knowledge to identify the root causes of your data inaccuracies and the specialist skills to fix them for you. And we can do this in a secure and cost-effective way. Here’s how: 

Ripping off the band aid  

It may seem counterintuitive given what we’ve said about dashboards exposing data problems, but one of the first things we do is use Microsoft’s Power BI to build your MI dashboards and get all your relevant data flowing into them. If you have underlying data issues then yes, some of the output may well be gobbledegook and you probably wouldn’t want these dashboards in front of potential buyers right now but think of this stage as a data health check – we’re ripping off the band aid to show you where your problems are lurking. And once we can all see what we’re dealing with, we can set about fixing the issues.  

Why Power BI? 

We’ve chosen Power BI for a number of reasons. As the name suggests, it’s powerful technology that’s more than capable of getting you all the real-time and historical MI you need to support your business sale. But crucially, because it’s Microsoft technology, everything happens within your own secure environment without the need for client or other confidential data to go anywhere near external third-party software. As well as being secure, this is cost-effective because once the dashboards are built, there are no ongoing subscriptions or costs for accessing your own data. All you need is a Power BI licence.  

Identifying root causes of inaccurate MI 

There are many reasons IFA businesses struggle with inaccurate numbers. Often it’s down to missing data – we all know that legacy data causes huge problems. But inconsistencies in record-keeping or definitions across client categorisations, services and product types or family groupings can knock metrics out too. And when data is stored – and often duplicated – across multiple systems and spreadsheets, this can exacerbate problems.  

Evotra has lots of hands-on experience of rooting out data gaps and other issues like this and can dig beneath the dashboards to quickly pinpoint the source of your troubles. 

Fixing your data to support the sale of your IFA business 

Once we’re all clear on the MI and data challenges you’re facing and what the root causes of these are, we can go about fixing them. What this looks like will depend on the specific issues but typical ways we help include cleansing legacy data and plugging gaps, putting in place automation to improve efficiencies and reduce manual errors, configuring your systems and improving processes for example making certain fields mandatory so you don’t end up with ongoing data gaps. We can also support with data entry, writing user guides and training your team to make sure you get the data you need.  

And once your data issues have been resolved, you can be confident that your Power BI dashboards will provide all the accurate MI you need to satisfy buyers and even the most demanding due diligence process. 

How much will this cost? 

We charge a single one-off fee to set up your dashboards – this fee can vary depending on your requirements, so give us a call and we’ll happily chat through your options with you – and then after that it’s just your own Microsoft licencing for you and whichever colleagues you’d like to grant access to. 

Why Evotra? 

Evotra was founded to fill a glaring gap in the market for a firm that could help wealth management businesses get the best from their technology by providing all those things that are beyond the scope of tech providers and that firms either don’t have the resource or expertise to deal with. Think cleansing your data, creating efficient, compliant workflows that sync with your technology, fixing third-party data feeds so valuations are correct and so on.  

We can do this because we have an expert team made up of people that have come from your industry and have first-hand experience of your needs and challenges together with tech specialists with a forensic understanding of the systems and technology you rely on. 

Whatever the issues and however antiquated and patchy your systems and records are, we can help you get ready to sell your IFA business.  

Please do get in touch to discuss your plans and hear more about how Evotra can help you. You can reach us on 020 3410 1966 or email hello@evotra.co.uk