By Jason Ray
It has been quite a year. Zenith has taken tremendous strides towards our purpose of leading individuals and communities to financial freedom. Over the past year, we have experienced excellent audience engagement with clients, students, professional service providers, and stakeholders.
In the background of covid-19 and fragmentation in our country leading up to the general election, I am humbled by the progress and action we’ve seen in one year. I continue to find motivation to grow our reach by the continued growth of wealth injustices that exist in our country.
Zenith has displayed growth and market fit in 3 areas: advising individual clients, educating organizational groups, and online youth education.
Each of these 3 areas are in line with our mission to lead more to financial freedom. High quality engagements and feedback from these 3 channels have prompted us to build more creative and accessible education and advisory solutions. Client success is at the heart of everything we do.
Looking ahead, we are focused on the following:
- Increasing the number and quality of engagements
- Inspiring more actions from our clients
- Expanding our ability to help clients create wealth
We define engagements as the raw number of people that have received education or advice from Zenith individually or in group setting. This metric is important, as it represents a unique opportunity for Zenith to inspire confidence, validation, or value on someone’s financial journey. Engagements lead to actions, which we define as someone acting as a result of our education or advice. Each action represents a step closer to financial freedom. A few examples of actions include purchasing an asset (like real estate or a company), opening an account, refinancing debt, starting a business, or making an investment.
Over the past year, we have experienced over 150 engagements and 530 unique actions taken. Clients have done a number of awesome things, with the top actions taken being:
A) Starting a business (family, individually, and with partners)
B) Buying real estate
C) Making an investment
Our process to track engagements and actions is admittedly manual and we will look to streamline it for the year forward.
Organic growth is our primary objective. Word of mouth, digital content, and educational engagements have been the largest positive variables for growth. It’s important to note, client success (like A, B, and C above) is the main catalyst of organic growth. It’s imperative that clients speak positively about success, quality of advice, and service provided by Zenith. As stated earlier, client success is at the heart of everything we do.
Therefore, it is clear to me that we will amplify organic growth by expanding our ability to help people make money, feel confident, and create long term wealth. Here are some focus areas that we feel will improve the probability of quality engagements.
1. Enhanced research and discretionary investment management capability for our savings/inflation portfolio and our growth portfolios.
2. Building visualizations for clients to see financial plan progress and other metrics (savings rate, surplus, investments) as part of a larger progress report. Integrating tax and legal advice into our financial plans.
3. Onboarding the latest finTech to share and collaborate with clients effectively.
We have a lot of work to do. Thank you to everyone involved in the process. I’m excited to see what the next year will bring.
Thoughtfully,
Founder & CEO | Zenith Solutions