Our customers spend a lot of time and expertise in areas that matter - communications, collaboration, leadership, employee engagement. We've asked them to share some of their thinking - their insights and concerns. We've talked with IT teams as well as HR. We've spoken with Internal Communications, and Executive teams. We decided to share these conversations with you in their unedited form - whether they are email or video - what you see is what they said.
Here, Rob Freedman, Sr Marketing Manager at Focus Financial, gives us some straight up answers to straight up questions.
We sent him these questions over email - here are his entirely unedited responses.
1. Tell us about your company - (what’s your purpose, where are you located? number of locations, number of employees, fraction who are remote or field workers?)
Focus Financial Partners is the world’s leading partnership of independent, unbiased and unconflicted wealth advisors. At Focus we believe that to build a great business, you have to solve a big problem. And that’s exactly what we set out to do when we launched Focus Financial Partners in 2006. The problem, as we see it, is two-fold: Although more and more clients are seeking unbiased, and unconflicted financial advice from what’s become a $2.3 trillion growth industry, they don’t always know how to find trusted Registered Independent Advisors. And savvy entrepreneurial RIAs with excellent management practices don’t always know how to accelerate growth and ensure continuity.
To address the pressing needs of both clients and advisors, we created Focus Financial Partners. Today we are the leading partnership of independent fiduciary wealth management firms with partner firms and affiliates in the U.S. and UK. We currently have over 32 partner firms with over 750 employees. Focus is headquartered in New York City with another corporate center in San Francisco.
2. Tell us about yourself: name, title, and role in your intranet project.
Rob Freedman, Sr. Manager, Marketing. I was the lead on finding an intranet solution that would meet both our immediate needs and have scaleability as we grow.
In my background, this was my third intranet development project over the course of my career but my first deployment of a cloud-based solution.
3. What prompted your company to look for an intranet?
With over 30 locations across the United States and in the United Kingdom, we needed to provide a space for our partners to share best practices, industry news, and keep in touch with our colleagues who are constantly on the go. We have a very tight corporate culture and we were afraid that as we grow we would lose touch with one another.
4. Were there any special considerations your organization faced that influenced your choice of solutions (ie compliance, IT resources, security, mobile workforce, temporary workforce, or other challenge.)
We wanted a secure cloud based system that was mobile friendly but not “Facebook” for business. First and foremost we wanted a solution that was scalable and had a user friendly interface.
5. How was your experience deploying Jostle? Tell us about your launch!
The deployment of Jostle was by far the most straight-forward and simple of the three I have been involved in. From the initial set up of our intranet to the ongoing support from the Jostle team, we were surprised how smoothly the process was.
Our launch committee had a good time planning our Jostle launch day. We put together a series of countdown posters and launched a teaser video [EDITOR'S NOTE - This video is epic and the entire Jostle team LOVED it]
6. How did the arrival of Jostle impact your organization and/or it’s culture? Any big wins?
So far we are seeing strong adoption with over 95% of our people have activated their accounts and our engagement number continues to climb. We are really looking forward to how our Partners will use this to keep in touch with one another and continue to share best practices for managing their firms.
So - thanks for your thoughts, Rob. If you have a question for him, leave a comment or email us (info@jostle.me) and we'll hook you up.
We'll publish more of these discussions over the next few weeks. Some are practical, some are visionary. Every one of these conversations has taught us something. Tell us what they mean to you.
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