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By Paige Jones Showcase

Advisor Website Showcase: Auctus Advisors

12 minute read
Advisor Website Showcase: Auctus Advisors Featured Image

January has been a great start to 2019 for Twenty Over Ten! We’ve had the chance to work with some awesome clients this month and are always excited and grateful for the opportunity to take new websites live. 

This week, we got to speak with David Miller, managing partner and Chief Investment Officer at Auctus Advisors. Auctus is a Charlotte-based firm that specializes in comprehensive life style and legacy planning for affluent individuals and families including entrepreneurs, c-level executives, and professional athletes. To wrap up this exciting project, we are going to dive into the details of what it was like working with us to build an advisor website.

Framework

Fresnel

plan

Tailored

Tell us about Auctus Wealth and how you got started.

We launched the firm in 2018 as a spinout from a multi business line advisory firm, MBL Advisors, A McColl Brothers Lockwood Company. I spun out the staff and clients moving over $100 million in assets but remained with Charles Schwab as our custodian. We made the move to control our culture and our process and to become the Best, not the Biggest. We wanted to provide clients with a more customized process, better technology, and increased efficiency with the spinout and feel we have done so.  

How did you choose the name “Auctus Wealth,” and what does it mean to your company?

We chose the name Auctus, because it means “To Grow” in Latin.  We thought long and hard on a name that would help define our culture which we built around the principle of growth. With clients its growing trust, growing wealth, and growing legacies; with our associates its growing their knowledge, their skillsets, their careers and their passion for the industry. We also launched AuctusGives to Grow Philanthropically and give back to the communities that are important to our clients.

You have very specific niche serving entrepreneurs, high income earners, and professional athletes. What made you want to work with these groups, and how did this focus influence your vision for your website design?

Our work with high net worth and ultra-high net worth clients has uniquely positioned us to work with these subsets of clients. Clients want expertise and execution and Auctus is able to provide that given our years of experience with these particular groups of professionals. We wanted our website to highlight our expertise in these areas but also show our broad expertise in customized and comprehensive planning and our proprietary investment process.  

We love the introductory video you’ve included on your “Our Difference” page your site. Tell us more about the video creation process and working with Investopedia to create it.

Investopedia has been a great partner of Auctus. We are an “Investopedia Preferred Advisor” because our answers to their questions are highly rated and followed by their clients and page viewers. One of the “Preferred Advisor” benefits is a marketing video filmed at your office. The filming process was great—the crew was very professional, and they shot all of the footage in about 30 minutes. The video came together well and showcased many of the characteristics that we believe make Auctus such an exceptional company.

We love the #AuctusGives initiative. Can you tell us more about it? What inspired you to implement this? What’s the Birthday Card Campaign?

In keeping with the idea of “Auctus” we felt philanthropic growth was an incredibly important part of our culture. We want the Auctus Team to be engaged in giving back, and we want our clients to know that we are supporting initiatives that they care about.  #AuctusGives gives 10% of our corporate profits to charities that our clients nominate or suggest. Our team then does due diligence on the charities and we divide the resources.  Because our client base is global these charities can be local, national, or global in reach, and we vet each one thoroughly.

The Birthday Card Campaign highlights our “official” charity for the year. We have always given custom chocolates to our female clients for their birthdays and wanted to do something for our male clients as well. Each year we design a custom birthday card and make a donation for each of our male clients to the #AuctusGives charity for that year. Our goal is not only to donate directly to the charity, but to raise awareness on behalf of the charity.  

We know you’re using Redtail CRM for your CRM. Tell us what do you like about the software and how has it made life easier for you?

Redtail has made the firm more efficient and has allowed us to create a workflow that makes for a very client service-oriented process.  It also syncs with our custodian (Schwab) so we maintain the live feed and can view portfolios easily and enhance our asset management capabilities. RedTail has many integration partners that we use here at Auctus which further enhances our investment and planning process. It also allows us to increase our capacity to add new clients without diluting our quality.

Why did you choose to redesign your website?

Our previous website was good, but frankly we launched it quickly as we had other priorities during our spin out. A website redesign was a great opportunity to take really focus on the story that we wanted to tell. We wanted our website visitors to really get to know us from our website.  We wanted images from our offices (our conference room and lobby), and we wanted a video to bring life to the site. We spent a lot of thought on how to communicate our highly specialized process. We are anything but a commodity and our process is different, and we think better. We wanted our website to show our high-end approach but still feel welcoming to visitors.

What is your number one favorite thing about your new Twenty Over Ten website?

That’s a difficult question as we like so many things about our website and the team at Twenty Over Ten is so awesome. I think my favorite thing is the feedback from our current clients. Our clients know our process and our firm and have said that the site does a good job of helping you understand what it’s like to be an Auctus client. It showcases why we are different and why our processes help create superior outcomes.

What was the hardest part about designing your website? Was anything easier than you expected?

The hardest part was getting everything we wanted to articulate into a small and readable platform. Statistics on page views and readership clearly show that more isn’t always better. Because our approach is so thorough and intricate it was difficult to boil it down to a few crucial characteristics we wanted to portray on the site. We normally spend an entire meeting explaining our processes and all that goes into them, so communicating this in a meaningful way with only a couple of lines and images was a challenge.

The design portion was actually easier than we anticipated. We thought we wanted a multipage site but the designers helped us see the advantages of the scrolling site format that we now use.  We did our best to articulate our vision and our designer took it, ran with it, and improved upon our original vision. The process ran incredibly smoothly.

What’s the biggest piece of advice you have for advisors looking to redesign their website?

Make sure the site tells YOUR story. There are thousands of firms and thousands of sites, and for the most part, they say the same thing, use the same images, and are very generic.  Consumers are looking to learn about you by visiting your website, so make sure you spend the time and money to tell them about you and why you are different. Use imagery of your offices, videos of your team, and have the site tell your story. Otherwise, you are basically just checking the box and saying “yes, we have a website.” Your website should make an impact, not just check a box.

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