A little inside baseball on something that has been a long time coming: We launched a newly redesigned RWM corporate site. In a firm anniversary post last year, I discussed why it was important to “Recognize your weaknesses;” our corporate website was the weakest link among all of our online properties. This was long overdue.
You can use off the shelf or custom-built sites — we tried both. We looked at lots of aspects of others sites we really liked, But our business model was so different from a lot of the industry, and the inspiration was more on look and feel and less on functionality. Much of the thinking behind this is somewhat unique.
Why do I claim our business model is different? For the decade prior to our launch in 2013, I was generating high quality insightful content and giving it away for free. Josh too pre-dates the launch of RWM by many years (Ben was writing before he joined us). We not only continued this model after we launched, we expanded it dramatically – with blogs, podcasts (MiB, Animal Spirits, The Compound Show), a You Tube channel, and too many social media outlets to track.
Perhaps our biggest difference is that we don’t have traditional finance salespeople — all of our clients “self-select” and reach out to us. This creates a very different dynamic for both us as an entity and them as a client.
Compare this to the traditional broker-dealer approach. Our genesis as a firm traces back to the idea that we did not want to sell anything to anyone; the goal was to offer advice and counsel, rather than to pitch and close. To become an RWM client requires a multiple of steps designed to ensure that we are good fit for the client and they are a good fit for us. I consider it an exorbitant privilege that our process is geared towards finding clients that we are a good fits for, and are good fits for us.
Some of the photos are placeholders, waiting for us to be able to get out and take our own snapshots (and yes, some of the photos are clichéd). The individual photos, the team shot, some on the top carousel, are just there until we can replace them much better snaps with our own creation.
Lots of thought went into how this site fits into our process. One day, I will have to discuss some of the tech and techniques that went into this. For now, this is version 1.0. I already have a long list of items tee’d up for RWM site 1.5.
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