Murdock: We didn't practice a lot of things in the office. We kind of wing it; not completely – we're very calculated in our decisions. But some of the things we dove into, like hiring more employees outside of the home office, we had to then figure out how to adapt to. So we started hiring a lot of employees that are not in the office. And then what do you do to track what they're doing and how they're doing it? And one of the things that we adopted was a project management tool called Asana. There's several of them out there. ClickUp, Mondays, Trello. But it really made a huge difference when you can track a case from start to finish. You can add tasks to that case, you can assign those tasks, you can assign due dates on all of those, you know who's responsible for what you can do, and spreadsheets that show how frequently people are getting things done on time.

It really took away a lot of the pressure of feeling like you had to micromanage your employees that are now all over the place. You can't walk into their office and see if they're scrolling through Facebook. So it also gave a little bit of freedom to our employees too, to say, as long as you're getting your work done, do what you need to do. You don't need to check in constantly on that kind of stuff as long as you're available and you're getting your work done. So there were big bumps in the road, but we found a solution that really helped us get through that.

Heckert: Would you say your office, between the partners, the brothers and your parents, are all over the place and you have no traditional bricks and mortar?

Murdock: We do. We have a pretty sizable office in Salt Lake City, but we're all very spread out.

Heckert: So how many employees remote, and how many show up at the Salt Lake City office?

Murdock: There's only three in the Salt Lake City office now. I mean, we bring clients there and we do events there and things like that. But there's only three that are in the office in Salt Lake, and they don't necessarily even go into the office all the time.

Heckert: And how many remote?

Murdock: About 13.

Heckert: OK. So, Dana, what didn't work?

Mitchell: It's really hard. Some things are so much better in person. We had a lot of trouble maintaining our relationships with our centers of influence virtually. It's such a trust relationship, and we found digitally we were keeping in touch and going back to moving away from paper; our firm is completely digital. I don't have actual files or things to mail. We hired a marketing consultant, and I posed the question of, “I'm really having trouble developing new centers of influence and really gaining that relationship.” And what he said to me changed a lot for that challenge. And it was, “Sometimes you just have to put something physical in someone's hand.” It wasn't a fact find; it wasn't any work-related documents. But we bought these really beautiful packages, and we did it to some of our best clients too. We sent them notebooks, pens – he had all sorts of ideas of what to put in their hands, but we put in specifically something relating to that relationship.

So if you've got an accountant – we have got one that we know he really likes a certain type of pen. So we sent him a pen. He drinks a lot of coffee and when he comes to our office, we always get him Starbucks. We figured out how to buy branded Starbucks cards. So it's a Starbucks gift card, but it says, "Let me buy you a coffee with compliments of Basis Wealth." Our logo's on it. It's very slick, it's very expensive, but totally worth it. And so we sent those out to him, and he loved it. And so sometimes just putting that physical thing in someone's hand and being really purposeful about it helped with those centers of influence relationships. But we continue to struggle with that. So most of my meetings are virtual, even when people book an in-person meeting and I come into the office and I even have my dress pants on and not going to wear heels, but I put nicer shoes on, they email me and say, "Can we just do this virtual?"

So many in-person meetings turn into virtual, but the ones that actually happen in person are the center of influence ones. Because it's just on a computer screen, it just isn't the same.

Murdock: One of the things that's funny that I've noticed with that is that people have wanted to have the information conveyed to them digitally in a Zoom or something like that. And then they want to have a social get-together separately. So I have clients that really want that separation. They say, "Yeah, let's go to lunch. I don't want to talk about anything related to work." But then we'll sit down and have a Zoom and go over the material.

Kestle: For me, I think we overestimated a bunch of stuff and painted with too broad a stroke. Do we go all digital? It was almost as if the pandemic would never end, and we were very slow to come back and we had to play a lot of catch up for the people who really did want and need those in-person interactions. So that bottleneck really hurt us. But looking at all of the activities that could possibly be leveraged with technology versus all the ones that are high value, that need to be in person and really taking some time to define where is that separation, not just on a broad practice basis, but even in the individual groups and demographics within the book is something that we've done now to try and go forward with some more purpose and not paint with so broad of a stroke.

Things like Typeform digital template forms – it's super easy to create a digital form these days. It's super cheap to do it. And we just created a bunch of them. Those are tasks that usually we'd pay someone to do, or I would have to go out and drive out to do. Nobody wants to see me to go through these things. They're happy to do it in their robe on a Saturday morning and with their coffee. And then there's other things where they do need to see me, and we do need to interact. So really trying to find out where we can leverage technology for those mundane, time-sucker tasks, and then really focusing and leveraging our time on the high-value things is what came of it all.