Group Think

She kindly introduced herself, mentioning she was a member liaison for a mother’s group and suggested I look it up online. So I did.

Well, this being New York City, the mother’s group that I found online and joined is nothing like the small neighborhood group of a few dozen women my mother belonged to when I was growing up. No, this group has more than 1,800 women.

Of course, I will never meet most of those women in person, but the online discussion board has become my sounding board and research library. Nearly any question I have relating to my daughters, family or simply living downtown gets posed to this group of women. For example, when I needed a pediatric dentist, a suggestion of a scooter for my toddler, temporary help to fill in for a sick nanny, a recommendation for a babysitter in Utah or a hotel for an upcoming vacation, among many other queries, I turned to them. Not because I couldn’t find reviews or tips for any of these things elsewhere but because I know that these women are in some way in the same boat, and why not leverage their experiences and knowledge to improve my own?

Since PLANADVISER’s inception, we have tried to offer you a similar sense of community, something we continue to work out, whether by including many of you in articles or starting discussions on LinkedIn and Twitter. In this issue, we’ve expanded our research to do that, as well. Each year, we survey advisers to understand how you work with recordkeepers and investment managers and to get insight into how you run your practices. In this issue, we bring you the most detailed results of your perceptions and ratings of recordkeepers and investment managers than we ever have before. Beginning on page 38, you can see just what your peers think about investment managers, individual mutual funds and recordkeepers.

As we do in our sister publication, PLANSPONSOR, for the first time in PLANADVISER, we bring you individual recordkeeper charts and rankings in addition to the familiar “Best in Class” or “Top 5” charts. You will note that on the individual recordkeeping rankings, there are two pie charts, one showing advisers’ favorability of a particular recordkeeper and one displaying advisers’ experience with that recordkeeper. I think it is important to note that we only used the favorability rating from an adviser if they had some experience working with the provider. That way, the rating does not reflect hearsay or general industry perception but the opinions of those actually conducting business with a particular vendor.

I encourage you to review the rankings to see whether your experiences match those of your peers, or if perhaps there is a high-ranking provider unfamiliar to you. I look forward to your feedback.

Continuing on my “group think” theme of this issue, our cover story deals with inactive or automatically enrolled participants. You know who they are—the ones for whom set-it-and-forget-it does not refer to the investment in a target-date fund (TDF) but instead to their action, or lack thereof, in the retirement plan. “Wake Up!” (page 32) discusses ways to engage those participants, or at least increase their retirement readiness.

As many Baby Boomer advisers start to think about exit strategies, others are looking to expand their businesses, whether through hires or mergers and acquisitions. “Growing Pains” (page 58) discusses points advisers should consider when planning for business growth. Also in this issue, “Leading the Way” (page 64) addresses best practices for investment committees—an area ripe for group dynamics challenges.