A CRM for Stocks: GPM Growth Investor’s Strategy for Effectively Managing $300 Million of Client Assets
| Company Name | GPM Growth Investors, Inc. |
| Industry | Financial/ Registered Investment Advisors |
| Scope of Business | $300 Million for 200+ private clients |
| Benefits of Implementation | |
| Applications | Data Tracking and Analysis, Data Calculations, Accounting, Project Management |
| Subscription Plan | Professional |
| Scale of Use | 5 Internal Users |
| Frequency of Use | Everyday |
— Timothy Griffin, founder and managing partner @ GPM Growth Investors, Inc.
With Ragic acting as a CRM for stocks, the team at GPM Growth Investors are able to confidently make investing decisions in a timely manner— and in the world of stock trading and financial investments, data, knowledge, and timing are everything.
These investment decisions collectively cost hundreds of millions of dollars, affecting hundreds of families in the Bloomfield, Michigan area, and several other states and countries. Intrigued with how they do it? Let’s dive in!
The GPM Growth Investors team, with Timothy Griffin at the center
Who is GPM Growth Investors, Inc.?
The US investment sector can generally be split into 2 parts: 1. The sales side, and 2. The advisory side. The sales side comprises of companies like Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, and Merrill Lynch, who largely make profit on a commission basis. On the other hand, the advisory side consists of investment advisors who earn on a fee basis, similar to a subscription, instead of by commission.
Compared to large wealth management companies like Vanguard and Fidelity, GPM’s personal touch and feel make them stand out. They cultivate a deep and personal connection with each family and customer. They aren’t just one of the hundreds of employees working in a giant firm, where clients can easily feel like another account number rather than a valued relationship.
In contrast to other regional investment advisors in the area, they differentiate themselves through investment philosophy, relationship, and integrity. Plus, customers know that the GPM team themselves also invest in the same equities they recommend, which shows that they too have a stake in the same investment risk. Most of their clients are gained through referral, a testament to the trust and satisfaction they build with each family they serve. Rather than relying on flashy advertisements or high-pressure tactics, their reputation grows organically through word of mouth.
The Challenge
GPM subscribes to 5-6 different research data platforms such as Factset and Finviz that are independent of each other. They also refer to articles, stories, and information from resources such as The Wall Street Journal and Morningstar. All in all, they refer to about 16 external sources for every stock in order to gain access to critical and timely information needed to make informed investment decisions.
Now let’s say that you’re a portfolio manager for hundreds of millions of dollars. You check stock performances on a daily basis across 16 different sites, perform calculations, take notes, and make comparisons with other stocks and industries to stay on top of the market’s volatility. Doing this for 1 or 2 stocks might not seem like much, but performing this routine across hundreds of stocks that involve 5 years’ worth of data trends on a daily basis can quickly become an overwhelming, tedious, time consuming process. With the hundreds of stocks available, it wouldn’t be strange to get lost and lose your trail of thought every now and then.
At first, the GPM team tried to use Excel spreadsheets as a means to consolidate information from various external sites for each stock profile. However, they soon found its limitations: Every search required manual filtering and sorting, and every link needed to be searched up and pasted on Excel— making the process time-consuming and inefficient. While spreadsheets are useful for basic calculations, they fell short in managing the broader scope of what GPM needed, such as linking to external sites in a more efficient way, taking notes, and uploading PDF files, among others. Moreover, spreadsheets provided no way to track who made changes or when those changes occurred, making spreadsheets an unideal long-term solution.
The Solution
Eager to find a better way to manage their data and workflow, Tim looked to Capterra for a no code solution that could work and found Ragic, which turned out to be exactly what they were looking for.
— Timothy, GPM Growth Investors
How did they do it?
Tim designed the GPM stock database to be like a CRM for stocks. He created a record for each stock, organizing them by ticker symbol; and upon selecting a ticker symbol, team members will be able to find information that can be segregated into 5 main parts:
1. Key metrics such as last prices, price changes, and the company’s EPS for the last 5 years, imported from their main data source
2. GPM’s own computations based on the imported key metrics
3. GPM-encoded fields such as upside potential and target prices
4. External site links
5. Stock notes and file uploads
How does it work?
Every day, the GPM team would import 5 years’ worth of data from their primary vendor into Ragic, updating the information for about 250 companies. This process takes about 1 minute to complete. The system then automatically calculates key GPM metrics based on the formulas they have entered, providing them with a reliable source of truth.
On the other hand, Tim also used formulas to generate links by referencing the ticker symbol on another field, instead of looking them up and pasting them one by one. With over 300 stock records and 16 external sites, the GPM team only needed to set the formulas for these links 16 times, while Ragic automatically “calculates” and generates these links for each stock. Clicking on the external site links would bring the team member straight to that stock’s information on the data resources’ websites.
For example, say there have been some discussions about Apple during a seminar and I want to quickly verify Apple information and see whether new events have impacted similar industry players. When I click into my “AAPL” record, I can instantly navigate to Apple and its peers’ information on various data sites like The Wall Street Journal, Morningstar, Factset, and FinViz, without having to manually weave through and sort data like previously.
Team members are then able to efficiently quantify any upside potential they find and record it onto the database, along with other notes and observations. As the managing partner and founder of the company, Tim has some data subscriptions that others may not be subscribed to. Whenever he finds anything interesting or worth sharing, he’s able to easily download the article and upload the PDF file onto Ragic for team members to see.
By utilizing Ragic’s shared views and fixed filters, GPM team members can quickly navigate to pre-defined groups of stocks such as healthcare companies, chip manufacturers, chip and equipment companies, focus sectors, and so on.
Why is this important?
If you’ve experienced trading stocks, you know how a single stock can have a certain price at one point in time and another price a few seconds later. That’s because stocks are extremely volatile financial instruments that react to events such as product developments, market speculation, and geopolitical crises. A $100,000 investment can be worth $90,000 or $120,000 in just a couple hours. Because of this volatility, it is generally important for stock investors to obtain credible information as quickly as possible, in a timely manner. Otherwise, it may be too late!
Instead of allowing opportunities to pass, the GPM Growth Investors team are all geared up to take action, and having a stock database on Ragic gives them instant information and increased confidence in the investment decisions they make on a day-to-day basis.
BUT it wasn't all smooth sailing...
As it is most cases, not all employees may be onboard with the idea of using a new software, and some resistance is natural. For the GPM team, some members may not be as tech savvy and as enthusiastic to learn Ragic; but with Tim’s help and guidance, the team was able to eventually adopt the software into their daily workflow.
By designing a database workflow that boosts efficiency, Tim was able to show other team members how using Ragic can significantly help their day-to-day tasks. Today, all 5 team members are now accustomed to using the GPM Database Tim built on Ragic.
The helpful support team
A Ragic user since late 2022, Tim has submitted a total of 29 support tickets over the last 3 years for the feature help and questions he had about Ragic; and in this span of time, he has passed along several heart-warming compliments to the consistent, helpful support team:
“Please pass along that I think the Ragic support team is refreshingly fantastic!!!”
“You are always on top of things!!!”
“Works perfect. I learn something from you every time!”
“This is a super platform!”
The responsiveness and reliability of the support team in understanding customer needs and delivering helpful responses in less than 24 hours has been a key factor in their satisfaction with the Ragic platform.
What else do they use Ragic for?
Although the GPM Growth team largely uses Ragic as a stock CRM, they have sheets dedicated for other tasks as well, such as project management, accounting, compliance, and quarterly process tracking. These are used extensively by their team.
Their Digital Evolution and Tech Stack
The GPM team is a company who is not afraid to try new things and keep up with the times. Having started on Alpha 4 before Microsoft even existed, they worked on this platform for 15 to 20 years before migrating to the Microsoft suite such as Sharepoint. This move was necessary for the team since Alpha 4 was workstation-based and could not get into the cloud. As Tim stated, “It just didn't keep up with the times and at that point we'd grown to be large enough that we were better off getting software as a service.”
With regards to portfolio management, they started on an unnamed portfolio management software that they described as “no good,” which prompted their transfer to Orion for wealth management shortly after. For their stock database, they moved from using Excel spreadsheets to using Ragic— a fantastic journey we’ve seen in the earlier section.
GPM Growth Investment’s current tech stack includes the complete Microsoft Suite (including Outlook, Teams, and Sharepoint), Orion (wealth management), Wealthbox (CRM), Wix (website management), and Ragic (stock database). From their journey and current tech stack, we can easily conclude that GPM is a team that does not settle for subpar platforms, constantly working to find the most suitable solution for their business. At Ragic, we feel honored and proud to be part of their tech stack.
The Results
From the old ways of manually sorting through external sources in order to gain information, the GPM team can now efficiently gain instant knowledge through their GPM Stock Database on Ragic.
By efficiently accessing critical information, the GPM Growth Investors team are then able to make confident investment decisions that affect over 200 families where $300 Million are on the line.
Isn’t it amazing how GPM was able to creatively design a stock CRM on Ragic? Imagine the other possibilities!
Category: Case Studies > Financial
