Stash Wealth

Stash Wealth is a financial services firm designed to serve the underserved: the HENRY (High Earner, Not Rich Yet). You see, traditional financial services want to service clients with $500,000, not with $500. The HENRYs are in a bit of a trap. High-end institutions won’t work with them yet, and HENRYs don’t know enough to use the low end systems for anything other than trial and error. Stash Wealth instead has the goal of changing the way young professionals think about – and behave with – their money, helping HENRYs achieve their tomorrow goals without sacrificing their today lives.

Stash Wealth established a high-touch, human-centered system of client intake, data ingestion, meetings and progress along a plan to help an underserved audience get their financial sh*t together, er, to support the entire personal finance journey across different stages of wealth. The question became how to integrate technology, both internal and client-facing, to scale the business for growth.

"The robos are of greater efficiency, and are engaged in a race to the bottom (whether they know it or not) where they’re functionally similar. The big firms scale by finding client commonalities, not by accentuating client differences. Neither could do what we’ve decided to do without breaking what they’ve already decided to do. Compared with either, we are of greater value. Our blue ocean is around our high-touch, relevant, human service, and we should swim to it, post-haste."

– From the Stash Wealth Business Strategy

It was my job to figure out the answer to that question. An audit of internal processes revealed the status of the company's current technical systems and their use cases. Talking to users about their likes, dislikes, and goals was essential for needs assessment. Stakeholder interviews with the founders revealed desires, assets, capabilities.

I take strategy development seriously, relying on frameworks defined by authors Michael Porter (Competitive Strategy) and Marty Neumeier (The Brand Gap). This input informed:

A business strategy. We defined our value proposition (we are humans first, and we treat our clients like humans first), our competition (robo advisers on one end, bigger advisement firms on the other), our differentiator (our high-touch, relevant, human service), and our activities that support these decisions. This gave us rules by which we could judge ideas or initiatives: if the fit the strategy, they were contenders. If not, into the icebox.

"We are the only financial advisors that exclusively serve HENRYs."

– From the Stash Wealth Brand Strategy

A brand strategy. We defined our mission, values, and vision, as well as the strategic (objective, scope, advantage) path to getting there. I developed a theme and direction as input to our brand designer; from there we extrapolated a design system for a web site that was key to realizing our brand position. Our brand was best displayed by the sassy, strong voice and tone embodied in external communications, and we leveraged that with visual design (applied to both digital and physical products), video, courses, and blog posts in that voice.

A technology strategy. We defined a series of enhancements to existing systems of technlogy, internal and external. First, we removed the technical barriers from obtaining signed digital documents. Then we cleaned up data ingestion by removing the manual process of re-typing captured data. And after that, we planned key components of the financial plan – the Money Map, visualizing income distribution for the customer; the customer's Magic Number, a number that displays discretionary income - money that can be spent without compormising the plan's goals - in software, and created the software design system to support it.

My role: Fractional CXO. I led the strategy, brand development, and delivery of the web site that fulfulled it. I designed software and systems for scale. And I continue to consult with my friends at Stash Wealth as they fight the good fight.

More Short Stories