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Male: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage the Senior Vice President of Organizational and Practice Development, Kirk Hewlett.
Kirk: Welcome. Welcome to Nashville, Tennessee Music City USA, and our Elevate, the Latin Berg Advisory symposium. Thank you for being here on the start of this January week. I know it might have been a little difficult with weather, and TSA and such to be here. So, we appreciate that effort, and we’re glad to host you here at the JW Marriott. We have 307 advisers here in attendance tonight, and that’s from across all five of the Latin Berg Independent Advisory and Brokerage Firms, or IABs as we call them. And that’s advisers from 39 different states. Our largest contingents are from Florida, and from California. So, welcome to everyone. It’s really great to be here in Music City USA. Now there’s some divergent history about where the term Music City USA came from. Some say that the radio disc jockey in the 50s came up with that name. A more unusual origin is that back in 1873, a group of Nashville magicians went to the court of Queen Victoria, and upon seeing their performance, she said, “These young people must surely come from a musical city.” And that may be the origin of Music City USA.
Music is not all the Nashville has to offer. While you’re here, try the culinary specialty of Nashville Hot Chicken. Have you had Nashville Hot Chicken before? That’s a mixed endorsement. It sounds like if Nashville Hot Chicken. So, there’s a bit of a myth and legend, and we don’t know how much it’s true about where Nashville Hot Chicken originated, but generally believed it came from the family of James Thornton Prince. Now Prince was quite a rascal. He was an unrepentant and unfaithful ladies’ man. And after a late night of carousing behind his girlfriend’s back, she decided she was gonna get a little revenge, and cooked him a fried chicken breakfast, and added lots of additional spices and peppers to that fried chicken. But what she thought was gonna be punishment ended up being just inspiration for prince. And he and his brothers modified that recipe to create the Hot Chicken that we now know today.
Their restaurant, Prince’s Hot Chicken opened in 1945. It’s still open today. You can go visit it while you’re here in Nashville. And we wanted to give you a little treat of Nashville. We left on your seat a Google cluster. Did you enjoy your Google cluster yet? You should. They’re very good [inaudible 00:05:00] Nashville original, and is actually considered the first combination candy bars. So it was the first candy bar that wasn’t just all chocolate. So the Google cluster has marshmallow, and you get Caramel roasted peanuts in it. So, really do enjoy that Google cluster. At the same time we are enjoying the partial government shutdown, which is its own type of cluster, but with more nuts.
So, while you’re here also, you may want to take home the quintessential Music City USA souvenir. How about a record album that you record yourself? If you’re just a few blocks from here, if go to Jack White’s Third Man Records, he has a voice-o-graph recording booth. Now, this is a vintage novelty that’s been lovingly restored to full condition where you can go in and record a 45 rpm vinyl record with your voice, whatever music you want to make. Now, the record shop will even let you borrow their acoustic guitar if you want to accompany yourself, or someone else in recording your own record. And this is rumored to be the only a working model of a voice-o-graph in the world right now. So, it’s a bit of a collector’s item as well. Well, I have had the honor over the last six months of leading a cross-company team that planned this event.
The objective of the Elevate Conference is to make this the most impactful advisory conference you will attend this year. And the planning team has a current and relevant curriculum that provides you actionable steps to elevate your advisory practice. So, I just wanna recommend a few to-dos’s for you to put on your Elevate agenda. First of all, get to know your fellow attendees. Now, and I’ll put this up on the screen. What you can see as each of the IAB is the attendees from that IAB are designated by a different colored lanyard, and that legend is here up on the screen, so you can tell who’s from where. So, get to know your fellow attendees. Second thing on your agenda, take time to talk with our 34 sponsor partners. Our partners here really make events like this possible with their financial support and educational content.
So, stop by their booze, say thank you, and learn about what they have to offer. And after tonight’s opening general session concludes, we’re going to have a reception in the marketplace along with a buffet. So, you have a chance to talk with all the sponsors then. Third thing, make sure you download the Latin Berg Conferences app. You can search any of the major app stores with Latin Berg Conferences to find that. Once you register, you can access the entire agenda, session descriptions, speaker bios, home office bios, session handouts, and more. It’s the go-to place for any information about the conference. When you download it, also turn on your notifications. Will actually ping you, notify you about events going on. If there’s any change of schedule, we can notify you through that means. And the final to-do for your agenda is to make a connection to one of our Link to the future participants.
Now, Link to the Future. This is a new program that links today’s independent financial advisers with tomorrow’s financial professionals. So, here at the conference with 18 students, three of those students are from nearby universities. They applied for and won a scholarship to come to the Elevate Conference, and to the Link to the Future program. Now, also as part of Link to the Future, we invited college-aged family members of advisers to attend the conference. We have 15 students who are recent graduates who are with adviser family connections joining us here as well. So, over the next three days, these students will attend special sessions, and networking meetings to provide them information on career opportunities in financial services and also insight just into a top industry financial trends. And 18 of you volunteered to be hosts and guidance for our Link attendees. So, thank you very much for doing that. Very appropriate as this is the volunteer state for you to do that. Now, Link participants can be identified by their white lanyards, inscribed with red lettering that says #lttf. They can also be identified by the fact that earlier when I was talking about 45 rpm vinyl records, they had no idea what that was. Never had heard about that. So, we have some of our Link students here in the audience tonight. Can you stand up so we can recognize you our Link to the Future students? There they are, what a [inaudible 00:09:39]?
Thank you very much. So note where they’re at. Make sure you say hello, welcome them. Get to know them as well. So let’s begin tonight’s program. 2018 is going to be a very exciting year. The Latin Berg Network has a number of new programs, and services, and technologies. We’ll be introducing to you in the coming 12 months, and we’ll take some time during the general sessions tomorrow, Monday and on Tuesday to tell you more about some of those. But tonight, we want to give you a sneak peek, and an exciting new technology and client engagement platform. So please welcome Doreen Griffith, Latin Berg’s Chief Information Technology Officer. Come on Doreen.
Doreen: Thank you, Kirk. It’s always nice to listen to Kirk opening up a conference. I never know what can come out of his mouth, but always a tidbit of information that is very enjoyable. Hello everyone. My name is Doreen Griffith, and good evening. I am so very excited to be able to spend a few minutes of your time today to share the efforts that have gone on to reinvent the online adviser experience. When we decided that we wanted to modernize not only the adviser experience, but offer a client online experience, we wanted to start with a clean slate. Start from scratch. We wanted to partner with industry leading thought leaders, but first and foremost, we wanted to engage you in your assistance for information on how to do this. So last year, during many of the conferences, there was group sessions that many of you attended. Some of you even gave us a couple hours of your time to have individual interviews, and I thank you for that.
That information was collated, documented by the vendor, and brought back to the Latin Berg cross-discipline team. Now, many of you that participated last year may think you’re off the hook. Well, I have to tell you, we’re gonna have a pilot here by the end of the first quarter, and you may be getting a phone call. So with that, I have some very exciting news that I wanna tell you. We’re moving to the cloud, not the dark clouds, but the white clouds. We’ve had enough of dark clouds, with whether we’re going to the white cloud. We’ve chosen to leverage Microsoft Azure. Couple of reasons, and I won’t get too techie because I’ll go down a rabbit hole, and nobody will understand me anyway. High availability and scale faster, but that basically means the portal will [inaudible 00:12:32]