Author: marionvermazen

I am a traveler, hiker, avid reader, Sun alumnus, computer geek, Spanish and French language student, knitter and genealogist. I am retired after working for almost 30 years in the Computer Industry. I live in Reno, Nevada with my husband Duke.

Shannon’s BDay Party

Shannon will be 21 next Friday! She was home for the weekend so we had friends over for dinner and a birthday party last night.  I went through all my old pictures and found a bunch of pictures of her over the last 21 years. I went to Kinko’s and had them  blown up to 8×10 and I put them up on the walls all over the house with the happy birthday signs. I know that every parent of a 21 year old says this, but it seems like only yesterday that she was just a cute little kid with lots of personality. I must be in denial because I put 18 candles on her cake!  I am so proud of the adult she has become. It is just so amazing how fast 21 years go by.

It was great to see my friends too. They have all know Shannon since she was born.  Whenever we entertain I always realize how much I enjoy it and  that we should do it more often. When you are really busy you tend to think you just don’t have time but  it really isn’t that hard. I just have to make it happen. I am reminded of a great piece I read by Tom Stienstra in his book California Fishing. I just found it on his web site. It is called Beating the Time Trap.  Basically what he says is that if you enjoy doing things you will only find time for them if you schedule them. Stienstra is talking about outdoors activities but I think it is true for other things like entertaining too. If I want to entertain friends more I just need to schedule it.

Book Club

I went to book club last Tuesday night. The book was Being Dead by Jim Crace. This will be  a short post. Following the principal of if you haven’t got something nice to say don’t say anything,  I haven’t got much to say about this book. It is the story of how a couple in the their mid 50s are murdered on the beach, how their bodies decay over the days until they are found and how their lives led up to the point of their murder. There is no doubt in my mind that Crace is an amazing,  poetic and lyrical writer. But even if he writes beautifully, when he is writing about what happens to the body after death I just don’t need it. Yuck! I must say though that I finished the book. I have a personal rule about not finishing books that I don’t  like but in this case I really wanted to finish the book even though I hated it. I attribute this to morbid curiosity much like how you can’t stop staring at an accident when you drive past it even though you know you shouldn’t be interested in someone else’s misfortune.

PortfolioMinder Sales and Support

a few weeks ago we previewed PortfolioMinder at the conference. It was a huge success! There was a phenomenal amount of interest. I’ve never done so many demos in all my life. There were 5 of us demonstrating PortfolioMinder and we were busy almost all the time.

I told Duke that this is a good news, bad news situation. We may very well sell a lot of PortfolioMinder when we launch. That is the good news. The bad news is that all those people will need set up and support and its my job to provide wow customer care for all of our customers. I guess that’s not really bad news it is just a great opportunity.

We plan to use a unique approach for PortfolioMinder Customer Care and Sales. We will build a PortfolioMinder Sales and Customer Care Network. Advisers in the PortfolioMinder Sales and Customer Care Network will be Intuit agents who sell PortfolioMinder, and provide pre and post sale support for PortfolioMinder. Agents will work on a contract basis and will be paid for their services on a per case basis with pay per case dependent on customer satisfaction and agent responsiveness. Sales compensation will be based on the agent’s PortfolioMinder sales. Agents will be expected to bill Intuit monthly for their services at preapproved rates.

My vision is that financial planners who are either building their practice or want to augment their current practice will support and sell PortfolioMinder and be paid for their services. One of the wonderful things about this is that these people can do this work from anywhere. We have no geographical location requirements.

We want to find a few awesome people to start providing these services. If you know of anyone who might be interested drop me an email or call me at Intuit at 650-944-3919.

Sam Francisco Bay shoreline

One thing that has always surprised me about the San Francisco Bay area is how Little the bay shoreline is used by the public for recreation and as expensive housing. I suppose it is because so much of the shoreline is industrial  You would still  think that there would be parks and restaurants and housing ringing the bay and on the whole there isn’t. Don’t get me wrong there are lots of places where you can go for a hike out by the bay but  If you want solitude the bay is often the place to find it.

I like to go places I’ve never been before. This evening Duke and I went for a hike at Oyster Bay in San Leandro just south of the Oakland airport. It was a beautiful night. The sun was setting over the peninsula and we had the park to ourselves. We sat on a bench overlooking the bay, watched the planes and enjoyed the sunset. The trail goes right along the shore. The park is still being developed and used to be a landfill. On the shore side it backs up to a recycling facility. I bet that 100 years form now this and many other areas along the bay will be parks and housing.  I have to believe that some day the San Francisco bay shoreline will be  a desirable address but it sure isn’t now.

Andy Gluck Reviews PortfolioMinder

I have talked to a lot of financial advisors lately and many of them say that product reviews influence their decision making process when they are shopping for software. The names of one or two reviewers  come up consistently when I ask advisors to whom they pay attention. Andy Gluck Is a  name that I hear mentioned consistently.

Recently Gluck wrote  a column for the Investment Advisor magazine and website about Intuit and PortfolioMinder. The column was mainly about Intuit and what it means for Intuit to be entering the financial planning software market. Gluck said  Intuit’s entry into this market could be "a pivotal development in the evolution of the independent advisor segment of the financial services industry". I would definitely agree with that assessment. I only have four months of experience at Intuit, all of it working on PortfolioMinder, but I am convinced that Intuit is in this for the long haul.

I am still reading the book The Innovator’s Solution by Christensen and Raynor.  By reading it one can really see how the PortfolioMinder product fits into Intuit’s strategy for  disruptive innovation and  customer driven innovation. This is where Gluck gets it wrong about PortfolioMinder. He said that his panel of  "advisors who attended the Web demo—mostly sophisticated advisors who
have attended demos of several other PMS applications with me in the
past—reacted. It is stunning to see how simplistic the system is "

If you read The Innovators Solution or listen to what Intuit says about PortfolioMinder you will see that Intuit is not making the mistake of trying to compete with the high cost end full featured, expensive solutions that alredy exist. PortfolioMinder instead is designed as a relatively low priced entry level  solution that is targetted at customers who don’t want or can’t afford the complex expensive solutions that are available today. PortfolioMinder essentially competes against non consumption not against existing well entrenched products.

We have a ways to go before PortfolioMinder is ready for release but I’ve talked to a lot of advisors in the past few weeks and I believe we will find a ready market among the advisors who don’t have a solution today. Gluck missed the point when he picked his panel of reviewers for PortfolioMInder but he got it rightr when he said that "If Intuit— ….. —can fulfill its mission in this little corner of the
world, independent advisors will be better off." I also believe that PortfoliomInder will help Intuit’s Quicken group become a growth engine for the compnay. I am excited to be a part of it.