"The first thing we open, the last thing we close": Why Marloo became BlueSky's operating system

BlueSky Independent Wealth Managers has just marked ten years in business. Using Marloo has changed how the firm is thinking about the next ten.

BlueSky director and chartered financial planner Kevin Gribben says the shift in his thinking came from bringing the entire firm onto the one platform. Until recently it relied on a collection of tools that did not communicate with each other. Now everything runs through Marloo: meeting summaries, task management, document generation, client communications. All seven members of the team are using it every day.

"More and more is being done now within Marloo, which means that's our first go-to place in the morning and our last place in the evening as well, because it provides such a good base and ecosystem for all that we have to do for the client."

The efficiency gains, Kevin says, come from no longer dipping in and out of disconnected systems.

"We're very bad in this industry for having so many tools in our kit bag, but when you're logging out of one and going into another, nothing really talks to each other, and that takes up time. We've gained so many efficiencies by not dipping in and out of different tools."

Before Marloo, BlueSky was already recording meetings, using transcripts and trying to harvest and distribute tasks from them. But the summaries their existing tools produced were too generic. Advisers were spending too much time working through a transcript just to recall what had been agreed, and tasks were being managed across separate systems. Nine months into using Marloo, that approach already feels, as Kevin puts it, "quite backwards".

Now, after a client meeting, Kevin steps away while Marloo gets to work on post-meeting communications, generating tasks and then assigning them to the team.

"Usually by the time I go for a coffee and come back, the summary is ready, a draft email to the client is written and they have that within 30 minutes of the meeting."

With team members working across Scotland and England, Kevin's supervisory role is much simpler. Having full visibility of tasks across the whole firm, watching them progress from to-do, to in-progress, to completed, means he can keep an eye on how things are moving without having to ask.

BlueSky's practice manager has also built out a library of task templates covering its most repeated workflows: each has a set of sub-tasks that can be adjusted as needed.

"Marloo frees up mind space. It allows us to concentrate on the actual planning, rather than whether someone's remembered to do a specific part of that task. Having that visual there gives you the confidence that it's getting done."

Previously, suitability reports were complex to track and took hours to produce. A paraplanner, who would typically spend two hours on a report, can now work from a Marloo draft generated in a few minutes, drawing on the paraplanner request form, the fact find, and product illustrations. Kevin says the drafts come back about 90% accurate, with only a few edits needed on a ten-page report.

BlueSky is saving 10 hours on the 5 suitability reports it produces in a typical week. That recouping of time means it can take on a lot more clients, without adding to the team.

"Before Marloo we had reached our peak client capacity. We can absolutely see that our capacity as advisers will double, and therefore the cost, the time, the effort that's put into integrating Marloo across the firm is going to be helping us generate twice the amount of revenue."

"What I love about Marloo is that its team wants to make this the best in the business, whether it's document generation, tracking tasks, meeting summaries. I don't feel as if they've just perfected one element and added mediocre things on. It looks as if it's best in class for all the different individual elements, which is impressive."