Testimonials

From a Family Office Member Firm - Midwest Region:  "AUG is *the* way to meet your Advent peers, to get information about industry issues, and discuss solutions. The people of AUG have worked their way through most of your problems and have the scars to prove it.  The community is very helpful and active. I find the newsletters, forums, meet-ups, and calls to be a great resource across the whole firm.  The AUG membership easily pays for itself in networking, support, and education."

From a Member - Midwest Region:  "I wanted to let you know that joining AUG in 2010 was an excellent decision!  We are a small RIA growing fast ($300M AUM within first 2 years).  As a new Operations Manager it is extremely helpful to draw on the years of experience of the other members in AUG.  I especially appreciate the group meetings in Chicago where we collaborate on issues, discuss best practices, and get to know each other.   During one of these events I met an Operations Director from another firm and she invited me to visit her office as I wanted to see how another operations department ran.  Within the following quarter my assistant manager and I visited her firm asking her to cover the following agenda:

• Organization Overview / Review of Operations / Job duty break downs
• Work Flow / Job training/cross training / Job/Team metamorphosis through growth
• What you know now and you wish you knew then
• APX / CRM / Business Intelligence Reporting from Advent
• How do you keep track of all the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, and event driven “To Do’s”
• If you were small and nimble what would you try to accomplish?

We also covered departmental personality profiles as her firm also did this type of testing on new employees.  What a great experience!  I was able to leverage many things I learned into our 2011 project planning.  Because of this trip I was better able to share a vision of our Operations Department and our direction with management.  I’m confident we’re on an excellent track and have clarity of the bigger picture.

I would tell new members you get out of AUG what you put into.  The people who join AUG seem to be wired in a similar way of sharing best practices and collaboration.  I have yet to find a business group as focused in my space as this one."  

From a Web Conference Call Participant:  "The AUG members really have a great set of skills and I really appreciate being able to come here to ask questions and find answers usually very quickly and very effectively.  Thanks for all you do." 

From a Member - Southeast Region:  "I love the new website and if you haven’t heard it lately, Advent users across the globe greatly appreciate the hard work you do for us. This is such a powerful forum that is a living white paper for all things Advent!" 

From Tracy Garon Hojka, Whitnell & Co.:  "It's truly amazing what you can find in old AUG forum threads!  I just discovered the one item that has been a major hindrance to my ability to script tasks.  I was not aware that entering -exit in the scheduler executable would close Axys once the script was complete.  For the last 2 years I've been using a batch file that killed Axys after each series of scripts is complete for the time period of the day (in order to not lock a much needed license) and now I find that all the added overhead to my schedules can be removed!  Thanks for posting this solution...now if only I had found that thread a year ago...oh well.  On to better programming, with the help of the AUG community!"

From Christine DeMao, formerly of Gibson Capital, LLC:  "I wanted to send a quick thank you to the AUG community saying how grateful I've been for the wisdom and knowledge that you've all so willingly shared with me over the last five years.  The end of the month is my last day with Gibson Capital, LLC.  I truly could not have delivered the work that I have without the wisdom, help, and support of the AUG.  I think it's such a great value for any firm.  So, thanks, and best of luck to all of you!"

From Lorraine Fisher, Kanawha Capital Management, LLC:  "The AUG is like 1,200 free Advent Tech Support employees at my fingertips.  Although Advent's support line can be helpful, through AUG I am able to find many members who have experienced the problems I'm having and get answers on "how to solve" instead of "how it should be solved."  I find AUG members' ideas and responses, as a whole, to be much more practical, creative and resourceful. 

Thanks to the AUG sessions at the Advent Conferences, I come back to my office with new life, excited about all the changes and improvements I plan to make.  These conference sessions are open to all Advent attendees, but the conference is only once a year.  By being an AUG member, attending regional meetings and receiving daily emails via the website, I am provided with continual sources of learning, idea gathering, and problem solving year round. 

AUG membership dues are minimal.  The benefits are immeasurable...."