Today I announced an important shift in Altruist’s work model. In the coming months, we’ll transition to a hybrid approach where the majority of employees will work from an Altruist office three days per week.
Our goal is to support a healthy balance between work and home life while fostering the exceptional collaboration and creativity that arise when talented people form strong relationships.
Over the past few years, we have made the most of the working constraints imposed by the pandemic. In the past 12 months alone, we quadrupled AUM, raised a $112m Series D, acquired Shareholders Service Group, launched our self-clearing capabilities, and deployed countless product enhancements that drove significant time and cost savings for our customers.
With continued growth and profitability right around the corner, the obvious question is, why make a change?
We are pursuing an ambitious vision. To make financial advisors better and financial advice accessible to tens of millions more people, we have to create a new industry standard. This will require constant adaptation. Our goals will evolve, new risks will arise, and external factors will change as we move through the various phases of business maturity. These are natural challenges for a fast-growing company.
In the early stages of growth, you need to prioritize speed to establish product market fit and a repeatable go-to-market motion. Otherwise, you run out of money and the business fails. At this point, Altruist has advanced past that initial stage.
We have incredible product market fit, a repeatable go-to-market motion, and our revenue is growing substantially quarter over quarter. If we kept doing what we’ve been doing, the company would make money and most likely achieve some level of commercial success.
While making money is an essential part of good business, it’s not what we’re striving for – we have the opportunity to be more than another profitable company. Our mission is to make independent financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to everyone.
The reasons we fail to achieve our mission are different now than they were three years ago.
We need to delight our customers (not just keep them happy), ensure that no one can catch us from behind, and be so far ahead of the curve that if legacy incumbents decided to innovate, their offerings would pale in comparison.
We accomplish this by building a product and customer experience that is, down to the minutiae, exemplary. This is only possible by bringing together as many people as we can, as often as we can.
To operate extraordinarily well over a long period of time we must maintain a culture of high standards.
Holding each other accountable to those standards requires trust – it’s the foundation of honest feedback, productive disagreement, and compassion as we work towards a difficult goal. Trust comes from spending time with each other and with our customers, regularly witnessing our shared values of kindness, brilliance, and grit.
Great teams consistently executing at the highest levels on big problems in even bigger markets is what makes an iconic company. And it just doesn’t happen over Slack and Zoom.
We expect to retain as much talent as possible with generous relocation arrangements, but for certain team members and their families, relocation simply isn’t feasible. Where employees either cannot, or choose not, to continue with Altruist in light of the policy, I can only express my immense gratitude and promise that we’ll provide as much support as possible during the transition period.
I am grateful to everyone who has worked to get us here and I look forward to what we will accomplish in the next phase of Altruist’s journey.
