I’ve been a business owner and consultant for nearly 25 years.  Over the years, I’ve become a keen observer of businesses and love to learn what makes them tick.  I find myself filling out a mental evaluation card on just about any business I encounter. I’m particularly inquisitive about what makes a company great (or not) and what the key drivers of the business are. In other words, how companies achieve excellence.

Every once in a while I encounter a business that really catches my attention for the excellence they exude.  I know for a fact that excellence doesn’t happen by accident. So, when I see an organization behaving in this manner, I immediately start looking for root causes and asking questions:

• What have they done to make themselves different?
• What is their hiring philosophy?
• Do they have discipline?
• What is their company culture?
• Are they really successful or just pretending?
• Are they investing in building something extraordinary or just playing for a payout?

If you learn to look for the nuances, the answers to these questions are often right in front of you.

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If you’re a sales or marketing professional, your job boils down to good communications. Creating and delivering an effective and engaging presentation is an incredibly important skill that usually starts with the marketing team and ends with the sales team.

The success of your efforts is determined by how well you persuaded your audience to take action.

When asset management marketers create sales presentation and pitchbook materials, they need to be dynamic.  In software engineering, “dynamic” is a term we use to define something that is ever-changing. Folks in Financial Services understand this concept better than anybody.  That’s because your branding, regulatory guidelines, and financial reporting data are in a constant state of flux.

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January – 2013
A major Boston-based investment manager has selected a Synthesis Publisher™ solution for the automation and production of fund factsheets. This large project will grow to involve support for more than 10,000 documents annually, spanning up to 15 different languages. The Synthesis solution was chosen via a competitive RFP process based on our solution maturity and depth of capability. Additionally, during the competition, Synthesis was able to provide a working proof of concept that addressed a number of the required features related to workflow and process controls on multi-language translation integration

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by Noah Menikoff 

A good proofreader is hard to find. Ask any financial services marketer and they will probably tell you this is the worst part of their job – proofreading, editing and updating documents. It’s time consuming work and it takes an enormous amount of time, patience, attention-to-detail, and focus.

Manual proofreading not only requires time and patience, but it also involves thoughtfulness and empathy. Thoughtfulness is required to interpret what is not always an apples-to-apples comparison and empathy is important for evaluating information from the perspective of the end-user. With so many data points and documents to work with, even the most skilled proofreaders face the undeniable challenge of human error. Not to mention, it’s unsatisfying work that takes up time and resources.

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