[AI Series] Revolutionizing Financial Meetings With AI With Parker Ence
- Quik! News Team
- 5 days ago
- 32 min read
Parker Ence is the CEO and Co-founder of Jump AI, the leading Advisor AI meeting assistant for financial advisors, designed to cut meeting admin time by 90% while elevating client and advisor experience by putting meeting prep, note taking, meeting compliance, CRM updates, and meeting follow-ups on AI autopilot. He works daily with RIA and broker-dealer teams to implement award-winning, safe, and compliant AI built for advisors, customizable to the advisor’s style, and deeply integrated with the advisor tech stack. Parker is a 4x technology CEO with experience in fintech, data, AI, and briefly at Google Cloud AI. He received an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor's in economics from the University of Utah.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:20] Parker Ence discusses how Jump AI helps financial advisors automate the meeting cycle
[6:44] Replacing assistants with AI-generated meeting summaries for team collaboration
[8:31] How Jump enhances active listening by reducing multitasking
[11:08] Ensuring accurate capture of action items using advisor-specific AI models
[15:10] Parker talks about real-time delegation of tasks to advisor teams after meetings
[17:26] Why Jump chose financial advising as its primary market
[20:03] Addressing advisor and client concerns about AI presence in meetings
[24:15] The importance of transparency and consent when using AI in sensitive conversations
[28:58] Navigating rapid product development and growth challenges at Jump
In this episode…
Financial advisors often spend 20 to 60 minutes on administrative work for every client meeting, from prepping beforehand to updating CRMs and task lists afterward. This time-consuming cycle detracts from what matters, such as being fully present with clients and building strong relationships. But with today’s technology, is there a better way to manage client meetings without losing valuable time and insights?
An expert in AI automation and customer experience, Parker Ence shares how advisors can reclaim hours of their workweek by offloading prep, note-taking, and follow-up tasks to AI tools. He explains that leveraging meeting-specific AI enables advisors to actively listen without distraction while ensuring all key data is recorded and follow-ups are promptly assigned. Parker emphasizes the importance of transparency when introducing AI to clients and the benefits of structured collaboration across advisor teams to improve responsiveness and trust.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Parker Ence, CEO and Co-founder of Jump AI, about using AI to streamline the client meeting cycle in financial advising. Parker discusses time-saving automation, improving client engagement through active listening, and real-time team collaboration. He also explores data-driven insights, compliance considerations, and the future of agent-based workflows.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Quotable Moments:
"We don't really have classes about how to be a great listener. And that's really a tragedy."
"You can just focus on one thing, which is that I can be totally present with the client."
"We're trying to just really, really speed up that cycle where all the action items are available instantly."
"If we sit still for a month, right, we feel like we're starting to lose ground."
"How do we just make sure that we really map out the day in the life?"
Action Steps:
Automate meeting prep and follow-up tasks: Using AI to handle repetitive tasks frees up time for client-focused, strategic work.
Enable real-time collaboration with team members: Sharing AI-generated meeting notes and tasks immediately ensures faster, more coordinated client service.
Develop listening skills: Letting AI take notes allows you to fully engage in conversations and build stronger client relationships.
Integrate AI tools with your existing CRM and workflow systems: Seamless integration ensures data is captured accurately without extra manual work.
Be transparent about AI use with clients: Clearly explaining your AI tools builds trust and helps clients feel secure in the process.
Sponsor for this episode...
This is brought to you by Quik!
At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.
Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.
Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.
Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.
Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.
Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included John Corcoran of Rise25, Patrick Hannon of Fidelity Labs, and Spenser Segal of ActiFi. Today is a special episode in my series on artificial intelligence, and today's guest is Parker Ence, CEO and co-founder of Jump. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get Quik! using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, I've been waiting to talk to him. Parker Ence, CEO and co-founder of Jump, is an experienced entrepreneur and business operator with over 12 years of CEO and co-founder leadership across sectors including advisor tech data as a service, artificial intelligence software as a service, and insurance tech.
Earlier in his career, he gained foundational expertise in private equity and venture capital, go-to-market strategy, consulting, and economic development. Holding an MBA from Stanford University, it has further informed his strategic approach to innovation and growth. Parker. Welcome to The Customer Wins.
Parker Ence: 01:49
Hey Rich, thank you so much for having me. Great to be here. Yeah, it seems like not too long ago we just we just met at the T3 conference, I think is the first time we met. So yeah, it's been a few months.
Richard Walker: 02:00
So I'm glad for that catalyst to get this going. For those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Parker, to understand your business a little bit better, how does your company help people?
Parker Ence: 02:20
Yeah. So over here at Jump, we're focused on particularly around the meeting cycle. So if I am in financial services and I'm constantly meeting with clients, that means that I have this ongoing cycle of I've got to prepare for my next meeting, make sure I show up prepared so I can deliver the best possible experience during the meeting. I want to be as present as I possibly can so I can be empathetic and responsive. And then when the meeting is over, what's just happened?
Well, I've learned a lot of information that I'm going to want to remember in the future. So I want to get that down somewhere and save that. I need to go update all these different systems. I've got to go update my CRM. I've got to update a task list somewhere for our financial advising customers.
I got to go update my financial planning tool and for a financial advisor to do all of that really well, it's probably somewhere between anywhere from 20 minutes to maybe 60 minutes of admin work outside of the meeting for every one hour that you're in the meeting. And so we originally got into this because my neighbour, who's an RIA owner, I was just chatting with him one day and we were literally at the park with our kids. And he said, you know, I love working with my clients. I love investments, but taking notes for the compliance office is the bane of my existence. And by the way, there's all these other things I have to do two and it takes up a lot of time.
And so that was the conversation that really led to myself my co-founders and thinking, you know, wouldn't it be really awesome if we could use some of these recent advances in generative AI to automate some of these things away that have never been possible to automate before? And so, you know, can we generate pre-meeting prep using AI? Well, maybe that can now take two minutes instead of 20 of digging through old notes. Can we make it so that you can just be present with the client and not be, you know, worried about I'm going to miss something. I've got to write everything down.
And then when the meeting is done, can we give a huge head start on all of the final close to final drafts on all that work that needs to happen after the meeting? And so, I think, to come back to your question, the way that we help advisors and other types of financial service professionals. The first thing we do is we just get them back a ton of time in their week, right? Instead of spending a third of their time on administrative slog. We're able to return that by automating a lot of that.
And as the companies evolved, of course, that time savings is really important. And we're really proud of that time savings that we give. In fact, the average Jump user will say that they're saving anywhere from, you know, maybe 1 to 3 hours per workday, which is pretty, pretty awesome. And we're really happy about that. And so now we're starting to think about, well, saving time is amazing.
What else can we do with all this data? Can we help reveal insights about hey, maybe if you talked a little bit less, let the client talk a little bit more. Maybe that would increase your conversion rate on a client choosing to become your client or prospective client measure.
Richard Walker: 05:41
You can measure that now, right? Because you're quantitative analysis around who spoke the most and for how long. Nobody had that before. That wasn't even a concept as far as I know.
Parker Ence: 05:52
Yeah. So that's sort of the fun of, you know, now there's this new data set that's really interesting. It's very rich dataset. What can we do to help advisors actually just become more effective, become more successful?
Richard Walker: 06:05
You know, you made me think of a couple of things in my past. So before I became a financial advisor, I worked at Arthur Andersen and Consulting. And on one of my early projects, I sat down with a senior manager at a meeting with the client. I took zero notes and he pulled me into his office. Afterwards, the senior manager and basically chastised me for not taking notes.
I'm like, I have an excellent memory. What do I need the notes for? I know what happened. He's like, you're not taking notes for yourself, you're taking them for me. I was like, oh, and that completely changed my perspective on why I had to become really, really good at taking notes.
What you just said is you just replaced me in that that meeting.
Parker Ence: 06:44
You know, that's I think that that. We have seen a little bit of that. So we have seen advisor teams come back and say, hey, you know, we used to send, you know, two assistants to every meeting, right? To make sure we got everything down. And now we're only sending one, or now we're not sending an assistant. But I think what's maybe even more common is that meeting the artifact that comes out of that, which is the meeting notes and the task list and all the other things that we generate that now becomes something that is common ground for the whole team to work on.
So that can be shared with the rest of the team, makes it a lot easier to delegate follow ups to other team members, so it becomes an easier way for the whole team to work together, especially if they're in some kind of ensemble or diamond or, you know, there's all these different ways to organize your team. And I think that's been a really powerful way to collaborate and make sure that none of those important details are actually slipping through the cracks.
Richard Walker: 07:38
Yeah, I think the collaboration is probably the majority of the value, frankly, because now you're enhancing so much more that can be done. But before we leave the note-taking aspect of what it's doing to the people, Well, there's two other things I wanted to mention. One is I remember being an advisor, going to somebody's house, having this whole meeting, not being able to take kind of notes I wanted to take, and then getting in the car and calling my own voicemail to leave messages to remember what I talked about, what my action steps were. And I'm so grateful I wouldn't have to do that ever again. But here's the other thing I wonder about.
Active listening is really, really hard. And it's a skill set you have to truly develop. For me, I still take notes, even though I've got note takers in my meetings. I still take notes because that helps me with active listening. Do you think this kind of tech will help improve active listening or make it less important?
Parker Ence: 08:31
Yeah. So the hope is that it really improves active listening. And I actually I do believe listening is so important. One of the I used to work for this guy, and he would do seminars to train dentists on how to run their dental practice better. And he would say, you know, we've got lessons about writing.
We you can go take classes on how to speak. You can go take classes on how to read fast. We don't really have classes about how to be a great listener. And that's really and that's really a tragedy that we're all, you know, pretty bad at it. And so I think that that's super important.
And our hope is, you know, there's all these studies around multitasking. And some people will say, oh, I'm an incredible multitasker. And scientifically, there really is no such thing as multitasking. It's switch tasking, right? You do task A and then you switch to task B, and maybe you're really good at switching back and forth, but they'll say that every time you switch, you sort of lose 25% of effectiveness because your brain has to reorient on what you're doing.
And so my hope is that when the Jump note taker is in the meeting, you can just focus on one thing, which is I can be totally present with the client. I can do that active listening. I can bring all my empathy and all of my attention. And I don't have to multitask writing things down during the meeting, because really, we know that that's it's just impossible to be great at listening and be fully engaged when you're also worried about, oh man, I don't. I better write down what they said their expected raise is or their or their mortgage is this year, because I know I'm going to have to go type that into, you know, e-money or moneyguidepro or write capital or something when I'm done.
So I better write it down. So that's our hope. And we have actually received that feedback that, wow, this is so nice that I can actually just focus on the client. And we hear that from the users, which is a ton of fun.
Richard Walker: 10:26
Man, you have such an elegant way to say I'm bad at multitasking. Thank you for that. No, in all seriousness, you're 100% right. And I think one of the reasons I'm good at note-taking is because I can type 100 words per minute accurately and just do it really fast, like transcription. Almost.
Yeah. But the main thing that I do with my note-taking is to try to articulate action steps at the end of a meeting. Like, to me, that's the most important thing. What are we taking out of this? What are we going to do next?
Now, going into the collaboration, I want my team to do these things. So how do I know I'm going to get the right steps out of. If the note taker is read by an AI, that summarizes it for me. How do I know it's going to capture the most salient next-step action items? So how do you address that?
Parker Ence: 11:08
Yeah. So our focus is we've developed this product is we kind of looked around at okay, let's say let's say I'm an advisor. Let's say that I wake up one day and I'm kind of, you know, look at myself in the mirror and I'm saying, you're really just spending way too much on all this administrative stuff. There has to be a better way, right? So then what are my options?
Well, I can do what you said. I can bring my assistant along, or I can go in my car after and I can talk, you know, talk my notes into something and get some kind of transcription or something like that. And then there's also all these kind of emerging generic AI tools. Right? There's a bunch of them.
There's probably, you know, 500 startups that are doing sort of generic AI note taking. And what we found with those is the first few times that an advisor has used those, they'll think it's magic. And by the way, it is kind of magic. It's amazing. Right?
This these models are amazing. But then they get the notes back and maybe by the 12th or 15th time they realize, you know, these outputs are actually not really made for me as an advisor. And it's maybe missing some of the nuance around all the actual data, right? All the different account balances and the insurance limits. And so there's not quite that level of detail.
And then two, you know, we want to make sure that we're actually integrated with the places where I do my work. So for example, with tasks a lot of advisors will track the tasks in their CRM or maybe some task management tool like Hubli or Monday.com or asana or something like that. And so, you know, a great the world's best assistant would sit in the meeting and they would be able to anticipate. I know the kinds of follow-up items that Rich is going to want because we've worked together. I can anticipate what he's going to want to do coming out of that meeting.
And I know where Rich tracks those to-dos. It's in Salesforce or it's in HubSpot or something like that. So I'm going to make sure those are all saved in there. So next time Rich logs in, they're just there waiting for him. And that's really what we're trying to duplicate.
So the AI assistant is going to listen. It understands what kinds of things an advisor expects to do after a meeting. It's going to pull those out and then it's going to organize them. And that's all available within minutes after the meeting is done. And so then all you really have to do, whether it's the advisor or somebody on their team, they just review those and then they save them over to wherever the task management tool is.
Then we're kind of off to the races. And what we've seen is usually how this goes down is maybe you do 4 or 5 meetings in a day, and then finally you're kind of two days later, like, okay, I really need to get organized for Monday. I better go back and figure out all the things I need to do, and by then some of those have been forgotten. Or the clients kind of sitting around wondering like, hey, when's Rich going to get back to me on that stuff that he said he's going to send me. So we're trying to just really, really speed up that cycle where all the action items are available instantly after the meeting is over.
They get delegated immediately to the team. And we have seen we have seen that really speed up the quality and the speed of follow-up, which has been really, really great because that's, you know, nobody wants to be sitting around waiting for three days to get followed up with after a really great, engaging meeting.
Richard Walker: 14:22
I don't know how many meetings a financial advisor has in a day. I mean, if you have 1400 clients you're meeting all day long. I've seen that that type of advisor. Me personally, I call it the marathon zoom wheel. Like I am constantly meeting to meeting, to meeting with very, very little break.
And I will end the day with no energy left and I'll have eight meetings I have to have notes for, do something with and then I forget. Like you said, I mean, I've gone two weeks and gone. Oh, no. I had a to do item from this meeting two weeks ago. Now that we're talking about this client, what happened there?
How is your product actually engaging all the team members? Is it by user? Are they named? Are they participating in meetings? How is this actually creating this collaboration with the teams?
Parker Ence: 15:10
Yeah. So I think the easiest way to explain this is I'll describe our very, the very first aria that we ever worked with. And by the way, we now work with about 9000 advisors. So this has been this is now there's a lot of different ways that this goes. But the very first advisor that we worked with, they're called Solidarity Wealth.
They're actually here in Utah. And your listeners might find it funny that we discovered right before we started this podcast episode, you and I went to the same middle school. We figured that out, which was pretty funny, but so not too far away from where you and I went to middle school. There's an RA solidarity wealth. They've got some advisers, and then they have other team members that help with all the back office tasks and operations and those kinds of things.
And they said, you know, the advisor is going to do the meeting, but then the team really steps in and helps with the follow-up and makes sure that the experience and everything is, is top notch. And so we set it up so that when the advisor does the meeting, within minutes of that meeting ending, the advisor is going to get an email that reminds them, hey, go in and check the notes, make sure they look exactly how you want because Jump will give them that final draft. But with all I, it's important to have a human in the loop, right? We want to make sure that somebody, somebody knowledgeable is reviewing that output before it's dropped into that permanent record. And so the advisor is doing that.
But then the rest of the team instantly receives the meeting content, including all the follow-up action items. And so then they don't have to be waiting for two days for the advisor to kind of make their way back to documenting what went on. And then. And then that becomes a place where they can all work and collaborate on, on serving that client. So that's been really, I think, really powerful for teams that take more of an ensemble approach.
Richard Walker: 16:53
I'm jealous. I am. I mean, I use zoom to capture my transcripts, but then I've got to manually get that over to my assistant, who can then go through it and set it up in HubSpot, etc.. I would like that team approach where it's automatically distributed according to maybe meeting type, because that's the other thing. I don't give my assistant my executive meetings or all the meetings I have.
I don't want her to go through that and put all those notes into HubSpot. So it's definitely a challenge at all levels. I think it's really cool that you guys are focused on this industry do. Is this the only industry that you're going to be in? Are you doing other industries too?
Parker Ence: 17:26
Yeah, it's a great question. So we decided early on that we wanted to focus on financial advisors initially. And the reason for that is what makes a financial advisor different from just a general business user. There's sort of three things that we think about. The first is that the relationship really is the engine of that business.
If you don't have a good relationship with your client, you're not having these great moments throughout the year or over the years. It just doesn't work. The second is we're dealing with all of this financial data. So we need to do things with that data, whether it's build financial plans or do analysis or. But there's a level of detail and precision that's required to do that and accuracy.
And by the way, number three, in case you didn't know this, Rich, we're in a highly regulated industry where compliance I'm sure we've never thought of that before. Where compliance is paramount to protect to protect these clients in many ways. And so, you know, so those are the three things that we think about. And we focus on how we deliver workflows that are in line with the real day in the life of an advisor. And how do we think about doing that in a safe way?
So the chief compliance officer is not freaking out about, you know, the risks of AI. How do we get to a position there where they can be very comfortable with that? And how do we do that in a way that handles this financial this financial data seamlessly? And so we started out with, you know, our first, you know, thousands and thousands of customers were just financial advisors. As our brand has grown, we have seen demand from other types of financial services who face those same three things, right?
Relationships, the core heavily regulated. And we need to handle financial data with care and with and be productive with that data. And so we're now in pilots with asset managers, insurance companies, banks, credit unions. But the focus remains the same. How do we just, you know, make sure that we really map out the day in the life of those users and deliver AI automations that feel like they're native to that user, not like some kind of generic AI I robot.
Richard Walker: 19:41
Okay, so you've been talking about your customer being the financial advisory and the advisory team, but ultimately the investor client is a recipient of this. And the benefit of this, this service in some manner. Do you feel like the end consumer is liking this or disliking this at any level?
Parker Ence: 20:03
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think two things come up. And one of them is what are the positive outcomes for the end investor because of this type of AI. And then the other is a concern around is this going to freak them out and are they going to be weirded out, you know. And so on the ladder, I would say maybe 20% of advisors that come in inquiring about Jump products, they'll express concern, you know, will this change the way that I talk with my client?
Are they going to clam up? Are they going to be less open and are we going to have less fun because there's, you know kind of an ear.
Richard Walker: 20:45
Yeah.
Parker Ence: 20:45
And in practice, what we found is this is never the case. Now, by the way, if somebody says, I don't want to use it, you know, we've got controls where you can you can pause it. You know, if it's something really sensitive, they just don't want captured at all. You can pause it. You can turn it off.
Right. So there's a lot of control around when that's on. But we've just found it's essentially never been that a client has come back. And we've never had an advisor call up and say, hey, I need to cancel because my clients just aren't down with this. We did have one funny one, which is we had one advisor came back and said, hey, I had kind of a crazy one here.
We had a client that said, don't capture this. Don't take any notes with this note taker thing because the IRS will come and take all of my guns.
Richard Walker: 21:33
Are.
Parker Ence: 21:33
And I don't know why the IRS specifically was the agency that might be coming for the guns, but that's what they were concerned about. So. But that was you know, that's like 1 in 1 in a million and.
Richard Walker: 21:43
But you know, it makes me wonder. It makes me wonder if people are just holding back then if they're like, oh, this is all recorded. I just I'm just not going to tell my advisor everything.
Parker Ence: 21:53
Yeah. I think that is often the concern that advisors will wonder about. And I think what we've found is as long as the advisor is confident about, hey, I'm going to be using this note-taking tool, it's going to help me with my notes. It helps me make sure that I don't miss anything. And I can also just talk to you.
I don't have to worry about typing the whole time. I mean, that's a pretty compelling reason. And I think the other piece too, is we are seeing this show up in other areas. So, for example, my wife recently went to the doctor and took I've got young kids at home. So this was just a normal like pediatrician, well, visit.
And sure enough, the doctor pulled out their phone and said, hey, I use this tool to take notes. It helps me so I can be focused on you as my patient. And this handles all of my medical notes. Is that okay with you? So I think we're going to see this in more and more places and especially post-COVID, right.
We're just kind of more used to doing things digitally.
Richard Walker: 22:50
You're hitting on something that's really important in all of this tech that people start using. And that is to be clear and transparent about how you're using it, when you're using it, and even asking permission so that people understand, like, hey, I'm doing this. Are you okay with it? I don't have to. Here's why I want to do it.
And if people aren't thinking that way, if they're just like, oh, I got the coolest new, new gadget, I'm just going to use it. I mean, I think a lot of people forget it's illegal to record somebody without permission in most states.
Parker Ence: 23:18
Yeah. So yeah. That's right.
Richard Walker: 23:20
You've got to you've got to make it upfront. And we're going to see more of this with voice AI agents. Here's one of my premises. Parker I don't think I should ever go to a doctor's office again and give them my data. A second, third, fourth, fifth time.
Who wants to fill out the clipboard over and over again? And with quick, we're looking at how do we automate that process. I mean, doctors, sure. But I mean just in general, what if we could take the data from the form and put it in such a format that a voice AI agent could call you up and say, hey, Parker, this is Rick Walker's assistant. I know you're coming in for a visit.
We wanted to collect some information ahead of time. Would you mind sharing it with me, the AI assistant, and I'll just walk you through it. You could have that conversation in the car while driving to the office and never lose your time. Yeah, I think that'd be really cool. But imagine if the voice agent called up and said, hey, Parker, this is Rick.
I need some data from you and wasn't transparent about who it was.
Parker Ence: 24:15
Yeah, I agree. You know, we'll sometimes joke about how dystopian it could be with all these kind of AI voice agents, and we'll joke, you know, we're going to have an AI salesperson selling to an AI buyer, and then that's like, you know, deal. That's how deals will be done. And people aren't talking to each other. And but I think your example is great.
I mean, I don't want to go sit down in the waiting room and fill out the same paper form that I've already filled out three times, and I'd love to just knock that out in advance. And, you know, I think actually you at quick are very well situated to do that. You've already got the data model and you've got the forms and just need to go get yourself a little voice agent. And I imagine you're probably already working on that. So that could be very, very helpful.
Richard Walker: 25:05
You just gave me my new business idea, and I should apologize because this podcast is not about me. But what if that whole buyer agent idea. Okay, if I don't do this, somebody please do this. Why don't I have an I buyer agent for buying cars? Like, what a painful process for most people.
Could you imagine? It sends the emails to the fleet managers like I'm looking for this deal. Next. Next. Figure it out.
Oh, man. Cool.
Parker Ence: 25:27
I think the crazy thing is, is we'll absolutely see special-purpose agents like that. Yeah, but also just these general-purpose tools like ChatGPT. They're going to be capable of doing these one off tasks. You know, where you can say, hey, you know, I'm going to buy a car. I've already decided that I want this particular model and this particular trim.
Go find it for me. And this is my budget and get the best deal that you can. And I think that these general-purpose agents will be able to do that. There's some pretty interesting things coming out. One of them's called MCP model Context Protocol.
You've probably already heard of this. It's actually very hypey right now, but it's hypey for good reason. The idea is, let's make it very easy for these large language models to go connect to external systems and quickly understand, you know, what can I do here? Right? So for example, maybe the grocery store sets up an MCP and then you can use your little AI agent and say, hey, I'm going to take a picture of my refrigerator and give me some recipe ideas.
I actually got that idea from Clayton Chandler at Mosaic. He does this. But anyway, so he. So, you know, take a picture. Okay.
What ingredients do I have and what can I make with those? Okay. Well, it looks like I'm missing this one ingredient, so hey, will you just go get that, you know, from the store and then. And then the agent goes and uses the grocery store MCP and it's able to make an order and arrange delivery. And this is all just sort of happening.
And we're obviously a ways away from this, but it's pretty crazy to think about where we might be in a few years, you know?
Richard Walker: 27:03
Oh, I think we'll be there. I, I've been thinking that there's going to be agents talking to agents for a lot of reasons. I mean, think about it. The whole travel industry, who likes booking airfare and hotels, unless you really love looking and looking and dreaming about it, whatever. But why not just have an agent, especially business travel, where it's pretty common?
You're doing the same thing over and over again. Just have an agent go find the best deal, best airline time frames, etc. come back and versus paying people to do it. I think we can go on and on and on about agents. There's a different type of question I wanted to ask you, Parker. First of all, how long have you been doing this?
How long did you go? Did you start Jump?
Parker Ence: 27:39
Yeah. So my co-founder, Tim Chavez, and I started working on this kind of mid-2022, and we had some twists and turns. So it's not like, well, you know, we could give you the retroactive rationalization answer of. And then we woke up and lightning struck the brain and it just was all laid out before us. And maybe there are some entrepreneurs that actually are that way.
But I think generally it's a little bit more running around in the idea maze and trying to kind of, you know, bump up against walls. So we launched in January of 2024 with what would now be recognizable as Jump in its current form. And yeah, and that's been a lot of fun. I think I mentioned we've gone from kind of zero to serving over 9000 advisors in, you know, five and a half quarters, which is that's why I'm getting more gray in here, just trying to keep up with that, which happens fast. Yeah.
Richard Walker: 28:29
No. And congrats on your success. You guys are taking off right now. I see, you know, big announcements with customer types that you're getting. But really my question comes back to how hard this has been.
Like what has been one of the hardest things to navigate as a co-founder, as a fast-growing company in a space where there's competitors and different types of, you know, it's not just direct but an indirect type of competitors. What do you think has been one of the hardest challenges you've been facing?
Parker Ence: 28:58
Yeah, so I think there are probably two things. So I think in the evolution of every business, there's before product market fit and after product market fit and product market fit as you as you well know, is when you finally get that right mix of this is who our customer is going to be, this is the problem we're going to solve. This is our unique solution, and this is how we talk about it in a way that it actually makes sense and people can get it and they can, you know, kind of get excited about it. And I think before you really find that, it really feels like pushing a rock up a hill, and it just feels so uncertain. And someday some days it feels inevitable.
It's going to be amazing, and other days you're convinced you're going to end up in a cardboard box somewhere. And so I think just that emotional warfare, kind of that psychological warfare against yourself to stay in it. And it took us about 15 months to sort of get to the final, you know, mix that that now would be recognizable as Jump. So I think that that's tricky and learned a lot about kind of what's the right way to pursue that. I think we just completely overthought it.
You know, we're doing all these fancy questionnaires and rate your pain points on a scale of 1 to 10. And it was just too academic. And I think we finally just got out there and put things in front of, you know, potential customers. And so, so that was that was kind of, you know, challenging in the early days and just wondering, are we going to be able to figure out something here? Yeah.
Since then, I think what's been really crazy is it's easier than ever to build software. There's more software engineers. There's AI that can help you code. And the barriers to entry are just not that high anymore. And so the pace at which software is being built is astonishing.
And you know, what we had a year ago looks like a tricycle compared to what we have today. And that's critical because especially with AI, you're building on top of all these new capabilities that didn't exist before. So it's very exciting. There's a lot of demand for these new capabilities. And so this is a long way of saying just the speed of innovation and shipping.
And, you know, we've had to hire 100 people in a year basically to just kind of go as fast as we think we need to.
Richard Walker: 31:23
Wow.
Parker Ence: 31:24
And by the way, for us, you know, it's been a good outcome. Like Jump leads the category in terms of product and in terms of market adoption and kind of advisor satisfaction. And I'm saying that based on like the Kitsis and the T3's and those kinds of research reports. But if we sit still for a month, right, we feel like we're starting to lose ground. And so anyway, long way of saying continually shipping things that people want has been just like relentless pace.
Richard Walker: 31:53
You know, I would say since I really hit its stride in 2324, the fear of missing out with tech innovators like myself and you is more palpable than ever, ever. In the 20 years, 23 years I've been running my company and I've missed some things, and I've taken advantage of some things, and I'm not going to miss this one. But it's hard because things are going so fast. I want to share with you the favorite thing that happened. It was actually today with my CTO.
We were talking about a legacy way of doing things in our company. Because we have an old system we've got to support, We've got to go do this thing with it. He called it insanity. And I wrote in the chat message to everybody, isn't it funny how the old way of doing things is now really thought of as insanity to do it that way? And to me, that's what AI is doing.
Like, can you imagine taking your own notes five years from now? Who would do that? I mean, even all the outcomes that you're getting from the notes and all the collaboration and all the, the, the action items and probably follow-up messages and scheduling next meetings and putting plans together, all those things are going to get automated, better and better. We're going to get a point where an advisor who's 50 years old, 60 years old is going to be like, yeah, the old way is insanity compared. And New Advisor would be like, well, this is how it's always done, right?
Parker Ence: 33:07
Yeah. If you're just starting your CFP, you know, you're studying for that and you're just coming out of undergrad or something, this is going to be. Yeah, of course. Why wouldn't I use AI for this? It's going to seem like it's like my kids in smartphones.
It's like, wait, you're telling me that these when you were a kid, you did. There was none of this stuff existed? You know, you know? It's just sort of in the in the air and in the water. And I think, you know, what we're excited about is chapter one for Jump was let's, let's do some of these summarizations after the meeting.
Let's help with tasks. Let's help with these other things. Let's also help prepare for the meeting. Right. Let's do some pre-meeting briefings based on your old data.
And now we are moving more into insights and agents. So how do we use that data to improve the firm's effectiveness. How do we have easy buttons for all of that work that needs to happen after the meeting is done, between meetings, before meetings. And so more and more it's hey, now I can spend more time with my clients. I can really do more of the human element of this work and leave more and more of the administrative slog to the AI robots, which is a bunch of fun.
We think of it as building that AI Iron Man suit so that the humans are still there, but we're able to augment that and get, you know, get more done in the day. Do it. Do it with more effectiveness.
Richard Walker: 34:28
Yeah, man, we got a lot to talk about, but I'm running out of time. So before I wrap up and get to my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you, Parker?
Parker Ence: 34:38
Yeah. So a few ways. So if you go to our website, the easier one to remember is jump.ai That'll take you to our website. And you can do things there like learn more and schedule demos and trials and ask our team questions those kinds of things.
And then if you want to just send us an email. The best way to do that is hello H-e-l-l-o @jumpapp.com. And feel free to address that to me and I'll you know that'll come to me as well.
Richard Walker: 35:19
Awesome. All right. So I always love asking this question because we get to think a little differently. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Parker Ence: 35:30
Yeah, so the true answer is so many different people, and we don't want to turn this into an Oscar speech and thank everybody. But so I'll just mention, you know, first, I think my parents are actually incredibly incredible leaders. And they made a huge impact on me. But I'm going to mention two others. So my grandpa, who's his name was actually Arthur Anderson.
No relation to the Arthur Anderson where, where you worked. But he had this speech that he would give and I heard him give it to all the grandkids I had. I had like 37 first cousins. So he had this really fun, like fun family dinners. And, you know, it was kind of a little bit chaotic.
But I heard him give this speech, which was he'd give this, you know, I imagine my funeral someday kind of kind of a speech. And he'd say, you know, I want to see my family there. I want and like they still care about me right at that point. And I want friends there where we had this great relationship, where we enjoyed life's journey. And I want to see people from my company there, and they felt like I cared about them and invested in their success.
And I want to see customers there. And, you know, we've all heard the think about your, you know, think, think about the end and to get some perspective. But he really lived that. And I think he was really a great example to me of, you know, somebody who was extremely dedicated as a professional but also extremely dedicated at home. And I think it's just so important as a co-founder and, you know, as, as, as the CEO can get so tunnel visioned on what's the next month and what are we got to do?
And I think that that's helped me just take a step back. And why are we even doing this? You know, where are all the people involved in this? So I think that was really important for me to get exposed to that way of thinking early on.
Richard Walker: 37:20
You're lucky.
Parker Ence: 37:20
Second one, I'll just mention very briefly. When I came out of business school, I went and worked for a company called Safegraph, and what I did is I joined and they had basically a business unit that they were they wanted to spin it out and turn it into its own separate company. So I basically came and took over this business unit, and I turned that product line and that business unit into a standalone company. And in doing that, I worked with the founder of the original company, and he's this just very, very smart guy. But what I learned from him was, how do we go faster?
I mean, he was just obsessed with speed and thinking about, you know, how do we reduce cycle time and how do we just move faster, faster, faster? How do we hire people on the team who are capable of velocity moving very quickly but in the right direction? And that had a huge impact on me. And I think that really helped prepare me for Jump where speed is of the essence. You know, time is of the essence.
So I'm really grateful for him and in many cases he was pushing me to move faster. And at the time I was kind of like, whoa, you know, this is where I feel like we're already going pretty fast. And that was extremely valuable as well.
Richard Walker: 38:29
Man, those are great, great examples. Well, look, I want to give a big thank you to Parker Ence, CEO and co-founder of Jump, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Parker's website at Jump or Jumpapp.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion.
We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Parker, thank you so much for joining me today.
Parker Ence: 38:58
Hey, thank you Rich. I really appreciate it. Great to see you. We'll see you soon.
Outro: 39:03
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
Comments