A homegrown CRM spawns a booming business.

It was 1998. Greg was principal of Friedman & Associates in Novato, California. His firm was fanatical about client service, especially creating a highly personal experience and using clients’ time efficiently. The approach was generating loyal clients and rapid growth.

The firm reached the point where Greg and his team couldn’t keep all the relevant client information, especially crucial personal details, in their heads. Greg’s firm started using existing applications like Outlook to catalogue data and coordinate activities, but they weren’t powerful enough or specialized enough to the specific needs of financial advisors. That’s when Greg began to collaborate with veteran Windows developer Ken Golding on the advisor-centric CRM system that would become Junxure 1.0.

Greg’s homegrown CRM demonstrated the potential. A lot could be done with technology to service clients, strengthen teamwork, increase overall firm efficiency, and drive growth and profitability. Software could result in a new class of service experience – and a new class of firm. When Greg started telling other advisors about his system, and showing it to them, they immediately wanted it for their own firms. That’s when Junxure was born as a business.

What follows is more than a decade of constant innovation, evangelism and growth. The Junxure suite has evolved to include ClientView Live, Junxure Mobile and an ever-deepening set of new capabilities. A cloud version of Junxure is in the works, targeted for release in Fall 2012, to give customers a choice between cloud and desktop versions. We’ve beefed up our service offerings, too, to help customers reap more of the performance benefits of Junxure in their practices. In 2010, we were selected by Schwab along with Salesforce and Microsoft to be part of Schwab Intelligent Integration.

In 2009, Greg merged his firm with Salient Wealth Management to form Private Ocean, a wealth management firm where clients work closely with a team of industry leaders and pioneers, and technology plays a central role in total firm management. One thing hasn’t changed—the day-to-day experiences of Greg and his firm remain the laboratory in which Junxure conceives and refines its technology for the benefit of advisors everywhere.