Interview: Natalie King, Vice

Natalie King

Vice President & COO RSA Consulting Group

How has demand for your services shifted over the last year?

Our clients hire us as consultants to solve a problem. We read the tea leaves, analyze the landscape, and develop strategies in order to achieve these goals. This past year brought a lot of changes, and while we are still problemsolvers, our scope of practice has evolved. We became advisers and counselors to our clients on not just public policy concerns, but also the human element of their business. Our top priority is ensuring that our clients are successful and can prosper without compromising the safety of their employees. Last year, we spent a lot of time guiding our clients through executive orders, operational changes and response strategies.

Which legislative or regulatory changes have impacted your business?

As a small business, my team was able to adapt and transition into remote working fairly easily, and we returned back to the office when it was deemed safe and appropriate. We appreciate that not everyone’s shift was as smooth as ours. Our client roster includes over 60 organizations, ranging from schools to large sports venues and hospitals. Each of them faced a unique challenge and there were no roadmaps or blueprints to follow. At the start of the pandemic, we spent a lot of time working through the definitions of essential and nonessential to ensure that they were classified appropriately, and then we developed individualized strategies.

We represent community health centers, both at the statewide association level and locally in Tampa Bay. They are a great example that demonstrates how to absorb all the changes rapidly, respond, figure it out on the fly and be a partner to the community. They overcame the logistical challenges of offering testing and vaccines, and as a nonprofit had to find solutions to fund this. What is most exciting is that they have been recognized for the investment that they made, and what they were capable of doing: providing a safety net for our underserved communities.

Tampa’s most prominent sectors include defense, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics, financial services and information technology.

( ) invested in their digital strategy, were able to make this move even more efficiently, something which is reflected on their balance sheets. Other emerging innovations include the automation of menial accounting tasks, the use of blockchain technology as a new type of accounting ledger, and fully transferring to a cloud-based system, which allows for a more rapid analysis of data. One example is Unbehagen Advisors, which implemented a secure client portal prior to COVID. “it has been a game changer from a standpoint of catering to our clients all over the United States,” said Todd Unbehagen, the firm’s president and CEO. “It provided us the ability to reach out to them virtually and securely. We were able to implement processes and procedures immediately for our clients’ benefit, because we already had them in place, even with an increased volume of new client interactions. We needed to have it

available and functional for every client immediately, once COVID started becoming a problem, and we did.”

With all the companies that are setting up shop in the Tampa Bay region, it’s no wonder that there is a vibrant financial advisory sector in the area. The top four financial advisers all manage, at a minimum, $200 million and include: Suncoast Equity Management, LLC, which manages $583,486,836; PSI Advisors, LLC at $354,561,511; Bayshore Capital Advisors, LLC at $280,950,730; and Wealth Advisors of Tampa Bay at $237,795,088.

In some cases, financial advisers had to be nimble to stave off catastrophe, especially in the early days of the pandemic when nobody knew how far the economy would fall before bottoming out. Within just a few weeks, there was a huge contraction of available cash, work was forced to go remote, and, soon enough, there was a slew of stimulus measures offered by the government that had to be navigated. Being able to predict the course of the pandemic early helped: one firm in Palm Beach, Dakota Wealth Management, had a medical professional on their board who saw the writing on the wall as early as February 2020. By March, the company had increased its cash holdings in its equity accounts and ETF strategies by five times and so were able to avoid the hit that the markets took in the middle of that month.

On the deals front, mergers and acquisitions posted one of the slowest years in a decade, with total deal value down by almost half a trillion dollars. That is directly attributable to market uncertainty stemming from the pandemic. That said, by the third and fourth quarter of 2020, buoyed by federal stimulus, a strong stock market, and the imminent reality of vaccination, things began ( )