SMARTDRAW IN FINANCE:

Financial Consultant Helps Clients Get the Picture with SmartDraw

Jon Golding is CEO of Golding Consultants, an international financial consulting firm with a major presence in the UK and Caribbean. His clients are generally global entrepreneurs, expatriates or diplomats with financial assets in two or more countries. Golding is charged with developing the business by screening new clients, as well as working as a team leader in problem analysis.

"Our job is to get to the root of the client's problem, understand why it is a problem, and illustrate what it looks like so the client can get a clear understanding," said Golding. "We are then in a position to construct a solution and set goals."

A big part of problem-solving is presenting the information in a visual manner to facilitate communication with the client.

"We use visual charts or graphics because it's easier for everyone to focus on and understand, and they are much more effective than reports that don't get read or understood," said Golding.

In the past, his firm had been using their own tools, templates and methods which they had created over time using programs like Visio^®, Excel^®, WORD^® and PowerPoint^®. Eventually, a colleague gave SmartDraw a glowing recommendation, and Golding decided to give it a try. Immediately, he could see that SmartDraw offered several advantages over what they had been using.

Golding found that SmartDraw offers hundreds of SmartTemplates such as mindmaps, flowcharts, decision trees and more—each loaded with a command set specific to the diagram type. Users simply enter the information and SmartDraw does the rest—building the graphic automatically. In addition, the templates can be modified quickly and easily.

"SmartDraw is very easy to use, and it offers a great wide selection of templates that we can customize easily," said Golding. "The product also widens our problem solving skills by offering a fantastic range of ideas outside the scope of the problem, that enable us to come up with new solutions."

SmartDraw's ease-of-use coupled with its automated drawing features helps Golding's team save hours in time.

"Time savings is the biggest asset to my team. It saves us 60% of our time compared to what we were doing before," said Golding. "In addition, it allows us to standardize our solutions and not 'reinvent the wheel.'"

In addition, Golding's team found that SmartDraw's web design capability was excellent for designing web pages. He praised the flexibility of the web design templates, as well as the wide choice of professional-looking color schemes.

SmartDraw also allows users to save SmartDraw documents to PDF, WORD^®, PowerPoint^® and Excel^® in a single-click.

"The ability to save in many formats such as WORD^® and PDF is a huge benefit," said Golding. "It takes the design to a finished product in no time at all."

And what do his clients think? According to Golding, most of his clients are very impressed with the documents created in SmartDraw, and ask him which firm they hired to make the polished and professional designs. Golding is so impressed with SmartDraw that he plans to build the company's value proposition around the program.

"SmartDraw takes us a quantum leap from what we were doing before," claims Golding. "Picture Power is our Value Proposition and SmartDraw is our Value Tool. From what we've seen, we don't think we'll be disappointed!"

To learn more and to download a free trial, visit www.smartdraw.com