Giving advisors the onboarding edge

About Derek

Derek Merkler runs Trophy Point Financial Planning, a virtual RIA focused on military veterans navigating the transition into the corporate world. But that's only part of his practice. He also handles bookkeeping and tax work for horse racing professionals, and has completed more than 550 one-hour planning sessions through Hello Nectarine. With three businesses running simultaneously and a high volume of short-form client meetings, Derek needed tools that worked quietly in the background — not ones that added steps.

The challenge

Running a high-volume virtual practice means a lot of meetings, a lot of follow-up, and very little margin for friction. For Derek, the math was simple: the more time he spent on administrative work after each session, the less capacity he had for the next one.

He'd tried standalone AI notetakers like Fathom, but found they added a layer without solving the underlying problem. He wasn't just looking for notes. He was looking for something that could take what happened in a meeting and actually move the work forward — drafting emails, capturing action items, prepping for the next call.

The other challenge was consistency across very different contexts. Nectarine sessions are fast, focused, and often involve clients he hasn't worked with before. Trophy Point work is longer-term and relationship-driven. Whatever tool he used had to be useful across both — even when it was working with limited data.

How Derek uses Quin

Derek starts every morning the same way: with Quin's daily brief before his first meeting. It gives him a quick view of what's ahead and what's still open, so he's not starting the day from scratch or hunting through notes to remember where things stand.

For Nectarine sessions, Quin earns its place even under constraints. When client data is limited, Quin works with what's there — pulling together relevant context, generating follow-up drafts, and keeping the session from disappearing into a folder of audio files. About 70% of the time, the email drafts Quin produces are good enough to save time even when Derek edits them. The other 30% still give him a starting point.

What pulled Derek away from tools like Fathom wasn't a single feature. It was the difference between a notetaker and something that could act on what it captured. Quin connected the dots between the meeting and the work that followed, without requiring Derek to manage a separate layer of automation.

His framework for evaluating any new tool: think through the actual value before getting distracted by what's new. Quin passed that test because the use case was clear and the lift was low.

The results

Derek's practice runs leaner because of it. The specific outcomes:

• Every morning starts with a daily brief that surfaces what matters before the first call
• Nectarine sessions — even with limited client data — generate usable notes and follow-up drafts automatically
• Email drafts save time on roughly 70% of meetings, with a starting point ready even when edits are needed
• Standalone notetakers like Fathom have been replaced by a tool that goes further than capturing what was said
• Across three different business contexts, one tool handles the follow-through consistently

For an advisor running at this volume, the difference isn't dramatic moments — it's the quiet removal of steps that used to eat time between every meeting. Derek's word for what matters most about Quin: simplicity.

"Keeping it simple is Quin's biggest differentiator."

See what Quin can do for your practice. Try it free for 14 days at heyquin.io.