Allow former Riskalyze CEO Aaron Klein to reintroduce himself. Because now, his business card and
On Tuesday, the
Growth is something Klein said both his company and the industry are razor focused on right now. And frankly, having a firm with "risk" still occupying prominent space in its identity was both muddying the message and limiting the scope.
Klein said the company previously tailored around the "Risk Number" has evolved into a complete growth platform for advisory firms that offers lead generation, marketing, client engagement and compliance solutions alongside risk analysis.
So for him, Nitrogen — the most plentiful element in Earth's atmosphere and considered a vital component for plant growth — was the perfect fit.
"If you look back over the history of our company for the last decade, one of the things we realized is that our customers, by and large, come to us looking for a risk solution. And they stumble over the growth platform that we've been building," Klein told Financial Planning in an interview. "And we said, 'man, in a couple of years, our company is going to be twice as large as it is today.' And we think that we need to look back and say the second half of our customers were actually looking for a growth platform when they came to us. They didn't have to stumble over it.
"I mean, listen, we're going to be the makers of Riskalyze for a while. But Nitrogen is just like … when we saw it, we just had to have it," he continued. "It's a catalyst. It's a force multiplier. And it just embodied all of those values of energy and velocity and growth that we deliver for wealth management firms and for the advisors they serve."
Plans to rebrand have been in the works for months, and those intentions were made public last fall when then-Riskalyze now-Nitrogen leaders broke the news at October's
But coming up with a new name is not an easy task and one that Klein said his firm was not taking lightly. After all, Klein has essentially been "Mr. Riskalyze" since the SaaS company first opened the doors in 2011.
Not only was the company getting a new identity. So was he.
"My wife and I, we joke that we have four kids. We have three of them who are human beings, and one of them who's a company. And she said, 'oh my gosh, you're renaming our fourth kid,'" Klein said laughing. "So there's definitely a little bit of wistfulness around that because it's over a decade of hard work and love and memories and pain and success. You can't just turn the page in that chapter without feeling a little bit emotional."
With big stakes on the line, a bat signal went up for the pros to come in. Craig Clark, chief marketing officer at Nitrogen told Financial Planning that the rebranding effort was a journey their team embarked on under the guidance of Focus Lab and
"You probably haven't heard of (Lexicon) before. But you've definitely heard of some of the brand names that they've developed over the years. Things like the Swiffer, Dasani Water, Sonos, work they've done with Microsoft," Clark said. "They have an amazing method of stepping in with a company like us and leading a team like ourselves through this really emotional job of putting a new name on something as storied as Riskalyze."
But did the effort ever become too emotional? When asked if the team got cold feet at any point about the rebrand, Clark laughed and said as challenging as it was, rolling back to the familiar color scheme and logo was never an option.
"The definitive answer is no. We were going to follow through right from the moment that AK (Klein) stepped off the stage at Fearless last year," Clark said
Nitrogen got its start as Riskalyze in 2011 as a free consumer product when Klein founded the company with Mike McDaniel and Matt Pistone. Both McDaniel and Pistone have both moved on from the company, with the latter recently making headlines by
With more than $50 million in research and development investments since its inception, Nitrogen now has a platform that serves more than 154 broker-dealers, RIAs, asset managers, custodians and clearing firms.
According to Nitrogen, research suggests that industry-wide organic growth exclusive of market impact and acquisitions dropped to as low as 3% in 2020. But during that same period, advisory firms that worked with them saw organic growth rates between 15% and 45%.
An internal Nitrogen survey also found that hypergrowth firms — defined as those whose growth is outpacing that of the market and competitors — tend to use their tech stacks more frequently and efficiently than non-growth firms. The same survey indicated that 95.3% of Nitrogen customers fall into the hypergrowth category.
"For the last decade, we've been leveraging this platform to accelerate our growth and the success of our advisors," Cody Foster, CEO at Advisors Excel, said in a statement. "These guys have been innovating for all these years, and now they have a brand to match their incredibly powerful value proposition."
Klein said his primary message to advisors is to expect the tools firms have grown to depend on to keep getting better. Nitrogen is offering up a fresh new look, but the navigation and the menus will stay in the same place within the software to keep from slowing advisors down.
The rebrand also doesn't affect any existing contracts or service plans. Riskalyze Elite is now Nitrogen Elite, and what was Riskalyze Ultimate is now Nitrogen Ultimate.
"And we'll be answering the phone, 'thank you for calling Nitrogen, the makers of Riskalyze,'" Klein said.
But respecting the past while looking to the future is going to be crucial in the coming months. The Riskalyze name had a strong 12-year run, but Klein expects Nitrogen to live on much longer.
"I am somebody who tends to look forward. What I can see is the next chapter opening. And the Nitrogen chapter of this company's history is a big one. And I've always felt like you can do great things in your career, but you can't really build a great company unless the company outlasts you," he said. "I feel extraordinarily grateful that we built a company that I very clearly will not be the last CEO of. So I told my wife … here's one little thing that we can take with us.
"I am the first and last CEO of Riskalyze, and I'll be the first CEO of Nitrogen. But probably not the last."
