For the past two years, we’ve had the pleasure of sharing year-end updates detailing our growth here at Bridgewell Financial. That includes an ever-expanding list of enhancements that we’ve made to address your evolving personal and professional financial needs across our core service pillars: group benefits; wealth and financial planning; executive planning; and personal and corporate insurance. Since then, our commitment to helping you achieve financial wellness has only become stronger.
This year is no different. We’ve taken steps to refine our processes, to add to our team and to redefine our service experience in exciting new ways. That’s included reinforcing our back-end infrastructure by introducing new software and service-delivery frameworks. It’s meant empowering our team to go above and beyond to help you meet your financial goals, while providing new tools for them to give back to the community. It’s involved a reimagining of our management systems, taking steps to stay ahead of financial industry trends and embracing the latest innovations and products to enhance our operational toolkit.
But once again our greatest inspiration comes from you, our clients and industry partners. Your support has powered our success, while inspiring us to continuously improve. Without you—and the hard work of our team members—our business would be very different. We truly appreciate all that you’ve done to spread the word about Bridgewell’s unique approach to service delivery, one focused on putting financial wellness at the forefront of our industry.
Making a long-term impact
To kick off this 2024 overview, we have some very big news to share about our firm’s charitable giving mandate. Bridgewell has established an ambitious goal that will see us donate $1 million to charity over the next 10 years. Why? Because we want to make a direct, meaningful impact on the communities we serve—in particular, connecting with organizations whose core values around wellness align with ours.
Giving back to the community was one of our main objectives when we founded Bridgewell. We look forward to working towards achieving our giving goal and promoting the importance of financial wellness and total well-being to our clients and communities along the way.
This year we also introduced a new policy designed to maximize the impact of our team’s donations to their preferred charities. Whenever a team member makes a donation, Bridgewell will match it 5-to-1. It’s our way of amplifying our team’s generosity, while helping our employees feel connected to the causes closest to their hearts. That’s in addition to the two paid days that we provide team members each year to volunteer at a charity or non-profit of their choice.
Giving back and growing as professionals
As always, we spent the past year supporting a range of wonderful causes. One was the annual JackRide: Canada’s Ride for Youth Mental Health in support of Jack.org, an organization that provides mental health training and support to young Canadians. We were thrilled to raise more than $5,000, while the entire ride raised more than $1.5 million to support the organization.
We once again sponsored another important event that means a great deal to our team: the annual Youth Unlimited Golf Tournament that raises funds in support of youth initiatives across the Greater Toronto Area. Bridgewell Senior Advisor Cheryl Solomon also brought one of her favourite charities into the fundraising fold, working to solicit donations in support of Camp Erin, a bereavement camp for youth grieving the loss of a loved one.
Lastly, we capped off this year’s philanthropic efforts with our annual pre-holiday event, held once again at the Leaside Curling Club. We not only curled and enjoyed time together, but also collected non-perishable food items for the Daily Bread Food Bank. Bridgewell then matched cash donations to the Daily Bread Food Bank, raising a grand total of $16,013.70 for the charity. We’re very proud to support a grass roots organization making such a profound difference in the lives of Torontonians living with food insecurity.
On the professional development front, we redoubled our firm-wide efforts to learn and expose our team to new ideas. Case in point: this year Bridgewell Partner Chad Tranter attended the Longer. Healthier. Better Symposium in Boston. Presented by Manulife, the conference brought together wellness and longevity sector luminaries to discuss everything from sleep and fitness strategies to human performance optimization. Chad offered some of his key takeaways from the event in a recent blog.
Chad was joined by Michael Wortsman in May at the annual Conference for Advanced Life Underwriting (CALU) conference, that once again assembled some of Canada’s leading insurance and financial industry professionals to network, learn and exchange insights. In September, Michael not only attended the Benefits Alliance Connect Conference in Nashville alongside our Benefits and Savings Program Consultant Amr Galal, but delivered two presentations—‘Using an effective brand and clear messaging to build Bridgewell Financial’ and ‘Think outside the box: Leverage tech tools to make your life easier.’
Lastly on the event side, the team came together once again for Bridgewell Day. This year we ventured out to the Fairgrounds for some intense pickleball play, great food and fun all around.
Expanding our team and our service offering
The only way we can continue to deliver a premium service experience is to continue building our team. This year we welcomed several new professionals. Yohan Roche joined the team as a Client Service Coordinator, with responsibilities in areas such as onboarding new clients and liaising with the rest of our team, while also managing new insurance applications. Justin Kishurilall came aboard as an Account Manager in our Group Benefits group. Justin is focused on working with clients to organize plan renewals, addressing their questions and concerns and proactively helping them adjust or enhance their group benefits coverage. As our newest team member and Group Service Coordinator, Sharika Thalapally coordinates client onboarding and assisting with group benefits claim processing. Her decade-plus of professional experience is already having a positive impact on our firm.
We’re very fortunate to have welcomed such dedicated, skilled and service-focused professionals to the team this year in important customer-facing roles. If you haven’t met them already, we look forward to you working with Sharika, Justin and Yohan in the months ahead.
Along with welcoming new staff, we also invested in new platforms to serve you better, including a full integration of Salesforce to enhance tracking and improve the service-related solutions we deliver to clients. Over the past year, we’ve also incorporated Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) into our business. The purpose is to use this innovative management system to become more efficient, to improve strategic decision-making and accomplish more with our existing suite of resources.
So, on behalf of the entire Bridgewell team, we’d like to extend our heartfelt gratitude for your support in 2024. It’s been a wonderful year on our end, and we hope on yours, too. We wish you happy holidays and a very prosperous New Year ahead in 2025.
The Bridgewell team
For assistance with your group benefits, wealth and financial planning, corporate or personal insurance needs, contact a member of our team
