Insights
Plain answers to the questions that come up when a firm is weighing whether to change how it runs. No gates, no email required.
Category
The word covers four different arrangements. Firms shopping for one routinely buy another.
Category
Both outsource investment management, and they are built for entirely different firms. Choosing wrong is a scale mistake.
Switching
Every platform quotes weeks of their effort. Almost none quote the number that affects your calendar.
Buyer's guide
Twelve questions to ask everyone on your list, and the one that predicts all the others.
Category
The comparison most firms build is missing its largest line — and it is not software.
Cost
Most firms underestimate this by about half. Here is how to total it properly.
Tools
Redtail, Wealthbox and Salesforce, written without a horse in the race.
Risk
A large share of advisors became discretionary managers without deciding to. The workload is the visible part.
Operations
Nobody leaves over a fee error. They leave over what the fee error tells them.
Switching
Custodians retain three years. Most firms have been operating far longer.
Compliance
A firm can obtain excellent execution and still fail the obligation.
Compliance
Using the methodology and claiming compliance are different things.
Growth
A multiple is an output. What a buyer prices is decided years earlier.
Operations
Rarely by design. Reconciliation does not add — it multiplies.
Risk
Tolerance, capacity and requirement collapsed into one score — and where that misleads.
Planning
It returns a percentage and the client nods. They were asking something harder.
Technology
Most of what advisors are sold is a prompt in front of a general model.
Architecture
Four systems can compute a client's return, each correctly, each differently.
Portfolios
Three mandates should not mean three registrations. That is a software constraint.
Controls
Most systems enforce access on the screen. That is not where access is enforced.
Compliance
Every proposal documents what was recommended. Almost none document why.
Cost
Each cost is disclosed. The sum almost never is — and the sum is what they pay.
Client experience
The most repeated event in a practice, and its agenda is whatever the software printed first.
Client experience
The most valuable thing you can say about a decline has to be said before one happens.
Client experience
Most fee conversations fail before they start, and the client can hear it.
Client experience
Reporting built to demonstrate thoroughness. The evidence nobody reads it is in your inbox.
Client experience
Clients decide what this relationship is on operational evidence, not advice.
Client experience
The most common challenge in the business, and the one most advisors answer worst.
Going independent
The quoted figure is setup. Setup is the smallest part of year one.
Going independent
Governed by documents most people signed years ago and have not read since.
Going independent
They are not weighing your reasons. They are working out whether this will be hard for them.
Practice growth
Three decisions get made at once, and firms that treat them as one postpone all three.
Technology
Most firms have no written position on AI. That is itself a policy, and the hardest to defend.
Client experience
Most widows leave their late husband's advisor. The reason is almost never performance.
Client experience
Most heirs change advisor after inheriting, usually because they had never met you.
Practice growth
A schedule unchanged for a decade is a real-terms cut delivered annually.
Practice growth
Most principals hire an advisor because that is what they are. It is usually wrong.
Technology
Every product demos well. The demo is clean data along a chosen path.
Planning
Most firms use a rule of thumb, and it is wrong often enough to check every time.
Going independent
Framed as ambition, which is useless. It is about which problems you would rather own.
Technology
Nearly everything can be automated, which is why that question does not help.
Client experience
Most principals carry them for years, and the reason is rarely economic.
Practice growth
Two clients with identical assets can differ five-fold in cost to serve.
Compliance
Mostly whether you can demonstrate what you did, not whether you did wrong.
Practice growth
What changes hands is a set of relationships that can decline to come with you.
Practice growth
Everyone says referrals, then cannot name the source of their last ten.
Planning
The break-even framing invites the wrong question entirely.
Marketing
It reduces the number of people you compete with for each prospect.
Marketing
If a stranger cannot tell it is for them, nothing further down matters.
Marketing
Most advisors get nothing from it. Usually the approach, not the channel.
Practice management
Cadence should follow complexity, not the calendar.
Practice management
Almost every firm runs on knowledge recorded nowhere.
Technology
The value is in what you use it for, not in who wrapped it.
Research
Everything published about advisory operations is opinion. This is the part nobody publishes.