A few weeks ago I was in Dover, on the coast of the English Channel, with my friend Jamie Hopkins and both of our wives. We ducked into a pub. The walls were covered — names, places, numbers.

They were swimmers. The tradition after you swim the Channel is to stop by this pub and record your time. It's a record of people doing something once thought impossible, written in permanent marker.

And what struck me, standing there, is that all of it started with one person. This tradition ultimately began in 1875 with a man named Matthew Webb.

Matthew Webb covered himself in porpoise grease and dove off the Dover pier to try something no one had ever done. He had no wetsuit and no GPS. His crew handed him brandy and beef tea from a rowboat. He got stung by jellyfish. The tides pushed him so far off line that a 21-mile crossing turned into nearly 40 miles of actual swimming. And almost 22 hours later, he crawled up onto the sand in France, barely conscious.

When he got home, the Mayor of Dover said he didn't believe anyone would ever do it again.

It took 36 years for someone to prove him wrong. But once they did, everything changed.

Slowly, that wall started to fill up.

In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to make the crossing, and she didn't just do it. She beat the existing men's record by nearly two hours. And from there, the times kept coming down. Fourteen hours. Then eleven. Then under eight. By 2012, a swimmer named Trent Grimsey crossed in 6 hours and 55 minutes, roughly a third of Webb's time.

Today, more than two thousand people have made it across. Some have done it twice in a row, some three times. And in 2019, a woman named Sarah Thomas swam the Channel four times without stopping. Fifty-four hours in the water. Around 130 miles by the time the currents were done with her. And she did it a year after finishing treatment for breast cancer.

We went from one person, greased up and told it was impossible, to a person crossing four times in a row after cancer.

Here's the part I keep coming back to.

The human body didn't really change between Webb and Thomas. We are not a faster or stronger species than we were in 1875. What changed is everything around the swimmer. And even more than that, what got passed from one swimmer to the next.

Because no one out there is starting from scratch anymore. Webb's grease, his near-fatal mistakes, everything he learned the hard way, all of it became the next person's starting line. Every name on that wall is a piece of hard-won knowledge, handed forward to whoever reads it next.

That nearly straight line Grimsey swam existed because pilots had spent decades learning how the tides actually move, and telling one another what they found. The very same pilot who guided the previous record-holder across turned around and guided Grimsey right past him. And when Sarah Thomas made her crossing, she had a boat full of computers reading the wind and the water in real time, all of it built on data from the thousands of swimmers who had gone before her.

The swimmer gets the glory, and they should. But it's the shared knowledge underneath them that does so much of the work.

That, I think, is what the wall is really for.

Progress didn't compound because a handful of people were heroic. It compounded because they wrote down what they learned and handed it forward. The lesson that cost Webb 22 hours eventually became someone else's 7. But only because he passed it on.

And I'd argue we're standing in that very same moment right now.

We have more intelligence to draw on than any generation before us, and more support around us than we have ever had. But I don't think the tools are the real story. The thing that actually moves the number from 22 to 7 is our willingness to share what we know.

And in our industry, that matters more than in almost any other, because we are in the business of getting families safely across their own hard water. A sudden liquidity event. The loss of a spouse. The sale of a company someone spent thirty years building. Handing a fortune, and the values underneath it, to a generation that didn't earn it. Those are Channel crossings, every one of them. And most of what it takes to guide a family through them lives in the head of whichever advisor has done it before.

That is our problem, and it is our opportunity. The advisor who has walked three families through a brutal succession knows things no training manual will ever hold. The operations lead who fought through a painful custodian conversion learned the tides the hard way. When that knowledge stays locked in one person, every new advisor on your team and every next family you serve start back in 1875, greased up and guessing at the tide.

But when we write it down, when we build it into how the whole firm works and into the data and tools we finally have to carry it, the next family doesn't get our rookie effort. They get everything the firm has ever learned. That is what it actually looks like for our number to go from 22 to 7. Not a faster swim. A family guided further, and more surely, than the one before them. And that kind of progress compounds across generations, which in our line of work is the only kind of progress that ever really counts.

The names on that wall in Dover are never really finished. There is always room for more, and the people who come after us will write their times right next to ours. If we do this right, theirs will be faster, because of what we chose to leave behind.

So as we head into the second half of the year, this is what I want to leave you with. The families you serve are counting on you to carry them across hard water you have crossed before. The only question that really matters is whether you make that crossing alone, holding tight to what you know, or whether you leave a straighter line for the advisor and the family, coming up right behind you.

Have a great weekend.

I hope you find some time near the water, the warm kind, with a cold drink and the people you love.

Episode 153: This week on Next Mile, Kyle Van Pelt is joined by Brett Bernstein, CEO & Co-founder at XML Financial Group. Brett is an active financial advisor assisting clients with his holistic approach to goal-setting and problem-solving. Before co-founding XML in 2004, he was a Vice President and Senior Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch. He is also a serial entrepreneur, actively investing in many startups, and has led his firm through three acquisitions.

Brett talks with Kyle about why advisors are going independent. He discusses why independence continues to attract both advisors and clients, what it takes to build trust and brand recognition as an independent advisory firm, and how firms can balance scale with personalization. Brett also addresses the realities of scaling a modern advisory firm, including aligning operations across multiple teams, attracting the next generation of investors, investing in cybersecurity, and thoughtfully adopting AI without compromising compliance. 

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(02:03) - Brett's money moment

(05:34) - How to build brand credibility and trust as an independent firm

(07:52) - How Brett defines independence

(11:36) - Unifying operations and compliance while preserving advisor autonomy 

(13:15) - XML's social media and content strategy 

(18:15) - Referrals, seminars, and community-driven growth strategies

(20:04) - How to build a successful business from the ground up

(22:08) - Cybersecurity as a non-negotiable investment

(25:02) - How XML adapts to technology and AI

(27:17) - Leading with compliance: XML's approach to using AI

(29:16) - What Brett thinks about data and AI 

(31:24) - What the future holds for XML Financial Group

(33:53) - Brett's Milemarker Minute

Everyone wants to grow—but the firms pulling ahead aren't just recruiting more advisors. They're recruiting the right ones.

Join Jessica Perez and me on Wednesday, July 29 at 1:00 PM ET for a live webinar where we'll show how firms can use data and AI to identify advisors who are the best fit before the first conversation even happens.

Register here:

Milemarker on the Road
Catch my team on the road at the following events or cities:

If you would like to arrange a meeting time, please reply to this email, and we’ll schedule something on the calendar.

Jud Mackrill