Greetings from Charleston.

It's prom night at our house. I just got back from taking pre-prom photos of our 17-year-old and her friends — the weather is perfect, friends are in town, and tomorrow we're headed to see My Morning Jacket with Alabama Shakes. Should be one of those weekends you don't forget.

This week, we launched Relay at Milemarker. We've been building it and rolling it out with customers for a while now, and as of Tuesday, it's live for all of them. The team is stoked. The early results are even better than we hoped. More on that below.

Next week I'm on the road — New York, Tampa, Atlanta, and Chicago. If you're in any of those cities and want to grab coffee, reply, and let's get something on the calendar.

On Wednesday, we launch the first in a new webinar series with SignatureFD called How I AI. It's a behind-the-scenes look at how firms are actually adopting AI to transform the way they work — less theory, less hype, more "here's exactly how we're using this on a Tuesday morning." Laura Hubbell kicks it off. Worth having on your radar.

Without further ado, I'm going to break down the state of automation in the industry as I see it. I think it matters, and I think it's time.

Our team at Milemarker has also been shipping some of the most transformative updates we've ever released, and it's a delight to see the immediate impact on how firms run their businesses.

Here's this week's Rising Tide.

I want to tell you something I don't talk about much.

In my past, one of my most fruitful marketing expenses has been in the category of automation.

Not on marketing. On the automation of it. Marketo. Salesforce clouds stacked on Salesforce clouds. A custom data warehouse. Zapier Enterprise. Segment. A team of people whose full-time job was keeping the plumbing working.

I'm proud of the work we did. It was ahead of its time for our category, and a lot of what we built still compares well with what most firms in our industry are doing today.

But here's the honest reckoning. It was expensive. And it was not nimble.

Every new campaign was a month of integration work. Every pivot was a small army reconfiguring plumbing. The stack could do almost anything — eventually. What it couldn't do was turn on a dime.

MarTech moves four or five times faster than anything we see in fintech or wealthtech. Running a billion-dollar marketing operation on Salesforce-era architecture was like trying to run a Formula 1 team with a diesel truck. You could do it. You wouldn't win the championship.

Here's a fun fact, though. The automation I put into place with some of today's largest wealthtechs back in 2013? Still doing its job. Quieter now. Older. But a house built on a rock.

That matters to you. If you start investing now — particularly by getting real control over your data — what you build is going to outlast almost everything else in your stack. Automation done on a strong foundation compounds. It doesn't decay the way most software does.

On Tuesday, we launched Relay. This letter is everything the press release didn't have room for.

Data is the fuel. Automation is the scale.

Every company is becoming a technology company. Not in the "we have an app" sense — in the deeper sense. How work flows. How decisions get made. How customers get served. All of it is becoming a software problem.

A software problem needs two things: clean fuel and a way to turn that fuel into motion without a human pushing every step. The fuel is data — unified, trustworthy, and real-time. The scale is automation — the thin layer on top that turns data into action.

Without both, you don't have a technology business. You have a service business dressing up as one. And the market will figure that out.

The numbers back this up:

Translate those numbers into a mid-size wealth firm running at a 25% margin and the math isn't subtle. A 10% reduction in operating expenses is an enterprise-value story, not an efficiency story.

Most of wealth management hasn't picked up on this yet — especially mid-size and large firms. Automation in those firms is atrophied. Not because leaders don't care. Because the muscle hasn't been used. Because every attempt got stuck on the same thing: the data.

I used to spend a lot of money each year building bridges between systems. We should have been building ground.

The ground finally exists. The thing we were simulating a decade ago with integrations and duct tape is a product you can buy today. The excuse is gone.

A few years ago, somebody floated the idea of a Chief Automation Officer. I got the impulse, but it's the wrong instinct. Automation isn't a department. It's everybody's job, same as AI. The advisor is automating client review prep. The ops lead is automating morning recon. The CCO automating attestations. Everybody.

The firms that win this decade won't be the ones with the fanciest strategy. They'll be the ones where everybody is automating the repetitive stuff.

So here's what I hope for you.

Make this the year you automate everything you can. Not because we launched a product on Tuesday, but because the cost of not doing it keeps rising and the cost of doing it keeps falling. Those two lines are about to cross.

If you're a Milemarker customer, Relay is in your hands. Thin automation layer on your unified data. Included in what you already pay.

If you're not, automate anyway. Find one thing that eats an hour of your week and give that hour back. Then find another. Look around at what we're building for the firms we partner with. Get curious about what's possible now that wasn't six months ago.

Every business is becoming a technology business — whether its leaders have accepted that yet. A technology business needs data as fuel and automation as scale.

Two of those we can sell you.

The third — the conviction that your firm is, in fact, a technology business now — is on you.

Have a great weekend.

Bain & Company. "Automation Scorecard 2024: Lessons Learned Can Inform Deployment of Generative AI." Bain & Company, 2024, www.bain.com/insights/automation-scorecard-2024-lessons-learned-can-inform-deployment-of-generative-ai/.

Bain & Company. "Most Automation Transformations Fall Short, Despite Opportunity to Reduce Costs by as Much as 30%." Bain & Company, 13 Mar. 2023, www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2023/most-automation-transformations-fall-short-despite-opportunity-to-reduce-costs-by-as-much-as-30/.

Böringer, Jan, et al. "Insights to Impact: Creating and Sustaining Data-Driven Commercial Growth." McKinsey & Company, 18 Jan. 2022, www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/insights-to-impact-creating-and-sustaining-data-driven-commercial-growth.

Chui, Michael, et al. "The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier." McKinsey & Company, 14 June 2023, www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-economic-potential-of-generative-ai-the-next-productivity-frontier.

Episode 140: On this week’s episode, Kyle Van Pelt sits down with Anne McPhail, Managing Director at Novare Capital Management. With more than 30 years of experience across corporate banking and wealth management, Anne brings deep experience in wealth management, with a focus on guiding clients through major life transitions and building advisory relationships rooted in trust, empathy, and long-term perspective. 

Anne talks with Kyle about what it truly means to serve clients through life's most important and often most difficult moments. She shares how genuine empathy and thoughtful financial strategy come together to create meaningful client relationships, how leading advisory firms deliver a consistent, high-touch experience at scale, and how Novare develops the next generation of advisors without compromising trust.

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(01:43) - Anne's money moment

(04:18) - Novare's life transition playbook

(07:13) - Scaling personalized service across the firm

(09:06) - Anne's advice for young wealth professionals

(11:19) - Developing the next generation of advisors

(18:28) - Staying current in a changing industry

(21:17) - Integrating planning into every aspect of clients’ lives

(25:00) - Building trust that lasts through life's uncertainties

(25:56) - Philanthropy, community, and relationship building

(30:37) - Anne's outlook on the future of financial services

(33:50) - Anne's Milemarker Minute

Unlike generic API-based tools, Milemarker Relay runs on top of data already normalized across 130+ wealth management systems—so workflows understand accounts, advisors, sleeves, and compliance rules out of the box.

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

Jud Mackrill