70 degrees in Charleston. Christmas week. Feels like June.

Before the holiday, I had the same conversation three times.

Different people. Same reference: the Domino’s Pizza Tracker.

“I wish we had that for our clients.”

Domino’s launched that tracker in 2008. Seventeen years ago. And advisors still bring it up weekly.

A $14 pepperoni pizza has better status visibility than a $200 million portfolio rebalance. That’s absurd. And it’s still true.

This week: why we’re still talking about pizza, and what 2026 should finally change.

Happy holidays. Here’s the Rising Tide.

1. Have Your Pizza and Track It Too

2. Next Mile: What It Takes to Build the Next Generation of Talent 🎧

3. Elevation Point on Laying the Foundation for AI-Driven Growth

4. Milemarker On the Road ✈️

Have Your Pizza and Track It Too

Domino’s launched its Pizza Tracker in January 2008.

That’s seventeen years ago. The iPhone was six months old. Obama hadn’t been elected yet. Lehman Brothers was still a going concern.

And yet, almost every week, an advisor brings this up to me: “I wish we had something like Domino’s Pizza Tracker for our clients.” 

Every. Single. Week.

Think about that for a moment. A $14 pepperoni pizza has better status visibility than a $200 million portfolio rebalance. Your client can watch their Meat Lover’s journey from prep to oven to doorstep, but they have no idea where their rollover paperwork stands.

How is this still true?

Let’s talk pizza. Let’s talk data. And let’s talk about why 2026 should finally be the year you can track your calzones.

The Dirty Truth About the Pizza Tracker

Here’s the thing about that famous tracker: it’s not quite what you think it is.

The Pizza Tracker is real technology—Domino’s patented it (U.S. Patent 10,262,281)—but it’s also part theater. The system is connected to actual store operations through Domino’s Pulse computer system, accurate to within 40 seconds according to the company. When a team member finishes prepping your order, they press a button. When it goes in the oven, another button. When the driver leaves, they punch out.

But here’s where it gets interesting: former employees have revealed that the system can be “gamed.” Employees sometimes mark orders complete before they’re actually done. Drivers use dummy accounts to take more deliveries than the system thinks they’re running. The tracker might say “delivered” when your pizza is still three stops away.

Why do they game it? Because the tracker isn’t just for customers—it’s a performance management tool. Corporate uses that data to rate store locations. So when Friday night gets slammed and there aren’t enough drivers, employees find creative workarounds to keep their metrics looking good.

The tracker is only as honest as the people feeding it data. Sound familiar?

The Real Genius of the Pizza Tracker

Here’s what Domino’s actually solved: they eliminated the “where’s my order?” phone call.

A TikToker who read the entire patent put it perfectly: “They’re not out to fool us. It’s to reduce the amount of people who are calling and asking, ‘What status is my pizza at?’

Before the tracker, every anxious customer meant an interrupted kitchen. Someone had to stop making pizzas to answer the phone, look up the order, explain that yes, it’s in the oven, and get back to work. Multiply that by dozens of calls per shift and you’ve got a serious operational drag.

The tracker didn’t just improve customer experience—it freed up capacity. It turned reactive service into proactive communication.

Now imagine that applied to your practice.

Why Advisors Still Dream of Pizza Trackers

When advisors tell me they want a “pizza tracker,” they’re not really asking for a progress bar. They’re expressing a deeper frustration:

They can’t see where anything stands. 

• Where’s that account transfer?

• Did the ACAT go through?

• Has the client signed the documents?

• Is the model rebalance complete?

• When did we last reach out to this prospect?

These answers exist somewhere—scattered across your CRM, your custodian portal, your portfolio management system, your email, your task manager, maybe a spreadsheet or two. The data is there. It’s just not connected.

And here’s the kicker: your clients feel the same uncertainty you do. They submitted that rollover paperwork and now they’re waiting. Wondering. Maybe calling. Definitely anxious.

Domino’s understood something profound: visibility creates trust. Even imperfect visibility. Even a progress bar that’s occasionally off by a few minutes. The act of showing people what’s happening—giving them a window into the process—fundamentally changes how they experience the wait.

The Gap That Shouldn’t Still Exist

So why, in 2025, does a pizza chain have better process visibility than most wealth management firms?

Three reasons:

1. Fragmented systems. The average RIA uses 15+ different technology platforms. Each one holds a piece of the puzzle. None of them talk to each other in any meaningful way. Your CRM knows about the client relationship. Your custodian knows about the assets. Your financial planning tool knows about the goals. Your trading system knows about the models. But nothing knows everything.

2. Data lives in silos. Even when you can access information from multiple systems, it’s disconnected. You can pull a report from Schwab and a report from Redtail, but reconciling them requires manual effort. The data isn’t unified. There’s no single source of truth.

3. No process layer. Here’s the real problem: even if your data were connected, you’d still lack the workflow infrastructure to track multi-step processes. A pizza order has five stages: prep, bake, quality check, out for delivery, delivered. A client onboarding might have fifty steps across eight systems. Without a process layer sitting on top of your data, you can’t track anything meaningfully.

What It Actually Takes to Build a Pizza Tracker

Let me tell you what Domino’s had to do to make their tracker work.

First, they centralized their order data. Every order from every store flows into a unified system. They’re not checking eight different databases—they’re polling one.

Second, they created standardized stages. Prep. Oven. Quality check. Delivery. The same stages at every location, logged the same way, measured against the same timelines.

Third, they connected the humans to the data. Every button press, every login, every punch-out feeds the system. The tracker isn’t a guess—it’s a reflection of actual events happening in the store.

Fourth, they built a customer-facing layer on top. The tracker itself is just a visualization of the underlying data. The real infrastructure is invisible.

This is exactly what’s been missing in wealth management. Not the visualization—the infrastructure.

The Warehouse Changes Everything

At Milemarker, we’ve been obsessed with this problem for years.

Here’s what we’ve built: a data infrastructure layer that sits beneath your entire operation. Every system you use—your CRM, your custodian feeds, your financial planning software, your portfolio management tools, your document storage—all of it flows into a central warehouse.

But we didn’t stop at data aggregation. That’s table stakes.

We built the process layer.

When a request comes in—an account opening, a money movement, a rebalance—it doesn’t just live in your request system. It lives in the warehouse. It lives in the data lake. Every stage, every status change, every timestamp gets captured.

Why does this matter? Because now you can see it. Track it. Report on it. And—here’s where it gets exciting—you can automate it.

From Pizza Tracker to AI Agent

Here’s what 2026 looks like.

Imagine a client submits a rollover request through your portal. That request hits your CRM. But it also hits your data warehouse. An AI agent picks it up, recognizes the request type, and kicks off a workflow:

1. Generate the rollover paperwork

2. Send it for e-signature

3. Monitor for completion

4. Submit to the custodian

5. Track the ACAT status

6. Notify the advisor when assets land

7. Update the client along the way

At every stage, the client can see where things stand. Not because someone built a bespoke tracker, but because the underlying data infrastructure makes visibility automatic.

Your own pizza tracker. For any process. Any “pizza”—or calzone, or breadsticks, or whatever your firm’s version of a complex multi-step client request happens to be.

The Lesson From a $14 Pepperoni

Here’s what seventeen years of Pizza Tracker envy should teach us:

The visualization isn’t the innovation. The data infrastructure is. 

Domino’s didn’t build a pretty progress bar and call it a day. They rebuilt their entire operational data architecture so that real-time visibility became possible. The tracker is just what customers see. The transformation happened underneath.

Wealth management has been trying to solve this backwards—bolting dashboards onto disconnected systems, hoping visibility will emerge from complexity. It won’t.

You need the warehouse first. You need unified data. You need a process layer that captures every stage of every workflow. Then the “pizza tracker” becomes much simpler.

2026: Have Your Pizza and Track It Too

I’ve been having this same conversation with advisors for years. The longing for a pizza tracker. The frustration with opacity. The sense that this shouldn’t still be a problem.

It shouldn’t. And it doesn’t have to be. The infrastructure exists now. The AI capabilities to automate complex workflows exist now. The ability to surface real-time status to clients and advisors alike—that exists now.

2026 should be the year you finally stop envying a pizza chain.

Build the warehouse. Unify the data. Create the process layer. And then watch what becomes possible when you can finally see—and show your clients—exactly where their order stands.

Prep. Processing. Quality check. Complete.

Your pizza’s ready.

Have questions about building your firm’s data infrastructure? Let’s talk. Because nobody should have to wonder where their money is when they never have to wonder where their pizza is.

______________________

On the Pod: What It Takes to Build the Next Generation of Talent 

Episode 124: In this special Christmas 2025 episode, Kyle Van Pelt brings together four standout voices to explore what it takes to identify, attract, develop, and retain the next generation of talent.

Daniel Spurgeon shares how firms can spot potential early and create intentional career pathways instead of reactive hires. Kristen Oziemkowski explains what today’s young professionals are really looking for—and how purpose, culture, and clarity drive attraction. Eric Kittner highlights the power of mentorship, in-person learning, and real responsibility in developing talent. And Matt Matrisian makes the case that long-term growth, trust, and investment are essential to retention.

Together, these conversations offer a practical roadmap for building teams that thrive well into the future.

00:00) - Intro

(00:54) – Daniel Spurgeon on identifying potential early and building intentional career pathways

(07:32) – Kristen Oziemkowski on attracting young professionals through purpose, culture, and clarity

(16:53) – Eric Kittner on developing the next generation through mentorship and real responsibility

(24:52) – Matt Matrisian on retaining talent by investing in growth, trust, and long-term vision

⚡️Bookmarks

Elevation Point on Laying the Foundation for AI-Driven Growth

I recently spoke with Elevation Point CEO Jim Dickson about the future of RIAs and why proactive data management and AI-powered tools are becoming table stakes. We also discussed Elevation Point’s new partnership with Milemarker and how a unified data foundation is helping fuel long-term, aligned growth.

Below are a few highlights from our conversation.

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

1. Phoenix, AZ —January 26-28

2. Charleston, SC — January 26-28

3. San Diego, CA — February 26-28

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

Jud Mackrill