Very early Friday morning, I made it back east after a few days in Scottsdale. Thankfully, I missed the outage, but I’m assuming some of you got caught out there. I hope you found someone named Guy Polinski (AKA the Polka King of the midwest) and grabbed a ride with his band to get you back home in time to be with your son Kevin.
This week has been a soap opera.
There were many eye catching headlines. Nvidia's Jensen Huang, arguably the most powerful CEO in AI, admitted to affairs, is facing congressional scrutiny over possible espionage. The board launched an independent review, and the stock dropped about 4% in a single day. Huang resigned. Microsoft's email stumbled again, leaving some inboxes dark for hours. Anthropic released Fable 5.2 to the general public. Anthropic's IPO is expected to start trading on November 19. And, of course, something happened with the federal aviation system, although no one is being especially clear just yet about the details.
All of this and more.
Does any of it matter?
Will it change our lives?
Maybe.
Definitely if you found yourself in an airport you did not intend to stay inside for very long. For most people, probably not. At least not this week.
The headlines move fast. Markets swing. Someone on TV will explain why everything is different now. Your clients will see the same headlines, and some of them will call to ask whether they should buy Anthropic on day one. That's fine. That's the job.
Here's what does matter
One foot in front of the other, day after day.
Some steps matter more than others. A call that turns into your biggest client. A hire who changes the culture. A conversation at a conference that becomes a partnership five years later.
You rarely know which step that will be when you take it. Most of them feel ordinary. Some of them turn out to be everything.
The only way to find out is to keep walking. Some days you'll be running.
The advisor who sends the eighth follow-up to the prospect who finally says yes. The ops lead who catches the billing error before it reaches a client statement. The team that shows up Monday and does the work.
Progress rarely looks like a headline. It looks like a Tuesday. It builds quietly, through small decisions most people never see, until one of them breaks things open.
So read the news. Have an opinion. Stay flexible in the airports. Enjoy the drama if that's your thing.
Then close the tab and take the next step. It might be the big one.
What's the step you've been putting off? Hit reply and tell me.
Have a great week.
Jud
On the Pod: Building a Boutique at Scale
Episode 170: This week on Next Mile, Kyle Van Pelt is joined by Leah Sciabarrasi, President and Managing Partner at Crestwood Advisors. Leah joined Crestwood in 2003, when the firm was three people with no assets under management, and has helped build it from the ground up. Over two decades she has grown from hands-on operator into the leader guiding the firm's strategy and growth.
Kyle and Leah explore what changes when an advisory practice becomes an enterprise, and how Crestwood has kept a boutique client experience as it has grown. Leah shares why the firm invests in people and infrastructure before capacity gets strained, how culture and mutual adaptability shape successful mergers, and why long-term strategy sometimes means spending ahead of revenue. They also discuss using technology and AI to improve efficiency while keeping judgment, context, and human relationships at the center of advice.
Key takeaways:
Invest ahead of growth, so you build capacity before you're fighting fires.
Decide whether you're building a practice or an enterprise. They require different systems, culture, and career paths.
Make scale invisible to the client. Growth should add resources without making the experience feel impersonal.
Treat merger integration as a people and culture challenge first.
On Demand:
The Control Layer: Turning Scattered Files Into Reports, Proposals, and Beautiful Experiences
Your firm already has everything it needs to produce great client reports and winning proposals. It’s just spread across a custodian portal, a CRM, three spreadsheets, a shared drive, and someone’s desktop. So every quarter-end and every new prospect turns into the same scramble: pull the files, reconcile the numbers, paste them into a template, fix the formatting, and hope nothing changed in the meantime.
That isn’t a reporting problem. It’s a control problem. When there’s no single layer governing your data, every output gets rebuilt by hand, and the quality of what your clients see depends on who had time that week.
In this session, Jud Mackrill and Kailash Duraiswami show what changes when firms put a control layer between their scattered files and the experiences they deliver. You'll see how firms are taking documents, exports, and system data, bringing them under one governed foundation, and turning them into client reports, proposals, and branded experiences without the manual assembly. They walk through real workflows, where firms typically get stuck, and what it takes to make polished output repeatable instead of heroic.
This session is built for operations leaders, firm principals, and anyone who's tired of spending skilled hours on copy-and-paste work. Watch it whenever it fits your week.
Your hosts
Jud Mackrill, Co-Founder & CEO, Milemarker
Kailash Duraiswami, CTO, Milemarker
Milemarker on the Road
Catch my team on the road at the following events or cities:
Chicago - November 10-11
Scottsdale, AZ - November 11-14
Omaha, NE - November 15-17
New York, NY - November 18-19
If you would like to arrange a meeting time, please reply to this email, and we’ll schedule something on the calendar.
Jud Mackrill