Greetings from heat advisory-laden Charleston.

Someone sent me a clip this week about the self-improvement paradox.

It borrows the old project triangle. Fast, cheap, good — pick two. Except the corners are fit, successful, and well-rested.

Fit and successful? You're not sleeping.

Fit and rested? Your career's going nowhere.

Successful and rested? You haven't seen the gym since March.

It's funny. It's also true, for a pretty boring reason. Twenty-four hours. One body. The corners compete for the same fixed pool.

You can shave the edges. Grocery delivery. A trainer. Real help, worth having.

But nobody can sleep on your behalf. Nobody can ride your intervals.

You are one node. Fixed capacity. No routing.

Growth. Client experience. A healthy team.

Unfortunately, most of the time you have to pick two.

Growth and experience. Your operations team works crazy long hours, always in the office on the last weekend of every quarter. You’d fail if that one person who knows how the billing file actually works went away.

Growth and a healthy team. Onboarding is undefined, and clients only hear from you at review time.

Client experience and a healthy team. Beloved. Referral-only. Same headcount for six years. The founder is sixty-two, and there's no succession plan.

It shows up in the data. In Schwab's benchmarking work, RIAs under $250 million grew organically at 9.2%, while firms above $250 million grew at 5%.

Getting bigger made them slower. That's the trade, measured.

But that’s the thing about firms that isn't true about individuals.

Your firm isn't one node. It's a system.

Systems don't have to pick two. They can route.

Before you distribute anything, you have to know where the load actually is, not where you assume it is.

Most firms are flying blind here, though not for lack of caring.

Kitces has been reporting the same number for years: the typical advisor spends only about 20% of working time actually meeting with clients. More than twice that goes to work happening where nobody can see it.

So the third corner never gets named. The drain stays invisible until your operations team is out of breath in October.

Step one is instrumentation.

This is where most firms stall.

Ask your team members: how long does onboarding actually take?

You'll likely get a few answers from different vantage points of the team. The CRM starts the clock at signed paperwork. Then the custodian paperwork is in play to open accounts. Your service team might chase the client for years to get the client's insurance details, but when does onboarding technically complete?

The context of open items is crucial.

Across all your operational behaviors, data can provide metrics. Context tells you what the number means to your firm — what a household is, what "onboarded" really means.

Without the context, asking your business a question gets you a guess with a decimal point. With it, you can finally ask the right questions. Where does work bottleneck? What sits? What did we promise in March that we're still doing by hand in August?

Five years ago, that was a consulting engagement, but now it's a question you can ask.

Episode 157: This week on Next Mile, Kyle Van Pelt is joined by Libby Buckley, Director of Wealth Administration & Marketing at Parable Wealth Partners. Libby leads the firm's client experience and team culture, bridges connections between clients, partner businesses, and non-profits, and creates experiences that help people rethink their wealth's potential to create change. 

Libby talks with Kyle about how radical hospitality translates into the wealth management space. She discusses how firms can preserve high-touch, authentic human relationships as AI adoption accelerates, how to design thoughtful and memorable client experiences, and how organizations can scale without losing sight of their core purpose. 

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(00:57) - Libby's money moment

(05:32) - Libby's definition of radical hospitality in wealth management

(08:05) - Client events that create meaningful connections 

(09:56) - Why AI makes authenticity even more valuable

(11:52) - Practical advice for building soft skills and radical hospitality habits 

(16:12) - How culture drives Parable's organic growth 

(18:31) - Scaling without losing authenticity 

(21:08) - Libby's outlook on the future of the financial services industry

(24:08) - Libby's Milemarker Minute

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Jud Mackrill