I started this week with Jon McNeill's The Algorithm on a flight to Nebraska.

Met up with my oldest son, who had finished the year at the University of Nebraska.

Spent time with one of our partner firms.

Tuesday morning, we hit the road — Lincoln to Charleston, where he’ll get to recharge and work for the summer. Hours in the car with the best company I can imagine. A lot of flat land turning into hills, the Appalachians, and then the Coastal Plain.

Meanwhile, back home, we launched Milemarker MCP on Tuesday — one of our biggest product releases we've shipped. More on that below.

But first — McNeill's book. It kept coming back to me through the week. Partly the ideas. Partly because of the impact his approach has historically had. The framework he lays out is the clearest lens I've found for what's happening in our industry right now.

Here’s this week’s Rising Tide.

Jon McNeill grew up in Kearney, Nebraska.

Kearney is one of those places that matters to my family — one of a few pins on the map that shaped where we come from. Kearney, Washington, DC, and a few other places in between. It’s always interesting when small places punch above their weight in forming how you see the world.

Growing up in Kearney, McNeill mowed over 100 commercial lawns before graduating from high school. He went on to become President of Tesla, COO of Lyft, board member at GM, Lululemon, and CrossFit. He built a career on one instinct: ruthlessly remove what doesn’t need to be there.

His new book, The Algorithm, lays out five steps:

That order is unique. Most people skip to automate. McNeill says you earn the right to accelerate only after you’ve deleted everything that shouldn’t exist.

For decades, the technology industry sold us steps. CRM. Portfolio management. Reporting. Compliance. Custodial portals. Each one a station on an assembly line. Each one requires a login, a workflow, a trained operator, and a handoff to the next station.

You couldn’t question whether the assembly line itself was the problem. We just kept adding stations and calling it progress.

Launching a dashboard for leadership. Submitting a ticket. Writing requirements. Waiting for an analyst. Build it. Review. Revise. Deploy. Seven steps. One week.

Onboarding twelve new advisors. Twelve logins across a myriad of systems. Twelve permission sets. Twelve team assignments. Twelve emails. Twelve of everything.

Now, there’s a way to implement questioning, deletion, simplification and acceleration.

Model Context Protocol — MCP — is the open standard that brings this to our desktops. It lets AI assistants connect directly to the platforms a business runs on. Not as a chatbot on top of a dashboard, but as an operator with access to the actual controls.

And the world's biggest platforms are reorganizing around it. Salesforce just announced Headless 360 — making every capability in its platform available without a browser. The company that invented the login screen just told the market that the login screen is over.

This week, we launched Milemarker MCP. Our firms can now operate the entire platform — data, dashboards, users, search, metrics — through natural conversation with the AI assistant of their choice. Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Gemini. One conversation replaces five tools. The SQL worksheets, the configurators, the admin UIs, the dashboards, the ticketing systems have been collapsed into a single interaction.

But here’s what McNeill’s framework clarifies better than anything I’ve read: this is about more than speed. It’s giving your team the space to engage their own creativity.

When your team spends four hours a day navigating systems and managing handoffs, it’s easy to think that they are being slow, but really they’re occupied. Occupied people don’t have space for new ideas. They’re too busy operating the assembly line to question whether the assembly line should exist.

Delete the steps, and you get headspace back. Your COO stops pulling data for the quarterly review and starts redesigning how you onboard $50M accounts. Your ops analyst stops managing dashboard tickets and starts building a better client experience.

The firms that define the next decade of wealth management won’t be the ones with the most technology. They’ll be the ones who deleted the most steps.

There’s something about growing up in a place like Kearney that wires you for this. When resources are finite, every unnecessary step is a luxury you can’t afford.
Point at each station on your assembly line.

Ask the question:
Why does this step exist?

If the answer is “because we’ve always done it that way,” you just found your starting line.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Over the next few weeks, I’m dedicating my time to helping clients and firms all over the country understand how this technology changes everything. Let me know if I can grab some time with you today to learn more about how your firm works.

http://www.hubspot.com/meetings/JudMackrill

Episode 143: On this week’s episode, Kyle Van Pelt talks with Scott Schwartz. Scott is one of the Managing Partners and a Wealth Management Advisor at OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners. With more than 40 years of experience in helping clients achieve their financial planning goals, Scott has created tailored financial plans that empower clients to make informed decisions.

Scott talks with Kyle about what it takes to build a modern, scalable wealth management firm. He shares how his team thinks about growth, why alignment and shared equity matter more than titles, and what it looks like to create a firm designed for long-term impact rather than short-term recognition. Scott also explores the realities of scaling firms to a national level and the role of technology and AI as powerful force multipliers for efficiency and better client experience, not as replacements for advisors.

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(02:21) - Scott's money moment

(07:59) - The history and evolution of the Bleakley Financial Group

(10:40) - Rebranding Bleakley Financial Group to OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners

(13:37) - The turning point at which Scott began building a scalable firm 

(18:19) - Transitioning from a 1099 model to a W-2 firm 

(24:57) - OnePoint's growth goals and expansion strategies

(30:55) - What it takes to become a national firm

(33:42) - The role of technology in OnePoint's growth

(38:25) - Scott's outlook on the future of the financial services industry

(41:39) - Scott's Milemarker Minute

CHARLESTON, S.C., May 05, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Milemarker, the wealth technology company unifying the industry’s data layer, today announced the Milemarker MCP Server — a new way for firms to operate their entire Milemarker platform through natural conversation with the AI assistant of their choice. MCP is now rolling out to Milemarker partner firms.

Read more here: https://www.milemarker.co/articles/globenewswire-milemarker-launches-mcp

Five tools. A ticketing system. Half your ops team's week.

That's what it costs most firms to get an answer from their own data.

We just deleted all of it.

Milemarker MCP is live — and in this webinar, Kailash Duraiswami and I will show you what it looks like when querying data, deploying dashboards, managing users, and running platform projects all happen in a single conversation.

No boring slides. No theory. A live demo of the future of wealth platform operations.

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

Jud Mackrill