I'm headed home after two beautiful days in Manhattan.

Today was capped with the Knicks championship parade. So many people flooding the city, donning blue and orange. The whole place was vibrant. Full of a spirit of collaboration unlike anything I can remember.

I know a lot people love to end a day of work in a steakhouse, but I’ve never been one of them. I'd much rather grab some dollar pizza and catch live music. My batting average isn't amazing, but lately I'm on a roll. Charlie Harper in London on Saturday. Thrice and Jimmy Eat World in New York, playing Bleed American 25 years on tonight.

In the crowds of music and sport fans, I felt the same spirit of community. Nobody was trying to impress anyone. The crowds are older. The artists are older. Most of the hits already happened. So the pretense is gone. People put their guard down and just appreciate being alive and being together.

You're probably not here to read this issue of SPIN magazine. So let me tell you where I'm going.

Coming together with people around something unleashes a spiritual aspect in us. Whether it's the Knicks, the crowd watching Thrice play an hour-long set, or your kid's Saturday morning games.

Here's how that connects to your work.

As a multi-time CMO of a couple of very successful firms, advisers often ask me for marketing tips. They want to know how to unlock organic growth.

Because look around. Barring a few exceptions we get to work with, most firms aren't growing organically. They're barely keeping their heads above water.

If you want a tip, it almost always comes back to one thing: Your orientation to community.

Look back at most firms' history and you'll find they were once hyper-focused on a single community. Sponsoring it. Being part of it. Advocating for it.

It wasn't scalable. It wasn't easy. You couldn't be lukewarm about it. You had to immerse yourself. You had to hire people who came from that world and knew it cold.

When Mercer Advisors started in 1985, they served one kind of client. Dentists.

The people in business development knew the whole supply chain. The chair companies. The folks doing the real estate. They knew everything about their client. And it unlocked everything. That focus carried the firm for more than twenty years.

Look at where that focus took them. Today Mercer runs more than 110 offices and oversees around $95 billion in assets. One of the biggest RIAs in the country. It all started with dentists.

Mercer isn't a fluke. The data backs it.

The XY Planning Network studied its advisors. The ones who committed to a niche grew revenue 40.8% in their early years. The ones who didn't grew 15.5%. Same network. Same tools. More than two and a half times the growth.

Kitces found the same pattern. Advisors with a niche serve more clients, and those clients carry around 25% more in investable assets.

Now hold that up against the median advisor today.

Most are struggling to grow. Strip out the market and a huge share of firms are barely adding new clients at all. They're talented. They work hard.

They just never picked a community. They want to be for everyone, so no one thinks of them first.

Here’s a good question for you and your team: What are we all about?

If we're just about growth at all costs, we will lose our way.

Pick a community and go all in, and the work starts to feel different.

Seth Godin calls it your smallest viable market. The smallest group you can go all in on. He says that focus, almost by accident, is the thing that grows you.

It doesn't feel lonely. You're not worried about how your peers are doing. You're not running while looking over your shoulder.

None of that.

You just become the best version of yourself for your people - right alongside them.

Episode 149: On this week’s episode, Kyle Van Pelt talks with Ben Carlson, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Ben is the author of five books on investing, including his newest, Risk and Reward. He's the creator of the blog A Wealth of Common Sense and co-host of the Animal Spirits podcast.

Ben talks with Kyle about how content has become a powerful engine for growth, clarity, credibility, and connection. He discusses the value of consistency, how to structure content for different generations, and why showing up to solve client problems before they even arise builds an enduring business.  Ben also talks about why in-person connection still matters in a digital-first world and how AI is changing the advisor-client dynamic.

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(01:07) - Ben's money moment

(03:45) - How content became a growth engine for institutional business 

(05:19) - Inside Ben’s content creation process 

(07:13) - Why Ben started blogging 

(09:13) - Why blogging became Ben’s medium of choice

(10:15) - Why podcasts create a stronger audience connection 

(12:06) - How Ritholtz approaches content strategy 

(17:03) - How Ben came up with the idea for his book 

(24:10) - Future Proof: Building a conference that almost never happened 

(27:08) - Why in-person experiences matter more than ever 

(31:11) - Ben's outlook on the future of wealth management

(35:12) - Ben's Milemarker Minute

As AI becomes more central to how wealth management firms operate, the ability to connect and activate your data is becoming a competitive advantage.

On Wednesday, June 24, from 1:00–2:00 PM EDT, I’ll be joined by Kailash Duraiswami for a free webinar, APIs in Practice: Applications, Automations, Agents & More, where we’ll explore how a firm-owned API can unify your tech stack, eliminate manual work, and unlock new possibilities for applications, automations, AI agents, and reporting.

If you’re thinking about the future of your firm’s technology and data strategy, I’d love for you to join us.

Hello!

June brought depth to the platform. Layers now lets you drill into nested data with a single click. Scorecards are queryable through MCP. And the Page Builder just got a lot more flexible with variable injection and fallback cards.

Here’s what shipped:

AI & MCP Expansion
Your AI agents just got smarter. Scorecard metrics are now queryable through the MCP API, and metric presentation rules now carry through to MCP responses—meaning what you see in the dashboard is exactly what your agents see.

Milemarker Layers
Drill deeper and navigate faster with click-through drill-downs, single-click navigation, improved responsive layouts, and enhanced data handling across nested Layers.

Page Builder & CMS
Personalize static content with HTML variable injection, manage categories and tags in CMS, automatically embed video URLs, and keep dashboards clean with new fallback cards.

Forms & Data
Enjoy cleaner input and better output with form field masks, improved export capabilities, and more reliable data grid interactions.

Security & Infrastructure
New API key token minting, increased rate limits on authentication routes, and enhanced metric enrichment and error handling provide greater flexibility and security across the platform.

Plus, we delivered a host of bug fixes and performance improvements across workflows, pagination, branding endpoints, and data access.

Full technical details, screenshots, and setup guides for every feature above are available at docs.milemarker.co.

Not yet a Milemarker client or consultant? Reach out at [email protected]. We’re happy to answer questions, share details, and set up a demo for you and your team.

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

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

Jud Mackrill