Tuesday Email: Integration is Not Just Technology

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

I'm looking at six faces on my screen, and I can feel it happening in real-time.

The COO is nodding, taking notes.

The CEO is leaning forward.

But the three team members who actually execute the meeting scheduling process? Their arms are crossed. One has that tight-lipped smile that means absolutely not. Another is shaking her head almost imperceptibly.

We'd just spent three weeks building them the perfect workflow—eliminating seven steps, saving an estimated 4 hours per week per team member, and creating a client experience that would feel seamless rather than clunky. Our demo had been flawless.

And in that moment, watching the room split in real-time, I realized we were about to lose this client.

Not because our solution didn't work. Because we'd fundamentally misunderstood what we were selling.

I spent eight years building a business process automation company before it collapsed.

We raised $7 million. We had real clients, real technology, real results.

And we failed spectacularly—not because integration didn't matter, but because I thought integration was a technology problem.

It isn't.

The meeting scheduling disaster taught me something I wish I'd understood earlier: every established process, no matter how inefficient, represents someone's security.

When you streamline seven steps into two, you're not just eliminating tasks. You're eliminating proof of value. You're creating capacity that feels dangerously close to obsolescence.

That team member with crossed arms? She'd spent five years mastering those seven steps. She'd become invaluable because she could navigate the chaos. Our "improvement" looked like a threat to her relevance.

And here's what I missed: we never asked her to help design the solution. We interviewed her, took notes, then disappeared into our development cave and emerged with an answer.

We made her the subject of the solution instead of the architect of it.

Real integration—the kind that actually transforms how firms operate—isn't a technology you install. It's a change you lead. And most firms never make it because they focus on solving the wrong problem.

There's a concept called "fragmentation tax," and it is pretty vivid in the healthcare industry—the hidden costs that accumulate when systems don't talk to each other. Incomplete records. Duplicative tests. Clinicians are drowning in administrative work. Everyone pays more for worse outcomes.

Financial advisory has its own version. We call it Tuesday.

The swivel chair syndrome—where team members toggle between five systems to complete one task—doesn't technically cost clients money. But it costs firms their margins, forcing them to hire more people rather than serve more clients. It pushes advisors upstream toward wealthier clients because serving the mass affluent becomes economically impossible.

When I talk to advisory firm leaders about integration, they almost always focus on specific pain points: "We need DocuSign to talk to Salesforce," or "We can't get our CRM and portfolio management system to sync."

These are real problems. But they're symptoms.

The actual problem is that most firms are trying to install modern technology onto infrastructure designed for a completely different world. It's like trying to add self-service kiosks to a luxury hotel where every process was built around having a personal butler at every step. The hallways are too narrow. The staffing model doesn't flex. The workflows assume human handoff at every stage.

You can't just bolt on efficiency—the whole system rebels.

Three months after that disastrous Zoom call, we lost the client. The leadership team wanted to move forward. The implementation team didn't. And the leaders didn't have the energy to fight for it.

I was frustrated at first.

Couldn't they see we were trying to give them the capacity to do more meaningful work? Couldn't they see the client experience would improve?

But I was asking the wrong questions. The right question was: why did we build a solution for them instead of with them?

Integration isn't a product you buy.

It's not even a project you complete.

It's a mentality you embed across an entire organization—from leadership vision to daily execution, from the systems you choose to the way you onboard new team members.

The firms that actually achieve it—the ones that don't just talk about integration but live it—do two things simultaneously:

First, they think in systems, not silos. Leadership doesn't just identify a pain point and buy a tool to fix it. They map the entire client journey and ask: if we could design this from scratch, knowing everything we know now, what would it look like? Then they work backward from that vision, not forward from their current mess.

Second, they treat it as infrastructure, not furniture. They build a technological foundation they control—an ecosystem with clear data flows, consistent logic, and room to adapt. Then they choose tools that fit within that system. They define the architecture; they don't let vendors define it for them.

Both pieces are essential. Strategy without execution is just expensive daydreaming. Execution without strategy is just expensive chaos.

Here's what's interesting about this moment in wealth management: we actually have more control than we've ever had.

The old infrastructure—the one built around bespoke, white-glove service that required human touch at every step—was designed for a world of scarcity: scarce information, scarce tools, scarce access to expertise. Advisors differentiated themselves by being the conduit.

But that world is gone. Information is abundant. Tools are powerful and accessible. Expertise can be captured in systems, decision trees, and workflows.

What clients actually want now—according to many major studies of affluent Americans—isn't more touch points or more bespoke customization. They want clarity, speed, and the feeling that their advisor genuinely understands what matters to them.

That's an evolved game. And it requires different infrastructure.

We can wait for the perfect technology platform to arrive and solve this for us. We can wait until we're certain about exactly how AI will change our business. We can wait for proof that integration actually delivers ROI.

Or we can start now, knowing we won't have all the answers, but trusting that we'll learn with each step.

The firms I see thriving in this transition aren't the ones with perfect solutions.

They're the ones that started imperfectly three years ago. They made mistakes. They rebuilt workflows that didn't work. They had uncomfortable conversations with team members who resisted change.

And now they're not asking whether to integrate. They're asking what's next.

I think about that Zoom call sometimes—the moment I watched the room split and knew we were losing.

I thought our job was to deliver better technology. And we did.

What I didn't understand is that integration isn't about the technology you install.

It's about the change you're willing to lead. It's about building with people, not for them.

It's about designing infrastructure for the world you're moving toward, not the world you're leaving behind.

The firms that figure this out won't win because they have the best tools. They'll win because they built a system that allows them to evolve continuously—to integrate not just today's technology, but tomorrow's thinking.

The question isn't whether our firms will need to integrate. It's whether we'll lead that change or let it happen to us.

The best is ahead!

-Matt