Tuesday Email: The Advisor's Dilemma: Scale or Depth? (8:00 am test)

Happy Tuesday!

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

Many, including much of the research, says we must make a choice.

We either serve 150 clients and be a volume firm or we serve 50 clients, deeply.

But we aren’t able to do both.

Heck, Dunbar’s number says so. Neuroscience seemingly backs it up. And science around our cognitive capacity seems to confirm it.

And so, you may think I’m crazy to say that I now disagree with this science.

My dad managed the largest book of business in our firm.

And when he passed we had to figure out how to best ensure that the decades of relationships and deep client connections he had created continued.

This is trust and connection that you can’t manufacture.

And in order to help with this, I was tasked with taking on a significant portion of his families. We did split up the book of business, but I still added roughly 40% more families to what I was already managing. Including the other aspects of the business I was focused on: running our transformation team, building AI solutions, producing thought leadership and actively helping in strategic direction of our business.

The research says that I should have cratered. I had already blown through Dunbar’s number. Cognitive load capacity was now an after thought, based on the science.

As many in the PE world would say… the math didn’t seem to math.

Yet, I thrived. And what actually happened was that math did more than math.

In the 18 months since adding this additional workload to my day to day, I’ve gotten more referrals than in any other period of my career. Not just a couple more. The most I can remember.

Over this period of time the markets did well, but we’ve also experienced some periods of extreme volatility. And I was working to establish relationships with families that had great ties with my dad and were experiencing grief and change.

As I saw the referrals come in I wondered if I was breaking through some biological ceiling or if the conventional wisdom about the ceiling was missing something important.

Knowing that I am just a regular person, I leaned towards the latter.

The science and research is miss the fact that AI doesn’t just help us do more of the same work faster. It fundamentally shifts the curve of what is possible.

I’m not trying to dismiss science or argue just to gain interest.

The idea behind Dunbar’s number is right. The number of relationships that we can honestly have is definitely limited. There is not an unlimited capacity.

And mental bandwidth is definitely a real thing. Having deep, meaningful conversations are draining. And we can only take on a certain number of those in a day. Emotions are draining. And to go deep with others means we must tap into our emotions.

So, the research and science isn’t wrong. We do have limits. It’s that the research makes an assumption about where and how we access and utilize our cognitive load. And that assumption has now changed. Or should change.

Let’s start with emails. Something that frustrates me (and many others).

When I do my keynotes to groups of advisors, I ask them how much time they spend on emails per week. And a large percentage spend 10+ hours per week.

This includes researching, drafting, sending, remembering context, following threads. All of it.

What if AI took five hours of that away?

Not by sending worse emails, but by handling the research, pulling the context, drafting the initial version so you're editing instead of staring at a blank screen?

That's 250 hours a year of freed cognitive load.

And I think that's where we all get tied to these specific numbers.

We assume cognitive capacity is fixed.

We assume the 150-person limit applies equally across all the work we do. But what if the bottleneck was never the relationships themselves bur rather it was all the administrative, tactical, information-processing work that surrounded them?

Another tension point for me in the research is that there is no clear definition whether it is looking at just your professional life or blending cognitive load capacity between both your personal and professional life.

So, if you've got a big family, a robust social circle, close friends, you're already using up chunks of that 150-person capacity. And if we are blending this capacity, that manes we have almost run out of room for deep client relationships.

Here is the thing, we are doing more today than we did 30 years ago. Younger generations are managing complexity that would have overwhelmed previous generations.

We have more connections, more information, more demands on our attention. And we're handling it.

Because the tools changed. The infrastructure changed. The curve shifted up.

The root problem, I believe, is that we all think it is a binary choice.

We are either McDonald's or the Ritz-Carlton.

We build for scale with standardized processes, mechanical systems, high volume. Or we build for depth with bespoke service for a small group.

I disagree with that framing.

Think about the Ritz-Carlton.

They service thousands of guests (millions of guests). But when you walk in, they make you feel known. Heard. Understood. Connected.

How do they do that at scale?

Mechanical processes in the background.

Systems that track preferences, history, patterns.

Training that empowers front-line people to be deeply human because the operational complexity is handled behind the scenes.

You can have both.

You can build extremely efficient systems that create a mechanical approach to the tactical work and use those systems to free your team to deliver personal, meaningful, human connection at scale.

The mistake is thinking it's one or the other. That depth requires you to stay small. That scale requires you to be superficial.

The reality is that embodied luxury, the kind of service that clients feel in their bones, isn't about headcount.

It's about DNA. It's about whether kindness is in the culture. Whether care is authentic or performative.

You can't just be kind to 30 people. You can serve 150, 300, be kind to all of them.

But you have to be intentional about building the systems that make that possible.

My life journey, professionally at least, has been around squeezing all I can out of the time I have.

And in order to do that I’ve spent hours and years creating, refining, trashing and rebuilding systems and processes to maximize my time to get the most output.

I took all of those lessons and applied it to my day and my team when I was forced to add 40% more families.

It wasn’t a hope for the best and go situation.

It was a lean on what you have learned to create efficiencies over the years mentality.

I built systems. I built processes. I involved more team members as part of the system, not a workaround.

And critically: I pushed those team members to leverage AI. Not as a nice-to-have, a requirement.

If they wanted to deliver what was needed to serve these families which included the level of insight, the speed of execution, the depth of preparation before client meetings. Then they would need to use AI to get there.

I built an AI infrastructure for myself, too.

Tools that synthesize information, surface patterns, prepare me for conversations. All that research and context-gathering that used to take hours? It's now done for me.

What didn't change? I still showed up to every conversation as me.

AI gives me the information. I provide the perspective. The authentic take. The human connection.

And the conversations themselves got richer. More personalized. Because I wasn't burning cognitive load on remembering details or reconstructing context. I could focus entirely on being present.

The service model I'm delivering now is deeper and more meaningful than what I was doing before… despite having more families.

All those referrals coming in wasn’t just because of timing. It was the fruits of the years I’ve spent building processes and systems. And the accelerant that this new paradigm has afforded me with the power of AI.

My systems and processes have been put into supercharge mode.

To find this point, we must first design for scale.

How might we create the standardization that makes the Ritz and McDonalds successful? We must look at the processes, workflows and outcomes that we are wanting. And then design systems around the new technology and opportunities that empower us to get there.

And we must be intentional. Intentional in that as we create hours in our day, we are not going to fill them to do more of what we have been doing.

But rather to go deeper in how we serve.

And that is where we focus on designing for depth.

Using this freed up time to do non-scalable things. Invest in qualitative skills, EQ. All the things AI can’t do.

I don’t believe the FutureProof Advisor must choose between scale or depth.

I believe they can be both. Built on scale to deliver more depth.

Human relationship boundaries still exist. It's not infinite. Dunbar's number is still real.

But the curve has shifted up.

We can serve more people at a deeper level than we could five years ago.

Not because the biology changed, but because the infrastructure around the biology changed.

AI is redistributing cognitive load away from information processing and toward emotional presence.

The question isn't whether we should choose scale or depth.

The question is: Are we being intentional about building the systems that let us do both?

Because the advisors who drift—who add clients without adding process, who build AI tools without changing how they spend their time—they're the ones who'll hit the ceiling.

The ones who win will be the ones who recognize that this moment is different. That the old tradeoffs don't hold the same way they used to.

And that the work we've been doing—building process, iterating on systems, staying open to new tools—that's what allows us to shift the curve.

We're figuring this out together. But the early evidence is clear: The ceiling is higher than previously imagined.

The best is ahead!

-Matt