Tuesday Email: The Practice You'd Build If You Started Today

Happy Tuesday!

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

What Would You Build If You Started Today?

It sounds simple. But our brains make it complicated.

The moment that question gets asked, the mind locks onto everything that would have to change, everything that would have to be dismantled. The instinct kicks in and narrows us back to what we already know. It feels like we're adjusting, but really we're just refining, imagining a slightly cleaner version of what we already have.

Here's the trick: don't ask about today. Ask about five years from now.

Temporal distance is our friend.

When the change we're envisioning feels far enough away that we don't have to act on it today, the brain relaxes. The defenses calm down. We start to think bigger. It's a mental trick we play on ourselves, and it works.

So why don't we ask it this way more often?

The answer is uncomfortable.

Where we are is the result of a lot of really great decisions. What we're doing now is built on a foundation laid over years. Those early decisions create a self-reinforcing lock-in that gets harder to exit with every passing month, every passing year.

If it ain't broke, why fix it? If we've had success, if we've built something we're proud of — why would we go and upset the apple cart? Why change a CRM that works? Why change a process that's worked for 20 years?

Our brains build a convincing case for staying put. Change is uncomfortable. What we have is known, and the known brings comfort. The longer we stay, the more we're rewarded, not just financially but reputationally. People perceive persistence as loyalty, consistency as trustworthiness.

Think about how you'd view two different people. One has stayed true to the same approach for 20-plus years. The other has changed multiple times. Our natural inclination is to call the first one committed and the second one wishy-washy. That reputational trap is another checkmark in the column of the status quo.

What does it look like when someone actually breaks free?

It starts with awareness, awareness of the rationale the brain is constructing, and then the willingness to push past it and genuinely ask: what would I build if I started over with everything I know now?

The healthcare industry offers a good example, given all the overhead, billing, and insurance hurdles involved. There's a physician I came across who had built a successful practice — built it the way most are built: grow the overhead, cover costs by serving hundreds or thousands of patients per physician. This physician wasn't burned out from failure. They were highly successful. They were burned out from the model itself. Insurance battles. Fifteen-minute appointments. Thousands of patients whose names were hard to remember. The inability to spend real time with anyone.

Plenty of people in wealth management know this feeling — the monotony of quarterly meetings, the same conversations on repeat, the yearning for something more.

What this physician did was deliberate and costly. They invested $100,000 into rebuilding their practice. They didn't try to convert everyone. They started with just 10% of their client base, the patients most likely to make the transition, and shifted from a traditional model to a concierge model. That 10% plus the invested capital covered overhead for three months. By month three, revenues were covering costs. It took two years to match prior salary and three years to recover all the invested capital.

It was no small thing. But on the other side: hour-long appointments instead of fifteen-minute ones. A couple hundred patients instead of thousands. Minimal overhead. The ability to actually practice medicine the way they wanted.

The journey, looking back, always appears easier than it was to live through. Two years sounds manageable now. But that's 700-plus days of uncertainty. Every patient who stayed or went. Every month wondering whether the math would eventually work out. You can't expect the economics of your old model to simply transfer to your new one. That's exactly what makes it so easy for the brain to say: avoid the change, avoid the blank slate.

The instinct is always to run a hybrid. Keep the old ways going while you try the new ones alongside. It feels like progress. And honestly, it's the only realistic way to do it. But there's a major downside.

Without intentionality, without deliberately protecting time and resources for the new, you fall back into defaults. And your default is always the way you've always done it. When things get tight, there is clarity in the old way and uncertainty in the new. Resources flow toward what's known. The new thing gets starved. This kills more clean-slate transitions than the transition itself does. Things just don't get all the way through.

I've seen this firsthand, which is part of why I've been thinking about it.

We started a new business and went in with the intention of building it differently — not the way it had been done, but on an AI chassis from the ground up. We had the vision. We had the implementation. Then we brought in people to run the day-to-day.

That's where the friction started. There became this tension between exploiting, actually doing the business, and exploring — rebuilding the way the business was done. The people running the operation were focused and incentivized on doing the job, not on reimagining how the job got done. When it came time to choose, we chose to exploit. The AI chassis, the exploration, the rebuild, it all went to the back burner.

The lesson: without a clear separation of roles, when the same people are responsible for both exploiting and exploring, resource allocation will always choose what's known.

So what actually works?

Start with better questions. I've been drawn to what I'd call a subtractive prompt.

Instead of asking, "If we started with zero assets today, what would we build?" — try: "If we deleted this specific process, re-established our pricing model, or removed this workflow, what operational bottleneck would disappear? What structural friction would permanently go away?"

Subtraction is easier than addition. The additive question — what would we build from scratch? — tends to produce a slightly shinier version of what we already have. The subtractive question surfaces real friction.

A practical starting place:

List five core operational protocols or technologies you rely on. For each one, ask: If we didn't do this, what bottleneck disappears and what friction gets permanently removed? Just map it out.

Then, when you're ready, ask the additive version. Trick your brain with the time-distance frame: If we were starting in five years with a blank slate, knowing everything we know now — what would we build? Let that sit. And if you want to take it further, work backwards. What's one small thing you can do today to move toward that vision?

The reality is most advisors will never run this diagnostic honestly. I struggle with it myself.

The reason is simple: the real answer is terrifying. The gap between what we have — what is working, what we've built, what we're proud of — and what it could be if we started over is enormous. The changes required are real. The outcomes are uncertain. The risk feels like it vastly outweighs the potential gain. And sitting inside all that uncertainty while the known world keeps operating around you, generating revenue, rewarding consistency — that's hard.

But the Futureproof advisor is one who's looking to differentiate. To deliver more value. To elevate the client experience in ways that matter.

The way we've done it has worked.

The way we'll need to do it will have to be different.

The only way to bridge those two things is to allow yourself, genuinely, to think with a blank slate.

The best is ahead!

-Matt