Servicing firms over $75M in AUM
Operations and systems that help RIAs scale and exit with higher multiples.
We identify your firm’s bottlenecks, build systems that free up human capital, and document how your firm runs, while keeping the software you already license.
- Fixed scope, fixed price
- Agreed in writing before we start. No hourly billing, and anything outside that scope is quoted first.
- We tailor solutions to your firm
- You see two or three routes with the trade-offs, and you choose which one gets built.
- You own all the output
- The systems, the documentation, and the roadmap are yours either way.
The problem
Three things preventing firms from growing and exiting.
Most principals can feel the constraint without being able to point at it, because nothing in your firm measures where the time goes.
Every new client costs about as much staff time as the last one, so your firm can only grow as fast as it can afford to hire.
Most of what your staff do in a day is moving information between systems. That is work which does not need a person doing it.
How your firm runs lives in a few people’s heads, so training is slow and a single absence is disruptive.
None of these is resolved by additional software. They are resolved by changing how work moves between the systems your firm already runs, which is the work we do.
Why now
Run more efficiently, scale faster, and future proof your firm.
Almost no firm plans this work in advance. It begins after something breaks, and the same seven events account for most of the engagements we are asked about.
The person who knew how everything worked has left, or has just given notice
An advisor has broken away and is standing a firm up from nothing
A book has been acquired, and now there are two ways of doing everything
An examination or a deficiency letter has landed
A CRM migration or custodial conversion is planned, and migrating an undocumented process costs more than documenting it first
The firm has grown past seven or eight people, and the informal coordination that worked at a smaller headcount is no longer sufficient
The principal has started thinking about handing the firm over
If one of those is happening now, the timing is better than it will be in six months, because every item on that list gets more expensive the further into it you are.
Is this your firm
Firms that benefit.
Almost every engagement starts for one of two reasons, on different timelines.
You are scaling
You are winning clients faster than you can hire, and every new household costs about as much staff time as the last one. Growth currently requires headcount.
Capacity that does not scale with payroll
You are preparing to sell
You are one to three years from a transaction, and a buyer is working out how much of the business leaves when you do. Much of that answer is currently undocumented.
A firm a buyer can see running without you
A good fit when
- Roughly $75 million in assets under management and upward, which is where the operations load starts to justify the work
- Registered investment advisers and wealth management firms, one to fifteen people, often broker dealer affiliated
- A CRM, a document system, and a custodial platform already in place
- Manual work and undocumented process in between those systems
- A principal who is still the escalation point for routine operational work
- An intention to grow the firm substantially, sell it eventually, or both
Not the right call when
- Wirehouses and captive advisor programs
- Firms below roughly $75 million, where the operations load does not yet justify a build
- Firms already large enough to staff an operations team internally, where what is needed is a hire rather than an outside build
- Anyone looking for investment advice, marketing, general IT support, or hourly help
The solution
We unify your entire operation through systems and documentation.
We move the work that repeats onto the software your firm already licenses, and we document what remains for a person to do, so the operation is legible to anyone who has to run it.
We work in whatever a firm already runs, and the platforms that come up most often are listed on the what we do page.
01 What you license
- CRM
- Custodian portal
- Planning software
- Document store
- E‑signature
- Email and calendar
02 What we build and run
- Field mapping and naming rules
- Triggers with named owners
- Document taxonomy and retention
- Exception handling and logging
03 What the firm relies on
- One client record
- Task queue by household
- Audit and activity trail
The engagement
Five steps, and you make the decision at step three.
We are not here to hand you an answer and an invoice. The design comes to you as options with the trade-offs attached, and you choose the route your firm takes. Steps one to three are the assessment, step four is the build, and step five is managed operations.
We learn how the business runs
Not a questionnaire, and not a workshop. We work alongside the people who run each process and follow live cases through every system they touch.
We find what is constraining it
We measure the work out of your own systems and show you where the hours go, where the errors start, and what is holding the firm at its current size.
We put options in front of you, with the trade-offs
You get two or three routes, each with what it costs, what it changes, how long it takes, and where it is weak. We say which one we would take, and you choose.
We build it inside the stack you already use
We wire in only what the design needs, on the platforms you already run. Every process is documented as it is built and your staff are trained as each piece lands.
We stay on and keep building
Maintenance keeps us close to the firm, so troubleshooting, changes, new connections, and the next buildout are handled by a consultant who already understands the whole arrangement.
What gets built
Six deliverables, and you own all of them.
The assessment settles which of these your firm needs, and in what order. We build none of it before that.
CRM workflows
Onboarding, reviews, RMDs and account maintenance, built as tracked processes.
Document architecture
One filing structure and naming convention, with retention applied.
Integrations and automations
Field mapping, triggers with named owners, document routing, exception handling.
The SOP library
A written procedure for every workflow, kept where the work happens.
Staff training
Your people trained on each piece in the week it lands.
Handoff documentation
Configuration and decisions written down as the work is done.
What changes
How your firm runs after the build.
Onboarding depends on who is in the office that week.
It runs the same way whoever opens it, and you can see where any household is.
The same client fact lives in four systems, in three versions.
One record is authoritative and the others read from it.
Routine questions escalate to you because only you know the answer.
The procedure is written and the owner is named, and the work stops reaching your desk.
When compliance asks how something happened, someone reconstructs it from email.
The system holds the trail, which is what changed, when, and who did it.
What it is worth
Four outcomes, and the fourth is usually what decides the timing.
The first three make your firm cheaper to run and easier to staff. The fourth is why principals planning an exit tend to move first.
You can add clients without adding people
Anything that runs the same way every time moves onto software that runs it, so the hours your team spends on data entry, follow-up, and re-keying stop scaling with your client count. The next household costs a fraction of what the last one did. That is the difference between growth that pays for itself and growth that pays for a hire.
How the firm runs is written down
Every process ships with a procedure and the training material that goes with it, so a new hire learns the job from documentation rather than from whoever has time that week. Hiring stops being a bottleneck of its own.
The work happens the same way every time
Automated processes do not skip a step, forget to file, or run differently depending on who picked them up, and when one cannot complete it says so rather than failing quietly. You get consistency, and a record of what happened that an examiner can read.
The firm can be transferred to another operator
A buyer is assessing how much of the business depends on you personally. A firm running on documented systems and written procedures is a different proposition to one where the process lives in a few people’s heads. The systems, the procedures, and the training material are all diligence material a buyer can read. Your banker prices the firm. What we do is make it priceable, by building the thing a buyer is paying for, which is a business that keeps running without its owner in it.
The alternative
Your alternative is hiring an operations person.
| Comparison | Hiring an operations person | Arclength |
|---|---|---|
| What it commits you to | A salary, benefits, and payroll tax, permanently, before anyone has written down what the role covers. | A fixed fee for the assessment, a fixed fee for the build, and a monthly retainer only for as long as you want us running it. |
| When it starts working | Usually three to six months to recruit, onboard, and learn how the firm actually operates. | The assessment runs in two to four weeks, and the first systems are in use during the build. |
| Where the process ends up | In the new person’s head, which is where it was before, with a different name on it. | Written down inside the systems where the work happens, and owned by the firm. |
| What happens if they leave | You are back where you started, and you are recruiting again. | The systems, the procedures, and the training stay, because they were never held by one person. |
| What you end up managing | An employee, and the operations work they cannot get to. | A written scope, and a monthly figure you can stop. |
- Hiring an operations person
- A salary, benefits, and payroll tax, permanently, before anyone has written down what the role covers.
- Arclength
- A fixed fee for the assessment, a fixed fee for the build, and a monthly retainer only for as long as you want us running it.
- Hiring an operations person
- Usually three to six months to recruit, onboard, and learn how the firm actually operates.
- Arclength
- The assessment runs in two to four weeks, and the first systems are in use during the build.
- Hiring an operations person
- In the new person’s head, which is where it was before, with a different name on it.
- Arclength
- Written down inside the systems where the work happens, and owned by the firm.
- Hiring an operations person
- You are back where you started, and you are recruiting again.
- Arclength
- The systems, the procedures, and the training stay, because they were never held by one person.
- Hiring an operations person
- An employee, and the operations work they cannot get to.
- Arclength
- A written scope, and a monthly figure you can stop.
What it commits you to
When it starts working
Where the process ends up
What happens if they leave
What you end up managing
Where it starts
Every engagement opens with an assessment.
Fixed in scope and fee before it begins, and what it produces is yours whether or not you build with us.
- How long it takes
- Two to four weeks, fixed in scope before it begins. An assessment is the only way an engagement starts.
- What it costs
- From $5,000, agreed in writing before the work starts, so there are no open hours to approve and no invoice you did not expect.
- What you keep
- The documentation of how your firm runs today, the baseline measured out of your own systems, and the roadmap scored for effort and impact. All of it is yours whether or not you build with us.
- If the problem is not operational
- We say so in writing and you stop there. Not every constraint on a firm is something a system fixes, and telling you otherwise would cost you more than the assessment did.
- What happens after
- A build is scoped and priced from what the assessment found, so you see the number before any of it starts. You can also take the roadmap and run it with your own staff.
It is a written report in six parts: the system register, the process maps, a measured baseline, the findings in order of what they cost, a scored roadmap, and the scope a build would cover. We walk it through with your team in a working session. Nothing gets built off the back of a conversation.
Diligence
What you can check before you sign anything.
We have no published engagements yet, so here is what you can check for yourself instead, starting before you grant a single login.
The baseline is agreed before anything is built
What we measure, where the number comes from, and what counts as better are all written down at the end of the assessment. You can check the claim yourself afterwards in your own systems, without asking us for a report.
The diligence pack is available on request
The scope, the access register format, the change log format, and the incident procedure are all available on request, and your compliance people can read them before you grant a single login.
References when there are references to give
Named principals who will take a call, offered once those firms have agreed to it. Where a firm has not agreed we will say the engagement exists and leave it there.
Security and compliance
We build so your record is ready before anyone asks for it.
As the registrant, the recordkeeping obligation is yours, which is why everything we build sits within your own accounts and forms part of your examination record.
Client owned infrastructure
Every system licensed, billed, and administered by your firm.
Named, revocable access
Named individuals at the narrowest permission, revocable without contacting us.
Compliance first by design
Data classified before architecture, and vendor approval cleared before configuration.
Questions
What principals ask before they start.
Do we have to change software?
Usually not, and the smallest intervention that works is the one we take. We configure what you already license before adding anything, and we would rather remove a failure point than add a system. Where a platform genuinely cannot carry the job, we will show you the specific place it fails. A migration is the most expensive project an advisory firm can take on, so it is the last option on the table.
What do you need from my team?
A few hours each from the people who actually run the processes, during the assessment, because watching the work is the only way to record it accurately. After that there are review points at the design and the walkthrough, and training as each piece of the build lands. We work around the service calendar.
Who can see our client data?
Only whoever is assigned to your engagement, working from a named account at the narrowest permission the work needs, inside your own systems. You can revoke any of it yourself at any time without telling us first, and the full control set is published on this site.
Next
Start with the assessment.
Tell us what your firm runs on today. We will come back with what an assessment would cover, and what it would take to run it.