"That's the most exciting part, right?

“That’s the most exciting part, right? That small, multi-family boutique offices like this can operate like enterprise.”

That came from Brian Krause at Cascade, on our first call together. His firm is under $1B AUM. Dynamics CRM they’ve effectively given up on. Tamarack sitting idle because Microsoft stopped investing in it. Data scattered across custodians with no central ownership.

And yet his instinct wasn’t “we need to get bigger first.” It was: the tools exist to punch above our weight class right now.

Carleen put the day-to-day reality plainly: “I’m kind of wearing a lot of hats at this point with HR, technology, compliance, so dipping my hand in a lot of buckets these days.”

That’s the staffing model at most boutique RIAs. One person covering three functions, manually collecting statements, on the phone, doing it all by hand.

The firms that pull ahead aren’t always the ones with the biggest ops teams. They’re the ones who decide early that the infrastructure should do more of the carrying.

Brian also already has an AI usage policy in place and his team is running Claude Pro. The primitives are closer than most firms think.

This is going to be fun.