I'm sitting on Delta 1663 headed to Charleston. Three days on the road feel like a week on their own.

While boarding this flight, one of my buddies calls me talking about getting stuck at LaGuardia due to a sinkhole that opened up on the tarmac today.

In a very Jurassic Park sort of way, LGA finds a way.

Things happen. We get stuck, and we have choices.

In our industry today, sinkholes sometimes appear. For every industry, the cheese seems to be on the move.

I was chatting with my friend Julie Littlechild earlier this week on the topic of client experience. Someone had made an outlandish post on LinkedIn about how technology is making way for you to now serve up to 500 clients as an advisor.

I couldn’t help but think, making way to serve 500 clients even more poorly. There will never be a time when comprehensive wealth management can be delivered to 500 clients. If you think your firm has a comprehensive offer and you’re serving astronomical numbers of people, I’d suggest looking deeply at what the word comprehensive means.

I'm sure your PE company would appreciate the aforementioned scale, but what they won't appreciate is how poor this will impact your NPS, brand, or the families that might gain a negative experience with financial advice.

The saying goes that for every crisis (or sinkhole), there’s an opportunity. The shortcomings in our industry are a massive opportunity for firms that value doing better for their clients and beyond. With a third of advisors ready to move to the beach and trade their desk for a golf bag full time, this era is teeming with opportunity to do better.

So where are the opportunities? Let's break it down.

Today, if you serve wealth management clients, you have no reason not to know:

What their full financial picture looks like. Not just the assets you manage. Their held-away accounts. Their 401(k) at work. Their spouse's old IRA sitting at a custodian they forgot about. The mortgage rate they locked in 2021. Their tax situation. Their insurance gaps. The data is available. The integrations exist. The excuses don't.

What's actually happening in their lives. Not from a once-a-year check-in call where you ask how the kids are doing. From systems that track life events, surface trigger moments, and prompt you to reach out before the client has to call you. A kid turning 16. A parent entering assisted living. A business hitting a revenue milestone. The signals are everywhere if you're paying attention — and the tools to pay attention have never been better.

How they actually feel about working with you. Not your gut sense. Real feedback. Structured, consistent, honest feedback. Julie has been beating this drum for years and she's right. Most firms have no idea whether their clients would recommend them or warn a friend away. They just assume the silence means satisfaction. It doesn't.

What they're worried about that they haven't told you yet. Estate planning gaps. Long-term care concerns. Whether their kid is going to blow through an inheritance. Tax exposure from a concentrated stock position. The best advisors aren't waiting for the client to bring it up. They're bringing it to the client with a plan already sketched out.

Here's the thing — none of this is theoretical. None of it requires some magical future state of technology. Every single one of these capabilities is available right now, today, to any firm willing to do the work of connecting the dots.

And if you're a firm that serves advisors? The opportunity is even wider.

Most advisor platforms are still shipping features nobody asked for while ignoring the stuff that actually makes an advisor's day better. Advisors don't need another dashboard. They need fewer tabs. They need data that flows without someone re-keying it. They need workflows that don't require a PhD in Zapier. They need to open their CRM on Monday morning and know exactly who to call, why, and what to say — without spending 45 minutes figuring it out.

The firms that build excellent foundations — whether you're an RIA, a broker-dealer, a TAMP, or a platform builder — are going to eat market share from the ones who don't. Not because they had better marketing. Not because they had a bigger PE check behind them. Because they actually made the experience better. For the advisor. For the client. For the family sitting across the table wondering if this person actually knows them.

The sinkhole at LGA will get patched. The flights will resume. Everyone will forget it happened by next week.

But the sinkholes in our work lives — the gaps in how we serve people, the data we ignore, the experiences we phone in — those don't patch themselves. Someone has to decide to do better.

The firms that make that decision right now are going to look back at 2026 the way the best RIAs look back at 2008. Not as the year everything was hard. As the year they pulled ahead for good.