I want to tell you something I don't talk about much.

In my past, one of my most fruitful marketing expenses has been in the category of automation.

Not on marketing. On the automation of it. Marketo. Salesforce clouds stacked on Salesforce clouds. A custom data warehouse. Zapier Enterprise. Segment. A team of people whose full-time job was keeping the plumbing working.

I'm proud of the work we did. It was ahead of its time for our category, and a lot of what we built still compares well with what most firms in our industry are doing today.

But here's the honest reckoning. It was expensive. And it was not nimble.

Every new campaign was a month of integration work. Every pivot was a small army reconfiguring plumbing. The stack could do almost anything — eventually. What it couldn't do was turn on a dime.

MarTech moves four or five times faster than anything we see in fintech or wealthtech. Running a billion-dollar marketing operation on Salesforce-era architecture was like trying to run a Formula 1 team with a diesel truck. You could do it. You wouldn't win the championship.

Here's a fun fact, though. The automation I put into place with some of today's largest wealthtechs back in 2013? Still doing its job. Quieter now. Older. But a house built on a rock.

That matters to you. If you start investing now — particularly by getting real control over your data — what you build is going to outlast almost everything else in your stack. Automation done on a strong foundation compounds. It doesn't decay the way most software does.

On Tuesday, we launched Relay. This letter is everything the press release didn't have room for.

Data is the fuel. Automation is the scale.

Every company is becoming a technology company. Not in the "we have an app" sense — in the deeper sense. How work flows. How decisions get made. How customers get served. All of it is becoming a software problem.

A software problem needs two things: clean fuel and a way to turn that fuel into motion without a human pushing every step. The fuel is data — unified, trustworthy, and real-time. The scale is automation — the thin layer on top that turns data into action.

Without both, you don't have a technology business. You have a service business dressing up as one. And the market will figure that out.

The numbers back this up:

• Automation can reduce costs by as much as 30% across enterprise processes (Bain & Company, "Most Automation Transformations Fall Short").

• Leaders cut process costs by 22% — versus 8% for laggards, and the gap is widening (Bain & Company, "Automation Scorecard 2024").

• Data-driven organizations see EBITDA increases of 15 to 25% (Böringer et al.).

• AI and automation can absorb 60 to 70% of the activities currently filling employees' time (Chui et al.). Not eliminate the jobs. Free the people inside them.

Translate those numbers into a mid-size wealth firm running at a 25% margin and the math isn't subtle. A 10% reduction in operating expenses is an enterprise-value story, not an efficiency story.

Most of wealth management hasn't picked up on this yet — especially mid-size and large firms. Automation in those firms is atrophied. Not because leaders don't care. Because the muscle hasn't been used. Because every attempt got stuck on the same thing: the data.

I used to spend a lot of money each year building bridges between systems. We should have been building ground.

The ground finally exists. The thing we were simulating a decade ago with integrations and duct tape is a product you can buy today. The excuse is gone.

A few years ago, somebody floated the idea of a Chief Automation Officer. I got the impulse, but it's the wrong instinct. Automation isn't a department. It's everybody's job, same as AI. The advisor is automating client review prep. The ops lead is automating morning recon. The CCO automating attestations. Everybody.

The firms that win this decade won't be the ones with the fanciest strategy. They'll be the ones where everybody is automating the repetitive stuff.

So here's what I hope for you.

Make this the year you automate everything you can. Not because we launched a product on Tuesday, but because the cost of not doing it keeps rising and the cost of doing it keeps falling. Those two lines are about to cross.

If you're a Milemarker customer, Relay is in your hands. Thin automation layer on your unified data. Included in what you already pay.

If you're not, automate anyway. Find one thing that eats an hour of your week and give that hour back. Then find another. Look around at what we're building for the firms we partner with. Get curious about what's possible now that wasn't six months ago.

Every business is becoming a technology business — whether its leaders have accepted that yet. A technology business needs data as fuel and automation as scale.

Two of those we can sell you.

The third — the conviction that your firm is, in fact, a technology business now — is on you.

Have a great weekend.

References

Bain & Company. "Automation Scorecard 2024: Lessons Learned Can Inform Deployment of Generative AI." Bain & Company, 2024, www.bain.com/insights/automation-scorecard-2024-lessons-learned-can-inform-deployment-of-generative-ai/.

Bain & Company. "Most Automation Transformations Fall Short, Despite Opportunity to Reduce Costs by as Much as 30%." Bain & Company, 13 Mar. 2023, www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2023/most-automation-transformations-fall-short-despite-opportunity-to-reduce-costs-by-as-much-as-30/.

Böringer, Jan, et al. "Insights to Impact: Creating and Sustaining Data-Driven Commercial Growth." McKinsey & Company, 18 Jan. 2022, www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/insights-to-impact-creating-and-sustaining-data-driven-commercial-growth.

Chui, Michael, et al. "The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier." McKinsey & Company, 14 June 2023, www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-economic-potential-of-generative-ai-the-next-productivity-frontier.