Jon McNeill grew up in Kearney, Nebraska.

Kearney is one of those places that matters to my family — one of a few pins on the map that shaped where we come from. Kearney, Washington, DC, and a few other places in between. It’s always interesting when small places punch above their weight in forming how you see the world.

Growing up in Kearney, McNeill mowed over 100 commercial lawns before graduating from high school. He went on to become President of Tesla, COO of Lyft, board member at GM, Lululemon, and CrossFit. He built a career on one instinct: ruthlessly remove what doesn’t need to be there.

His new book, The Algorithm, lays out five steps:

1. Question every requirement.

2. Delete every possible step.

3. Simplify and optimize.

4. Accelerate cycle time.

5. Automate last.

That order is unique. Most people skip to automate. McNeill says you earn the right to accelerate only after you’ve deleted everything that shouldn’t exist.

For decades, the technology industry sold us steps. CRM. Portfolio management. Reporting. Compliance. Custodial portals. Each one a station on an assembly line. Each one requires a login, a workflow, a trained operator, and a handoff to the next station.

You couldn’t question whether the assembly line itself was the problem. We just kept adding stations and calling it progress.

Launching a dashboard for leadership. Submitting a ticket. Writing requirements. Waiting for an analyst. Build it. Review. Revise. Deploy. Seven steps. One week.

Onboarding twelve new advisors. Twelve logins across a myriad of systems. Twelve permission sets. Twelve team assignments. Twelve emails. Twelve of everything.

Now, there’s a way to implement questioning, deletion, simplification and acceleration.

Model Context Protocol — MCP — is the open standard that brings this to our desktops. It lets AI assistants connect directly to the platforms a business runs on. Not as a chatbot on top of a dashboard, but as an operator with access to the actual controls.

And the world's biggest platforms are reorganizing around it. Salesforce just announced Headless 360 — making every capability in its platform available without a browser. The company that invented the login screen just told the market that the login screen is over.

This week, we launched Milemarker MCP. Our firms can now operate the entire platform — data, dashboards, users, search, metrics — through natural conversation with the AI assistant of their choice. Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Gemini. One conversation replaces five tools. The SQL worksheets, the configurators, the admin UIs, the dashboards, the ticketing systems have been collapsed into a single interaction.

But here’s what McNeill’s framework clarifies better than anything I’ve read: this is about more than speed. It’s giving your team the space to engage their own creativity.

When your team spends four hours a day navigating systems and managing handoffs, it’s easy to think that they are being slow, but really they’re occupied. Occupied people don’t have space for new ideas. They’re too busy operating the assembly line to question whether the assembly line should exist.

Delete the steps, and you get headspace back. Your COO stops pulling data for the quarterly review and starts redesigning how you onboard $50M accounts. Your ops analyst stops managing dashboard tickets and starts building a better client experience.

The firms that define the next decade of wealth management won’t be the ones with the most technology. They’ll be the ones who deleted the most steps.

There’s something about growing up in a place like Kearney that wires you for this. When resources are finite, every unnecessary step is a luxury you can’t afford.
Point at each station on your assembly line.

Ask the question:
Why does this step exist?

If the answer is “because we’ve always done it that way,” you just found your starting line.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Over the next few weeks, I’m dedicating my time to helping clients and firms all over the country understand how this technology changes everything. Let me know if I can grab some time with you today to learn more about how your firm works.

http://www.hubspot.com/meetings/JudMackrill