If you've been in financial services long enough, you know the cycle. A custodian or platform company announces the next big thing. You cast your hope toward what it could be. Then the timeline slips, the product underwhelms, or usually both. Repeat that for a decade and hope starts to look like a conspiracy: an entire industry quietly agreeing to wait for someone else to fix it.

Everyone got tired.

I was early in my career at Orion then. We were pushing the envelope. We were the first to resell Salesforce in financial services and the first of our kind to open source our technology for the industry. We wanted better, and I caught the bug. I wanted to keep it rolling.

Things did move ahead. Then the industry started feeling the side effects of consolidation. The promise that one plus one would equal three, five, even ten slowly turned into zero. Custody consolidated, competition went quiet, and advisors started to feel helpless.

Along the way I realized nobody could afford to wait for a path to form. Every player was already too partisan and carried too many commitments to investors, clients and boards. The only way forward was through.

That took more than hope. It took people willing to make a deliberate bet that the future could look very different, and then hold their breath while the rest of the industry caught up.

You've seen this movie before.

In 1978, America was down to about 89 breweries. A handful of giants made nearly all the beer, and nearly all of it tasted the same. Consumers had little real choice, and the people running the big brewers had every reason to leave it that way.

A few people stopped waiting. Jack McAuliffe was already brewing at New Albion in Sonoma, on equipment he'd salvaged himself. It folded within six years, but it proved the model. That same year, homebrewing became legal again. Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi welded together old dairy tanks and started Sierra Nevada. They built without an invitation.

Today there are more than 9,000 breweries in the US.

Advisory firms get to be the microbrewery.

Independence is the home of inspiration. Spend any time inside the large companies in this space and you'll find plenty of complication and very little inspiration. You'll find committees, integration roadmaps, and quarterly promises to people who will never meet a client. The breweries that changed American beer came from people who could taste the difference and act on it that same afternoon. Independent firms have that same proximity. You sit across the table from the client, and you get to decide what happens next.

Your freedom is the freedom to reinvent advice delivery. Technology is disrupting the status quo. That's the good news. Tools that once required a platform company's budget are now within reach of any firm willing to own its data and its roadmap. You can build enterprise-grade solutions on your own terms and shape what advice looks like for the next generation of clients.

The big buyers will come. Inspiration sets the price. The Anheuser-Busch InBevs of our industry are already shopping for micros, and that isn't slowing down. Look at the craft brewers that sold at the top. Ballast Point went to Constellation for roughly $1 billion, while Heineken bought Lagunitas outright. Each was a distinct brand that found its lane and executed in ways nobody could copy. The firms that command a premium will be the ones that build something worth wanting, whether they sell someday or stay independent forever.

AI + your inspiration + your data = infinite companies. When it comes to business strategy, I've taken a lot from Simon Sinek's The Infinite Game. Finite players play to win the round. Infinite players play to keep playing, guided by a just cause. Our careers are finite, but our inspiration and iteration can be limitless. Put AI in the hands of an inspired firm with its own data, and there's no ceiling on what it can become.

That’s a hope conspiracy worth joining.

At Milemarker, we're dedicated to operationalizing hope, and we've never been more excited to watch our clients make good on it every day.

Start brewing.