Every toggle is a tax on your advisor’s time. Here’s how progressive RIAs are eliminating workflow friction.
By Bill Lane, Ethos Financial Group
They’re moments so small we barely notice them.
We switch from the CRM to performance reporting.
We jump into email trying to find a note a client sent last week.
We open a planning tool to verify which action items were supposed to be completed.
We pop into SharePoint for an investment memo.
Sure, none of these actions takes long—a few seconds here, a minute or two there—but stacked across a day, across a team, across a firm?
They add up.
That’s the hidden tax. And for people who make a living measuring costs, it’s a surprising one to overlook.
Slower prep, longer turnaround, unanswered questions, inconsistent client experiences, these aren’t the fault of your team. It’s in the way your team is using their tools.
For years, firms responded to workflow bottlenecks by layering on more software to solve specific pain points. A CRM for client relationships. Planning software for turning goals into strategy. Performance platforms for reporting. Document management for storing institutional knowledge. Research and knowledge tools for finding answers without bouncing between systems.
Each solves a problem, but together they create friction.
Progressive firms know it’s not about adding another layer; it’s about streamlining software to make it feel like one system.
Praktikant uses the tools you already have in place and organizes them into action. Across systems like Addepar, Orion, SharePoint, and Redtail to help surface what matters in one place.
When advisors can work from one place, they spend less time hunting and more time advising. The context moves with them, prep is sharper, clients are happier, and the firm is stronger.
So, are you ready to stop wasting time?
Take the RIA Operational Efficiency Grader, a six-question diagnostic that benchmarks your firm’s AI readiness, supervision posture, and workflow automation maturity against peer RIAs in the $500M–$15B AUM range.
