Why I Started Building

In my last letter I told you I didn't set out to build software. This is where I explain what changed that.

Years ago I built a TAMP. It grew fast — faster than I expected, and a lot faster than the software running it could keep up with. We passed a few hundred million in assets, then doubled that in a single year. That sounds like a good problem to have. From the inside, it was mostly a software problem.

The tools we'd bought were fine when we were small. As we grew, they became the ceiling. Every new account, every new client, every new hire added friction the system couldn't absorb. We were spending our days feeding the software instead of serving the people it was supposed to help.

We grew faster than our software could

Here's the moment it became real for me. I looked up one day and realized my team was organizing their entire day around what the tools *couldn't* do. Working around limitations. Keeping side spreadsheets because the system couldn't hold what we needed. Entering the same information in three places because nothing talked to anything.

That's when I understood the thing that still drives everything I do. The software had opinions about how my business should run — and its opinions were wrong. Not wrong in general. Wrong *for us.* It had been built for some other kind of firm, and it was quietly forcing mine to behave like that firm instead of the one I'd actually built.

So we built our own. Not because I wanted to run a technology company — I didn't. Because I had no choice. The tools wouldn't bend to us, so we made tools that would.

What happened next is the part I'm proudest of, so I'll say it plainly and move on. We got to where a single team member could serve several thousand accounts — many times what's normal in this business. I won't claim the client experience magically got better. But the work did. Inside our own platform, turnaround times got faster, errors went down, and the rework that eats a team's day mostly disappeared. Not because we worked people harder. Because the technology finally fit the work instead of fighting it.

What I learned building it

I learned a lot of things the hard way. The biggest one: complexity is the enemy, and it never stops trying to creep back in.

I'll give you one example that stuck with me. Some time later, I was building a system, and the code had slowly turned into a knot — layer on layer, patch on patch, until it was complicating the very thing it was supposed to simplify. I made a hard call. I tore it down and rebuilt it from scratch, keeping only the handful of pieces at the core that actually mattered.

That's a painful decision. You're throwing away real work. But I've learned that when something has accreted that much complexity, patching it one more time just buys you a worse version of the same problem. Sometimes the honest move is to go back to the foundation and build up clean.

Hold onto that idea. It's going to matter later in this series — because it's the exact thing the rest of the industry can't bring itself to do.

The other lesson was simpler, and it's become my rule for everything. Technology should flex to how you work, not force you to flex to it. If a tool makes you change how you serve your clients to suit its design, the tool is wrong. Full stop. You know your practice better than any software company ever will.

Your process is the asset

Which brings me to the thing I most want you to take from this letter.

The way you run your practice — how you follow up, how you make people feel taken care of, the small moves that make a client choose you over the firm across town — that process is *yours.* It's proprietary. It took you years to build, and no competitor has it. In plain business terms, it's an asset. Often it's the most valuable one you own.

Now look at where that asset lives today. Inside rented software that was designed for someone else. Software you conform to, that you can't change, and that you'd have to leave most of your data behind to walk away from. You've taken the most valuable thing about your business and poured it into something you don't own and can't shape.

I don't think you did that on purpose. I think it's just the only option anyone ever gave you: buy the software, bend your practice to fit it, pay every month, and hope.

I built my own way out because I had to. Most of you can't run a technology company on the side, and you shouldn't have to. But I don't believe the answer is to keep renting a business that treats your process as an afterthought.

The obvious question

If this is so clearly the right way to think about it, why hasn't the industry built it for you already?

That's a fair question, and it has an honest answer. I won't pretend to know exactly what your practice needs — every one is different, and after years running my own and working alongside thousands of professionals, I've learned not to say. But I don't think what you've been handed is it.

That's the next letter.

Talk soon,

Ryan Borer

Founder & CEO, AdvisorCRM