When & Why to DIY your Technology Systems

Every decision you make as a financial planner should be informed by the question - “will this choice improve the quality of my advice?”

This doesn’t just apply to client recommendations. Every facet of your company influences the quality of your client relationships.

With that in mind, ask yourself - are my technology providers improving those client relationships?

Your systems - your CRM, your planning software, and all the other components of your tech stack - shape how your clients experience their interactions with you. If you use an out-of-the-box solution, you cede control of the client experience to a company that doesn’t know your clients.

Your technology should feel almost invisible - it should not introduce any friction between your way of working and your clients. But more often than not, your technology creates rather than eliminates friction. It can feel like you’re doing your job twice - once to get the work done, then a second time to update your systems and keep track of things. A frictionless system removes the need for tedious tracking while naturally mirroring the way you work.

What does designing your own system mean? Luckily, it doesn’t mean learning to code and creating new software out of thin air. Instead, we can use no-code building blocks to create something that truly maps to your way of working. Airtable, Notion, and similar products allow us to implement custom tools for advisors that give you more control than an out-of-the-box solution ever could. Let’s dig in to the benefits of building yourself.

Own Your Roadmap

I’ve talked to advisors who have requested new features from their tech providers multiple times. They are still waiting to hear back from the software company. It’s frustrating to have a great idea, only to be shut down by unresponsive providers.

If you design a custom solution, you’re never more than a few clicks away from implementing a new feature. Need a new field? Done in seconds. Want to create a company-wide wiki that your team (and their AI agents) can reference at any time? Easy. How about a custom dashboard to manage your quarterly tax projection process? With a custom solution, you can prioritize your own technology needs in a way that no third-party provider ever would.

You might argue that a powerful CRM such as Salesforce allows for this level of customization. However, a Salesforce Financial Services Cloud license starts at $300/month compared to $20/month for Airtable or Notion. What’s more, the data structure is so byzantine that you’d need a full-time expert on staff to truly take advantage of its capabilities. These tradeoffs might be acceptable to an enterprise-sized firm, but for those who are still building their practices, a no-code building block like Airtable or Notion grants you flexibility and power at a fraction of the cost.

This flexibility to customize might sound appealing, but you’re in financial planning for the relationships, not the technology. You don’t want to spend more time managing your tech than you have to. Wouldn’t building your own systems create more work? In fact, the opposite occurs. Once your systems are in place, the ability to easily make iterative improvements means your systems are always up to date, avoiding the need for huge projects to clean up your data or launch new features. Instead of spending hours each month working around your system’s limitations, you can spend minutes making it work exactly as you need.

Selectively Unbundle

Software providers are increasingly bundling as many use-cases as possible into their offering to create captive customers. For example, your CRM may offer your AI meeting recorder, your scheduler, and your planning software for one flat fee. This is great for convenience, but what if their meeting recorder is only the fifth-best option for your needs? You’re stuck either paying for a service you don’t use, or accepting an inferior version in the name of convenience. Plus, what happens if you come to rely on a feature of your bundle that is changed or canceled?

When you build for yourself, you choose what goes into your tech bundle. While the DIY bundle does require more work up front, it allows you to select the tools that are truly best for you. And, if a vendor changes their offering, you are nimble enough to swap out a component of your bundle for a new solution. This does require some vigilance and maintenance, but also ensures you’re on top of the technology adoption curve. This is a great place to lean on a systems expert to proactively strategize regarding your DIY-technology bundle.

To create your bundle, it’s often prudent to designate one piece of your software as the hub - this is typically your CRM. From there, select what other tools you want to layer onto your stack. Between native integrations and no/low-code tools such as Zapier and n8n, you can tie your data together across providers to make your DIY-bundle a frictionless experience for you and your clients.

Swim in the Bigger Pool

When compared to the larger enterprise- & productivity-tech market, advisor-tech is a small fish. Airtable and Notion’s estimated combined annual revenue ($600MM) is 10X Wealthbox and Redtail’s combined revenue ($55-60MM). This difference in scale isn’t just academic; it informs R&D budgets and innovation speed. As Airtable and Notion rush to improve their automations, AI, and user interfaces, legacy planning CRMs are slowly playing catchup.

Virtually every company in the world is looking for ways to improve their technology, whether that’s through better customer onboarding, unique internal tools, or embedded artificial intelligence. The technology needs of a financial advisor are not unique. Why, then, would you limit yourself to using only solutions built for a small corner of the software market? We don’t use a planner-only version of excel - we use the same tool as other professions, then build the custom formulas we need. Likewise, you should use the most powerful tools you can as your building blocks, then build the custom structures that best fit your needs.

You could argue that the smaller advisor-tech market is already customized to meet our needs, but in reality these tools are not custom enough. They force rigid opportunities pipelines, sloppy data structures, and rudimentary task tracking - and therefore create constraints rather than efficiencies. If you begin with a solution that makes no assumptions regarding your way of working, you can imbue the tool with your planning ethos.

Build Yourself / Build with Help

DIY isn’t for every firm. If your current CRM is meeting 80% of your needs and you’re comfortable with the workarounds you’ve found, there’s no reason to switch. If you’re at a large firm that has the infrastructure and revenue to run a custom Salesforce instance, great!

If you’re unsure if building something custom is right for your company, ask your peers about their experience with technology providers. What workarounds do they use daily? What features have they requested and never received? How much time do they spend each week fighting their system instead of serving their clients?”

If you are convinced that a DIY tech stack is the way forward, you may be asking how you can get started. Luckily, tools like Airtable and Notion have a friendly learning curve. An enterprising advisor with a little bit of time and data structure knowledge can create a minimum viable system in a few hours.

If you are looking to truly take advantage of the power of a custom solution, but DIY seems overwhelming, consider building with a systems expert as an alternative. Just as some people are happy to manage their own investments while others choose to work with an advisor, everyone has varying levels of comfort owning a responsibility outside of their core expertise.

Building with help allows you to build a custom solution while leaning on someone who has done it before. This does come with additional implementation costs, but the combined licensing and implementation fees are often less than a $3,600 annual Salesforce license.

Ending where we started, the key question to ask is whether a custom solution will improve the quality of your planning. Every hour you spend working around your current system's limitations is an hour not spent on client advice. Every great idea you shelve because your vendor won't prioritize it is a missed opportunity to elevate your service offering. Systems are just tools; your planning style is the true differentiator for your clients. A custom solution can be the perfect way to sharpen your strengths while reducing the friction you feel with your current technology.

Whether you choose to build yourself or work with an expert, the principle remains the same: your systems should amplify your expertise, not constrain it. If you're ready to explore what that looks like for your practice, I'm here to help—whether that means pointing you toward the right DIY resources or designing something custom that fits your firm perfectly.