Bayfield came to us to replace their CRM and fix a client portal nobody used — without touching the portfolio system that calculates performance and bills fees. They were clicking their own households three weeks later, and live in seven months.
Bayfield Wealth Partners is an example, not a client. The firm and the numbers are made up. The shape of the problem, the parts of the engine, and the way a build runs are real.
None of this is unusual. It is what happens when a firm buys the pieces separately over ten years.
It holds names, emails and a notes field. It cannot hold a household with a corporation and a family trust in it, so the real shape of a client lives in the advisor’s head and in a spreadsheet on their desktop.
A new client means forms by email, a signature chase and an assistant tracking returns on a printed checklist. Nobody in the firm can say how many onboardings are half finished right now.
Clients sign in, find a statement they already got in the mail, and leave. Fewer than one in five signed in at all last year, so every question still arrives as an email to the advisor.
“I want one place to work. Right now an advisor opens five things to prepare for one meeting.”
Managing partner, first scoping sessionEvery firm has one system it cannot move. That is not a reason to stop — it is a fact the build has to design around.
It calculates performance and it bills fees. Both are audited and both reconcile to the custodian. Replacing it is a two-year project this firm refuses to take on right now, so we do not touch it. We read from it, every day, and the numbers on the new desk are its numbers. The system you cannot move becomes a feed, not a blocker.
Three working sessions and a look at their real data, at our cost, before anybody signed anything.
About 60% of their accounts belong to a household that includes a corporation or a trust. Their CRM had no way to hold that, so the structure of the book only existed in people’s heads. Everything else we built depends on getting this right first.
We timed meeting preparation with two advisors: 40 minutes, and most of it was copying numbers between the portfolio system, the planning tool and a Word document.
Clients ignored it because it showed less than the statement they already had. A portal is only worth building on top of a client record that is complete. Fix the record first, and the portal has something to say.
Two weeks in we had their real households on screen. The surprises were small and fixable: about sixty duplicate contacts, and three accounts with no owner recorded anywhere.
One screen per household. Everyone in it and how they connect, every account with values read live from the portfolio system, the workflow that is open right now, the last meeting note, and what the client has actually seen. The advisor opens one thing before a meeting, and the client portal shows the same numbers, so there is never a second version of the truth.
Sale of the operating company closes in Q1. David wants the proceeds split between the holdco and the trust. Revisit the RRSP drawdown before year end.
Illustrative screen. The account values come from the portfolio system Bayfield kept; everything around them lives in the engine.
Most of this already existed and ran in production. Bayfield paid for the part that makes their firm different.
People, relationships, households and the corporate entities behind them. This is the piece their CRM could not do.
Accounts, insurance, property and private holdings, with owners and entities attached and a balance sheet that rolls up properly.
Templates, requirement sets, forms, and the chasing of whatever is still outstanding.
Review packages and proposals generated from live data, in their brand.
A portal, iOS and Android apps, and embeddable forms.
Every change traced to a person and a moment, from the first release.
Drafting a meeting note from the record, with the advisor editing and signing off.
A daily read of positions, performance and fee data, reconciled, one way only.
The one screen the whole build is really about, laid out the way their advisors work.
What a Bayfield client sees, in Bayfield’s brand, showing the same numbers as the desk.
Seven of the ten pieces already existed. Three were built for Bayfield.
Free at the start, monthly after that, and they could stop at the end of any month.
Three sessions with two advisors, an assistant and the COO. We followed one real client meeting from the calendar invitation to the follow-up email.
Their top 40 households, loaded from a portfolio export, on the desk, clickable. They reacted to something real instead of a slide.
The desk. Then onboarding and the workflow queue. Then the portal. Then meeting prep and review packages. Each one signed off before the next started.
The firm moved across one team at a time. The old CRM was switched off in month seven, once nobody had opened it for three weeks.
What the firm actually noticed, in the order they noticed it.
Illustrative figures for an example build.
This is the part that is hard to buy anywhere else. You are not choosing a product roadmap — you are choosing yours.
You choose the direction each month. Nothing about this build makes the next decision for you.
A boutique manager whose investment process was good and whose paperwork was held together with spreadsheets.
See the build Example build —A family office that could not answer "what do we own" without three days of work.
See the build Example build —A dealer whose supervision work was fine, and whose evidence of it was an inbox.
See the buildTell us how yours runs and what you wish it did instead. Half an hour on a call. We'll tell you what's already built, what we'd have to make, roughly what it costs, and whether it's worth doing at all. Scoping after that is free.
