Trending
March is when top advisory practices quietly set themselves apart. Not with louder marketing. With better operating decisions. This is the month top advisors use to (1) lock in their annual client rhythm, (2) tighten risk controls before the year accelerates, and (3) convert “strategy” into compounding habits: capacity, clarity, and trust at scale.
Below are the moves world-class practices are making right now—and the factors they’re using to improve their odds of winning over the next ten years.
1) They’re productizing advice into a repeatable “client operating system.”
Why this is critical: Over the next decade, the practices that grow will be those that deliver a consistent client experience across people, geographies, and market regimes, without the founder as the bottleneck. This is how you protect enterprise value, reduce key-person risk, and raise service quality as expectations climb.
Questions to consider:
- If a top client asked, “What exactly happens with you every year?” could your whole team answer the same way?
- Where do clients experience you as “brilliant but inconsistent”?
Quick case: A $1B team standardized a 12-month client cadence (tax, portfolio, protection, estate, family meeting). Service issues declined, referrals increased, and the founder became less the default escalation point.
2) They’re turning AI into a supervised teammate instead of a novelty.
Why this is critical: The advantage isn’t “using AI.” It’s using AI safely, consistently, intentionally, and measurably to free human time for judgment, client experience, and trust-building. Leading practices include deploying AI in operations (forms, servicing), internal knowledge retrieval, and advisor workflows (planning insights, portfolio implementation), while tightly governing claims and outputs. Large platforms are explicitly building “advisor & agent” models at scale.
Questions to consider:
- Where does your team waste the most cognitive energy: rekeying, searching, summarizing, scheduling?
- If regulators asked you to explain how AI is supervised, could you?
Quick case: A multi-office practice trained an internal AI assistant on approved templates and policies. It reduced turnaround time on common service requests by 30–40% and improved documentation consistency, because every output was routed through a human “final check.”
3) They’re building compliance and cyber resilience like a revenue strategy
Why this is critical: Cybersecurity and operational resiliency are no longer “IT topics”. I now discuss them and encourage advisors to consider them as trust topics. Regulators are emphasizing cybersecurity policies, incident response, third-party oversight, and emerging-tech risks. In the next decade, a contributing success factor will be whether or not clients believe: “My life is safer here.”
Questions to consider:
- If your CRM and email went down tomorrow, what breaks in the first 6 hours?
- Who owns vendor risk, and how often is it tested?
Quick case: A boutique practice ran a 90-minute “breach tabletop” with their custodian/IT partner. They identified permissions sprawl and outdated device policies, resolved them within two weeks, and turned the upgraded posture into a client reassurance message.
4) They’re making tax planning an “always-on” discipline, not a seasonal add-on
Why this is critical: Tax complexity is rising across major markets, and it’s one of the few places advisors can create visible, explainable value even when markets are noisy. In Canada, recent federal budget measures and ongoing tax policy discussions have kept high-income planning at the forefront. Top practices use March to tighten: realized gains strategy, charitable planning, corporate/trust considerations, and clean documentation.
Questions to consider:
- Do you run tax planning as a calendar, or as a reaction to April deadlines?
- Which 20 households could you help most with a proactive “tax decision memo”?
Quick case: A practice created a “Top 25 Tax Opportunities” dashboard by household (loss harvesting capacity, donation carryforwards, corporate class planning, insurance funding, etc.). It became the agenda for March–June client outreach, and a major catalyst for referrals among CPAs.
5) They’re upgrading portfolio design for a world of “public & private” and liquidity reality
Why this is critical: Private markets are moving from “institutional-only” into private wealth portfolios, especially evergreen structures and private credit, but quality, liquidity management, and operational readiness vary dramatically. Top advisors aren’t chasing alts; they’re building a governance framework: suitability, liquidity tiers, valuation transparency, fees, and client comprehension.
Questions to consider:
- Could you explain your private-market allocation like you’d explain a mortgage, simple, plain, and honest?
- What’s your liquidity plan if markets seize and clients want cash?
Quick case: A team implemented “Liquidity Buckets”: 12 months, 3 years, 7+ years. Private allocations could only be placed in the 7+ bucket with written client acknowledgment. The result: fewer uncomfortable calls during volatility and more confident long-term behavior.
6) They’re leaning into geographic and client-segment expansion with precision
Why this is critical: Wealth growth is increasingly global, with private banks and advisory platforms expanding in high-growth regions and cross-border corridors. Top practices treat expansion like an investment thesis: clear ICP, service model fit, and a referral/introduction process, rather than opportunistic “we can serve anyone.”
Questions to consider:
- If you doubled your ideal-client flow, do you have the capacity and service design to keep service quality high?
- What region/segment would you decline because it dilutes your edge?
Quick case: An advisory group built a “cross-border readiness” offering (tax coordination, account structure, estate coordination) and partnered with two specialist practices. They didn’t market broadly; they marketed only to a defined niche, and became a significant player in their space within 18 months.
7) Their engineering capacity is the practice’s primary growth lever
Why this is critical: The next decade will reward practices that can scale “attention” through role clarity, delegation, meeting discipline, and workflow design. Capacity is not a feeling; it’s a system. Top advisors are using March to reset client segmentation, service tiers, delegation rules, and a training plan that helps new hires become productive quickly.
Questions to consider:
- What work are you doing today that a well-trained specialist could do better within 60 days?
- Which 10% of clients consume 40% of capacity, and why?
Quick case: A founder moved to a two-meeting standard: “decision meeting” and “implementation meeting,” with pre-work handled by a service lead. Meeting count dropped, revenue per hour rose, and clients felt more cared for because the experience became more streamlined.
The March 2026 “elite move.”
Before Q2 arrives, top advisors do one thing that sounds simple and changes everything:
They choose a small number of operational bets, install them as habits, and measure them weekly.
For over ten years, the winners haven’t been the most informed. They’ve been the most consistent implementors.
A big goal for the whole team to think about this week is: “What would we do differently if we were building a practice we could sell at a premium in ten years?”
Related: 8 Enterprise Shifts Separating Scalable Firms From Stagnant Practices