If you've worked with me for any amount of time, you know I love a good list. Yours, mine, ours. There is something genuinely satisfying about having everything laid out — all the things the business needs, all the things that have been nagging at you, all the things you've been meaning to fix when you finally have the bandwidth.
But here's the thing about lists: they have a way of treating everything equally. The massive CRM overhaul sits right next to "fix that one email template." The project that could genuinely transform how your firm operates lives in the same document as the one that would save you twelve minutes a month. And when everything looks urgent, nothing is.
This is why I want to talk about the Pareto Principle — and why I think it should shape every conversation we have about what to work on next.
The 80/20 Rule, in Plain Terms
In the 1890s, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto noticed something strange: roughly 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He started looking for this pattern in other places and kept finding it. Business theorists picked it up decades later, and today the Pareto Principle — also called the 80/20 rule — is one of the most widely observed patterns in business and productivity.
The idea is simple: in almost any system, a small number of inputs are responsible for the majority of the outputs.
deliver 80% of the impact on your time, your client experience, and your ability to grow — the other 80% of projects share the remaining 20%.
The numbers aren't magic. They won't be exactly 80/20 for your firm. But the underlying truth holds almost universally: a handful of improvements will do more for your business than everything else on your list combined.
The job, then, isn't to do everything. It's to identify the handful that actually matter — and start there.
Why This Is Hard to See From the Inside
When you're running a small RIA, everything can feel like it deserves attention, because technically, everything does need attention at some point. The broken workflow, the onboarding process that's still held together with copy-paste and good intentions, the reporting template from 2019 that sort of works, the data hygiene situation you've been quietly embarrassed about — it all matters.
But mattering and moving the needle are not the same thing.
I see this pattern constantly. A firm will spend hours perfecting a document template that touches two clients a year, while a chaotic onboarding process is quietly eroding first impressions for every single new relationship. Or an advisor will want to customize a report layout before their CRM workflows are even functional — building the curtains before the house has walls.
"Fixing the right thing at the right time is more valuable than fixing everything eventually. The sequence matters."
Part of my job is to help you see what I can see from the outside: which projects are genuinely in your 20%, and which ones feel important because they're the most visible or the most annoying — not because they're the most impactful.
How to Identify Your 20%
There's no universal answer — it depends on where your firm is, what's breaking down, and what your growth goals look like. But there are reliable questions that tend to surface the highest-leverage work:
What's costing you the most time, week over week?
Not the occasional fire — the recurring drag. The thing you do (or redo, or undo) every single week that makes you quietly wonder if this is really how it has to be. Repetitive manual work is almost always a sign that a system improvement would pay for itself quickly and keep paying dividends indefinitely.
What's your biggest source of stress or anxiety about the business?
I ask this one because stress is often a reliable signal. If something is keeping you up at night or making you dread a particular part of your week, it's usually because some part of you knows it's fragile — a process you can't fully trust, a workflow that depends entirely on your personal memory, a compliance area you're less confident in than you'd like to be. Fragility in high-stakes areas is worth fixing early.
What's slowing down your clients' experience?
Your back-office chaos may be invisible to your clients — until it isn't. Slow onboarding, inconsistent communication, requests that fall through the cracks, information that has to be asked for twice. Client experience is where operational friction becomes a relationship risk, and relationship risk is something no small firm can afford to carry.
What's a bottleneck that holds up everything else?
Some problems are upstream of other problems. If your data is a mess, no amount of workflow building will save you — the workflows will just inherit the mess. If you don't have a reliable task system, no template will make your follow-ups consistent. Foundational gaps tend to block progress in multiple areas at once, which makes them disproportionately valuable to solve.
Before our next conversation, it's worth sitting with these questions:
- What takes more of my time than it should, every single week?
- What part of my operations would I be most embarrassed for a new client to see?
- What's the one thing I've been putting off that I suspect would actually make the biggest difference?
- If I could only fix one thing this quarter, what would it need to be?
Your answers to those questions are a pretty good map to your 20%.
What This Means for How We Work Together
I'm not telling you to ignore the rest of the list. Everything on it is probably real, and we'll likely get to most of it over time. But I am asking you to resist the urge to prioritize based on what feels most urgent in the moment, what seems easiest to knock out, or what's been sitting on your list the longest.
Those instincts can lead us toward busy work instead of the work that actually changes things for your firm.
When we talk about what to tackle next, I'll always be asking: Is this in your 20%? If the answer is yes, we move. If it's no, we talk about sequencing — because sometimes doing the smaller thing first genuinely sets up the bigger win, and sometimes it just delays it.
The goal isn't a shorter to-do list. The goal is a business that runs better, serves your clients well, and gives you back some of your life. And the fastest path to that isn't doing more — it's doing the right things, in the right order, with intention.
That's what I'm here to help you figure out.