From 2,500 hours to 15 minutes

The company

Strategic Wealth Group is a wealth advisory and tax accounting firm based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. They manage over $1.6 billion in assets and serve roughly 1,600 wealth clients. About 700 of those clients also use Strategic Tax Group, the firm's in-house tax practice, located one floor below the advisory team in the same building.

That proximity is supposed to be a competitive advantage: the firm already has each dual-service client's transaction history, investment activity, and financial events on file. In theory, a massive differentiator. In practice, it was a nightmare to execute.

The problem

Every year between January and March, a team of eight administrators manually compiled a one-page financial summary for each of those 700 dual-service clients: a full year of investment activity, large financial events, charitable contributions, IRA distributions, and anything else the tax team would need to prepare an accurate return.

The data lived everywhere: the CRM, the financial custodian, advisor notes, SharePoint folders, email threads. Each one-pager took 30 to 60 minutes to compile. Across 700 clients, the team burned roughly 2,500 hours in a three-month window. At an average admin salary of $70,000 per year, that's over $84,000 in labor cost spent entirely on copy-and-paste data assembly.

Worse, the tax team often didn't receive completed one-pagers until the final 15 days of the filing window. Rushed returns, increased error risk, and a backlog that rippled through the entire organization, at the worst possible time of year.

The approach

Most consulting firms would have started with a multi-month discovery engagement. Stakeholder interviews. Process mapping workshops. A 40-page recommendations deck. Then, maybe, a pilot six months later. We took the opposite approach.

We flew to Eden Prairie for a 2-day, on-site proof of concept. Day one started with a three-hour deep dive into the one-pager workflow with the people who actually do the work: the admins who build them, the advisors who review them, and the tax preparers who consume them. By that afternoon, our engineering team was building. By the end of day two, a working prototype was in the client's hands.

The solution

The tool does three things:

1. Connects directly to the firm's existing data sources. It pulls the raw transaction data, account information, and client records that previously had to be gathered by hand. No new systems to learn, no data migration required.
2. Applies a rules engine to classify the data. Qualified charitable distributions, IRA rollovers, K-1 indicators, and large financial events get flagged automatically. This is the layer that eliminates human error from the classification step.
3. Generates the completed one-pager. Each client's summary lands in the firm's existing template format, ready for advisor review.

"They took work that took an hour per client and made it something we can do for all of them in under 15 minutes. That changed our whole business!"

What came next

Strategic Wealth Group signed on as a transformation customer. We're now building SWG AI: a unified intelligence layer connecting 11 different data systems across the firm, from tax preparation and document storage to wealth management, CRM, and billing, enabling over 50 agentic and generative AI processes: proactive tax planning alerts, automated client communications, compliance tracking, and real-time cross-entity reporting.

While the larger product takes shape, we deliver value every month along the way: a chain-of-custody tax workflow tracker, CRM architecture across all three business lines, automated billing and time tracking, and an AI-powered client communication system. What started as a 2-day proof of concept is becoming the operating system for how the entire firm runs.