A growing estate planning business has client, operational and growth work crossing multiple tools and handoffs, which creates repeated effort and makes status harder to see.
ADL Estate Planning · Digital Transformation · Operations
Helping a growing estate planning business become more digital, measurable and scalable.
My role sits across business development, operations, analytics, content and client experience. The useful story is not the number of tools involved. It is the repeated process of finding friction, making the underlying work visible and turning one off effort into something clearer and more repeatable.
At a glance
Map the work, clarify ownership and next actions, use reporting to expose what matters, and turn repeatable manual sequences into templates, workflows or automations.
Real operational role. This case study deliberately avoids invented metrics; the service map below is a representative model of the work I actually structure.
01 · Client journeys
Make complex financial and legal information easier to act on.
Estate planning is full of information that can feel obvious to the professional delivering it and unfamiliar to the client receiving it. I structure documents, communications and internal handoffs around what the person needs to understand now, what happens next and which action belongs to whom.
Reduce uncertainty
Turn dense information into clear next actions rather than asking clients to interpret professional language themselves.
Improve handoffs
Structure the journey so advisers, operations and clients have a shared understanding of status and responsibility.
Service artefact
A representative client journey and the backstage work it depends on.
This is a simplified service map of the pattern I work across at ADL. It is not presented as formal user research. Its purpose is to make the handoffs visible so the business can see where clarity, ownership or automation matter.
StageInterestConversationAdvice and documentsFollow up
Client seesWebsite, content or referralClear next step and information requestStructured explanation and documentsStatus, actions and reminders
FrontstageLead captureInitial contact and qualificationAdviser communicationProgress communication
BackstageCRM source and ownershipNotes, tasks and handoffTemplates, document workflow and checksCRM updates, reporting and reusable follow up
Risk to removeInterest with no clear route forwardContext lost between peopleDense information or duplicated adminStatus dependent on memory
What I would measure next: time between stages, incomplete handoffs, repeated manual touches, lead source quality and the points where clients need clarification. I have kept these as measurement opportunities rather than fabricating results.
02 · Analytics and reporting
Make performance visible enough to improve.
I use reporting and analysis to move conversations away from “it feels like this is working” toward evidence. The focus is not producing a dashboard for its own sake. It is deciding what behaviour matters, what the existing view is hiding and what information would change a business decision.
Decision support
Structure reporting around useful questions, not around every field that happens to exist.
Look beyond the KPI
Use anomalies, patterns and missing information to identify questions the business was not already measuring.
03 · CRM and operations
Remove repeated work without removing judgement.
When a process is being manually repeated, I ask whether the thinking can be captured once as a workflow, template or automation. The goal is not to automate everything. It is to protect human attention for the parts that actually require judgement.
Workflow design
Clarify stages, ownership and follow up so routine work is less dependent on memory.
Automation
Identify repeatable sequences that can be standardised while keeping sensitive client decisions human.
04 · Growth and digital presence
Connect attention to a system that can actually follow through.
My work touches website improvements, LinkedIn, YouTube, content, lead generation, marketing and sales material. I treat those as connected parts of one journey: attention is only useful if the next step is clear, the lead is captured properly and the business can follow up consistently.
Content systems
Create a repeatable structure for useful content rather than isolated posts with no wider purpose.
Lead journeys
Think beyond acquisition to what happens after interest is created and how the business converts it into a useful conversation.
05 · How I work
I usually start by asking why we are doing the expensive version of the task.
I am drawn to unnecessary groundwork, duplicated effort and processes that require somebody to repeatedly reconstruct the same reasoning. My instinct is to find the smallest reliable method that can be reused, checked and improved. That might become a reporting pattern, a client document, a CRM process, a content framework or an automation.
Could this have been simpler? Usually yes. That is normally where I start.