COVER STORY

The Lifeworks co-founder and CEO wants to replace independence with interdependence.

By Jennifer Lea Reed

ON BULLIS ISN’ T SHY ABOUT HIS AMBITIONS for the financial advisory industry. A former entrepreneur turned advisor, he sees the old client recruitment models of golf-course prospecting and community center estate-planning seminars as relics of a slower, unscalable past.

“ At the enterprise level, those models are dead, gone, done,” he says.“ Even if you’ re an ensemble like a large team and you want to start thinking about scaling and more intentional growth, then rubber chicken dinners, networking, golf events—[ is ] definitely not the way you’ re going to be successful in the future.”

Instead, Bullis is flexing his entrepreneurial muscle again and is betting big on digital marketing, scalable client acquisition funnels and a redefined value proposition for advisors and clients alike. His firm, Lifeworks Advisors, based in Grand Rapids, Mich., is both an advisory practice and a platform— an attempt to rethink how advisors build businesses, how clients experience advice, and how firms create lasting enterprise value in an era when technology is commoditizing much of what advisors once sold as their unique client proposition.

But he’ s the first to admit he doesn’ t have all the answers, even if his firm’ s most recent Form ADV reported almost $ 750 million in client assets, primarily from roughly 1,500 individuals, including high-net-worth clients.

“ We haven ' t completely figured out our model yet, except to stay on the growth engine side of the business,” he says.

From Loss To New Purpose

While Bullis will wax poetic on the nobility of the advisory profession(“ I can ' t think of a business where we get to build wealth and income security for our families and those we love while also helping people take care of their families and the people they love,”) his conviction about scale, diversification and growth was forged through personal tragedy and professional dislocation. In early 2007, before the financial world was brought to its knees, Bullis was feeling his way through unfathomable personal tragedy— the death of his second daughter, not yet three weeks old. His business at the time, Platinum One Financial, dealt with the secondary commercial mortgage market, and when Lehman Brothers went under in the fall of 2008, so did Platinum One.

A call from a recruiter at Northwestern Mutual prompted Bullis to reflect on his own interactions with advisors— he had been given advice by advisors he thought were good people, but it was advice that sold products for their companies and made them money, yet didn’ t really address the financial planning needs of an entrepreneur, he says. If he was going to do this, he wanted to do it differently. Bullis joined Northwestern Mutual in 2008, earned his Chartered Financial Consultant designation( ChFC) in 2013, and launched Lifeworks in 2017 with partner Kurt Van Dyken, registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an RIA in 2020. It was then time for Bullis to make one more adjustment.“ It took a few years of being an advisor before I really, truly stepped into the role that I think is the right one for me, which is that of being an entrepreneur and building an enterprise,” he says.“ I love being a financial advisor, and I was a good advisor, but I believe I ' m really, really good at building great advisors for our clients.”

Independence Is Overrated The engine of that conviction is a deep skepticism about

“ independence” as the profession has defined it. Bullis argues that

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF LIFEWORKS ADVISORS DECEMBER 2025 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | 29