COVER STORY using crayons and paper to be perfectly honest,” he says.“ Because if I would have spent the same million dollars on business development that we spent on technology over these last seven years, we’ d be even further along.”
The simple( but expensive) lesson was that technology must serve growth, not distract from it. Building too big a tech stack or adding too much of the latest and greatest technology can actually blow up the client experience.
“ There are only two things that add value from an advisor’ s perspective,” he says.“ One, bringing in new clients, and two, spending time helping your clients make better decisions. Everything else is noise.”
So rather than pursue a platform-tech identity, Lifeworks is channeling investment into digital marketing and funneldriven acquisition. The firm runs paid advertising primarily through Meta, especially Instagram, and Google. And the process is highly engineered to turn viewers into clients.
“ Generally, they’ re watching two or three of our videos, downloading a white paper, and they book a meeting on one of our advisors’ calendars,” he says.“ The funnel itself— the language from the ad copy to the language in the video sales letter to the language on the landing page— is prepping them for their first emails. It’ s already filtering them.”
By the time that person books the meeting, they already fit the firm’ s ideal customer profile. Right now, that means the advisors are closing roughly 30 % of all the leads they receive, Bullis says.
The firm’ s ads lean heavily on themes like,“ Are you getting what you’ re paying for?” It’ s a message that Bullis expected to resonate given the research showing widespread dissatisfaction with advisor fees, and it ended up being Lifeworks’ most successful ad campaign to date.
The result is a lead engine that has become both asset and operational challenge.“ Last week was the third week in a row that we didn’ t have any open appointments for prospects to book on our calendars for two weeks out,” he says.
Some Lifeworks advisors are onboarding 10 to 12 new clients a month, he says, and the marketing engine has become so central that he is hiring more personnel to manage funnels and content, and he openly prioritizes marketing spend over technology investment.
The Democratized Family Office
For clients, the value proposition leans heavily into financial planning, tax, estate and investments in what Bullis calls a democratized family-office approach, for which Lifeworks charges a planning fee up front. In today’ s advisory landscape, this alone sets the firm apart, Bullis says.
“ Charging a fee for financial planning shouldn’ t be a differentiator, but in an industry where 96 cents for every dollar of revenue is an asset-centered management fee, charging a fee for the work that you do that’ s valuable is a differentiator,” he says.
Typically, within six months, 75 % to 80 % of clients move assets to the firm for more traditional management, he says.
Bullis rejects model portfolios and mutual funds as part of that portfolio management, and instead looks to individual securities and even fractional-share access( a practice in which investors can buy partial shares of a security). Lifeworks currently uses Apex Clearing and Schwab as custodians, and it’ s adding Altruist.
He also rejects returns-focused investing in favor of liability-driven investing, where the focus is on upcoming expenses. This approach is rooted in institutional frameworks where assets are matched to drawdown timing needs.“ If you need the money next month to pay your mortgage payment, that should not be in the S & P 500,” he says.
The firm uses exchange-traded funds for exposure to gold and bitcoin, and it sees adaptability as Lifeworks’ core advantage.“ We’ re constantly adapting a client’ s asset allocation to be ready to provide the assets to spend when they need to spend them,” he explains. Younger clients often hold digital assets directly, and Lifeworks integrates that into planning as well.
Advisors’ Future In A Co-Pilot World
Ultimately, Bullis believes the technical dimensions of advice— asset allocation, tax analysis, planning logistics— will be increasingly automated and accessible to anyone. What won’ t be as easy to automate are human abilities like coaching and behavioral guidance, nor the ability to connect money to meaning that a trained advisor has.
“ I think that‘ life coach’ word gets a bad rap, but I do think that the idea of a coach, somebody that’ s walking alongside of the person who’ s actually swinging the clubs and playing the game … I think that’ s where the future of advice is going,” he says.“ The power is going to reside in an advisor who understands how to ask really good questions that get people to think about meaning, their purpose, their life’ s work.”
If the advisory world is slow to change, Bullis is forging ahead, throttle wide open. He says he expects no dividends or cash distributions for Lifeworks equity holders before 2030, as every dollar is going to support the firm and its mission.
The Lifeworks model, he says, is a corrective to an industry struggling to maintain its relevance in a world of AI co-pilots. And there are no secrets as far as he’ s concerned.“ If you go to TheFutureOfAdvice. com, I have an online training academy … where I share every month and every quarter all the playbooks that we ' re running at Lifeworks,” he says.
Whether his model becomes a blueprint or an outlier will depend on execution and advisor adoption, but Bullis appears determined to force the conversation.
To him, the industry’ s next chapter will not be written by those defending payout percentages or referral spreadsheets, but by leaders designing scalable engines capable of meeting the next generation where they are— digitally, behaviorally and philosophically.
DECEMBER 2025 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | 31