Case study |
The firm that bet on the future
About Lifeworks
Lifeworks Advisors is a Michigan-based RIA managing nearly $1 billion across 2,000 households.
Why they switched
Lifeworks was building their own tech to compete for the next generation of clients. Then they saw Altruist was doing it faster and at a scale they couldn’t match.
The results
Switching to Altruist saved Lifeworks $1,800 per household every year, freed up the team’s time, and made it possible to do more for every client they serve.
Ron Bullis didn’t get into the custodian-switching business lightly. As founder and CEO of Lifeworks Advisors, a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based RIA managing nearly $1 billion across 2,000 households, he runs his firm like a CEO should: with a clear mathematical business case before making any major move.
In 2021, he made one of those moves. Lifeworks closed a seed funding round and hired software engineers. The mission: build a direct integration to Apex Clearing, develop digital account opening, fractional shares, and electronic ACAT processing, all in-house.
For a while, that was the plan. Until one platform started changing the calculus.
The moment the math changed
Altruist was building the same thing Lifeworks was after—tech-forward tools that could compete for the next generation of clients. Except, they were doing it faster, at a scale Ron’s team couldn’t match.
“We just looked at Altruist and said, ‘Man, they’re going to do this better than we are.’”
That was the moment. Lifeworks wound down the internal software operation, redirected the capital, and made Altruist their primary custodian. The goal: move 75–80% of assets and households to the platform by the end of 2026.
What the transition actually looked like
The number one question Ron gets from other advisors: how will clients react to leaving a household-name custodian for one they’ve never heard of?
His answer: not one client pushed back.
“Clients don’t hire the custodian. They hire the advisor. If the advisor has a clear, cogent, and compelling reason for why they believe Altruist is the best partner for their clients, most clients are going to take that advice without any significant objections.”
The operational side was equally smooth. Altruist imported all of Lifeworks’ client data directly, including historical performance records, so clients could see an unbroken view of their portfolio going back years. That last piece wasn’t standard. Lifeworks asked for it. Altruist built it.
“I don’t know any custodian anywhere that would agree to do something like that and then deliver it in anything less than multiple years,” Ron said. The training was the same story—proactive and thorough.
“
There was nonstop training. It wasn’t even driven by us. It was Altruist coming to us and saying, ‘Are we giving your team enough? Do we need to fly somebody to you? Do you want in-person training?’”
Ron Bullis, Co-Founder and CEO, Lifeworks Advisors
This testimonial was given by a current client. Neither Altruist nor its affiliates paid for this testimonial, but we do earn revenue from financial advisors who use our software, from assets invested through our broker-dealer (Altruist Financial LLC) and assets using services made available by our registered investment adviser (Altruist LLC). The promoting advisor received compensation or other benefits from Altruist through the promoting advisor’s participation in one or more of Altruist’s various programs, which created a conflict of interest on the promoting advisor’s part and may have influenced the view(s) expressed by the promoting advisor. For more details on program compensation and benefits and related conflicts of interest, please visit altruist.com/RIA-testimonial. For additional information about the promoting advisor’s conflicts of interest when expressing its views about Altruist or Altruist’s affiliates, please see the promoting advisor’s advisory program brochures, available at https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/. This testimonial may not represent the experience of others and it is not a guarantee of results.
What they got on the other side
For Lifeworks, the benefits landed in two places: what clients experience, and what the team no longer has to do manually.
On the client side, Altruist delivered the kind of mobile experience Ron’s next-gen clients expect—fast account opening, clean reporting, and the ability to log in and see their returns and move money easily.
On the operations side, the gains were just as significant. Automated billing, portfolio management, and reporting meant the Lifeworks team could stop spending time on tasks the platform now handles. And features like tax-loss harvesting and direct indexing, previously reserved for only the largest clients because of the labor involved, suddenly became viable for everyone.
“We’re going to democratize those benefits for everybody because Altruist has built the technology to manage that complexity at scale,” Ron said.
Running the numbers
Since making the switch, Lifeworks is saving nearly $1,800 per household every year in labor—work that used to fall on their team, now handled automatically by the platform.
“Here’s the basic math,” Ron said. “$1,800 per year, times the number of households in your firm, times whatever multiple of revenue your firm is valued at. Every 100 households puts $180,000 of cost back into your P&L. At a 10x multiplier, that’s a $1.8 million enterprise gain.”
$1,800
saved per year, per household with Altruist
0
clients pushed back on transition to Altruist
75-80%
assets moved to Altruist by end of 2026
What’s at stake for advisors
From Ron’s perspective, too many advisors are running on strong market returns, high profit margins, and the illusion that the status quo will hold.
“70% of the growth in our industry has just come from market appreciation, not from winning the next generation of clients,” Ron said. “There are far too many people in our industry that, I believe, are sleepwalking into irrelevancy because they refuse to look out there and ask: what are the platforms, what are the partners that we need to have that are building for the future?”
The advisors who are asking hard questions now will be the ones positioned to win, not just the clients they have, but the generation of clients everyone is chasing.
“If you have high conviction that it’s your responsibility to build a platform that serves clients across multiple generations, then you just get into this work, and you do it as fast and as clean as possible.”