Alan Rhode, Founder & CEO of Modern Wealth, on Building a Solo RIA That Scales with AI
When Alan Rhode launched Modern Wealth in January 2019, advisors in his network told him he was crazy. Running an RIA solo, no team, no safety net, seemed like a recipe for burnout. Today, those same advisors are envious.
What changed wasn’t the size of Alan’s team. It’s still just him. What changed was the technology available to support him.
Building the Foundation Before the Tools Existed
Alan’s first five years as a solo advisor were manually intensive by necessity. Client meetings required simultaneous note-taking, CRM updates, task creation, and follow-up emails, all without missing a detail. His investment infrastructure leaned on automation where it existed, like Charles Schwab’s institutional intelligent portfolios, but the tooling landscape was thin.
That grind, it turns out, was formative. Alan was forced to develop and document his processes the hard way, understanding exactly what each workflow required, where the friction lived, and what a good client experience actually looked like. When generative AI arrived, he wasn’t starting from scratch. He had a blueprint.
This is a pattern worth paying attention to. Advisors who struggled through the manual era often have the clearest instincts for where AI belongs in their practice. They know the job to be done because they did it themselves.
A Tech Stack Built for Precision
Today, Alan operates what he describes as a “family office environment” for his niche, small business owners five to ten years from a liquidity event, with gross revenues between one and twenty-five million dollars. His stack reflects that intentionality.
Impruve handles meeting intelligence and CRM sync to Wealthbox, eliminating the note-taking burden that once defined his days. eMoney serves as the master financial plan, running retirement projections and scenario modeling. As clients approach retirement, IncomeLab takes over, translating complex probability models into simple income guardrails clients can actually understand. Wealth.com handles estate document creation. HolistaPlan drives tax planning.
Each tool has a defined role. Nothing overlaps arbitrarily. And AI note-taking sits at the center, threading context from every client conversation into the broader system.
Where the Gaps Still Are
Alan is candid about where AI hasn’t caught up yet: niche-specific marketing. Generic automation exists in abundance. What’s harder to find is a tool that can reliably identify the right small business owner, at the right stage of their journey, with accurate data, and get in front of them before everyone else does.
This is the next frontier. The advisors who figure out how to build relationships with entrepreneurs at the Series A stage, rather than waiting for the acquisition announcement, will be the ones who win the accounts that matter most. In an AI-augmented world, casting that net earlier, and at scale, is becoming possible for the first time.
The Human Variable
For all the efficiency AI creates, Alan points to something it cannot replicate: accountability. People change their behavior when they are answerable to another person. They contribute to retirement plans, improve cash flow, and follow through on financial commitments not because an algorithm told them to, but because they don’t want to disappoint someone who knows them.
That dynamic, the face-to-face relationship, the personal trust, the sense of obligation, is what keeps the solo advisor model viable even as AI takes on more of the operational load.
Alan Rhode’s practice is proof that the future of independent advising is not bigger teams. It is smarter infrastructure, sharper niches, and the judgment to know where the human still has to show up.
