The session covered how firms should describe themselves now that clients hold the same general-purpose tools their advisors use. The room split on how far the change goes. One founder argued firms don't need to become different businesses. Compress delivery to the twenty percent that carries the value, scale that, and sell a more efficient version of the same firm.
Kelly Reedy, CEO of Common Good, agreed on substance, then showed the pitch itself is what has to move. He said his core service twice.
"If you pitch 'we do positioning work,' you sound like everyone. What we actually say is: we do the positioning work, then we run the direction through a system we've built that validates it against your data. Same craft. But now the client isn't buying our gut, they're buying a tested answer."
Nothing in the delivery changed between those sentences. The firm still does positioning work. But the first version is a category. The second is the same judgment, backed by a system that proves the direction before the client pays to execute it.
Kelly made the reason explicit: clients assume they could do this themselves because they can see the tools. Describe your value as expertise and you invite that comparison. Describe it as judgment validated by a system you own and you don't.