Fewer clients, deeper relationships: how Zocks is helping Strategic Wealth become a true family office

Strategic Wealth: where family comes first

Strategic Wealth is a boutique independent advisory firm partnered with Osaic, serving roughly 400 households with over $100M in assets under management. Founded by Shawn Manuel, the firm serves households with complex financial needs — engineers, bank executives, analytical clients who want depth and data — and is moving up-market toward a family-office model with fewer clients and deeper relationships.

For Shawn, getting to that model meant rethinking what every client meeting actually cost the team.

The challenge: a meeting workflow that buried the team 

When Dylan Earnest joined the firm in 2022, he became the de facto note-taker — head down, capturing every data point so nothing got missed. It worked, but it was not the best use of his skillset.

“Dylan’s well equipped to take care of our clients,” Shawn says. “And if he's quiet and silent during the whole meeting because he's just capturing notes, they're not seeing his value.”

The post-meeting load was just as heavy. Dylan's shorthand notes had to be expanded, organized, and turned into follow-up tasks. “That process took 30 to 45 minutes depending on the type of meeting to really go back through and make sure you captured everything,” Dylan says.

The solution: a no-recording tool with highly customizable templates

“It was this light bulb after we got the opportunity to try Zocks out. We said, hey, we know exactly how we're going to deploy this and how it's going to help us,” Shawn says.

The team evaluated Jump alongside Zocks. Jump needed to record calls through RingCentral to function — a non-starter given that Osaic's broker-dealer guidance discourages call recording. “We are rule followers to a fault,” Shawn says. “Technically we can't be recording phone calls, but to use Jump, we had to turn on call recording. This made us more aligned with Zocks.”

Customization sealed it. Dylan built out 15 to 20 meeting templates, from a 30-minute prospect intro call to a deep-dive discovery, so notes come back already formatted the way Strategic Wealth wants them. “We didn't see that as an option with other solutions, at least not to the level that Zocks offered,” Shawn says.

Dylan witnessed the change immediately. “I was taking notes side by side with Zocks and Jump for our first few meetings because we're naturally skeptical. It was pretty clear that Zocks was going to take much more thorough notes than I ever could.”

Over time, Dylan's role in the meeting itself shifted. He went from heads-down note-taker to a fully present second advisor. 

Now, Zocks seamlessly runs across their whole tech stack: Redtail, eMoney, PreciseFP, ClickUp, and RingCentral. Shawn saved Zocks as a contact in his phone so every inbound or outbound call starts with adding it to the line.

“Out of all of our technology we use — and we have a lot of technology that we love using — Zocks bolted on seamlessly to more of our existing tech than anything else.”

The results: deeper client relationships even without its center of gravity

Then something happened that Zocks wasn't bought to solve. Erin, Shawn's wife and the company’s Chief of Staff and operational backbone, was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer and stepped away from the firm for a year of treatment. She was the person who kept the office running and had the global view of everything happening across client accounts and operations.

The systems already in place carried the firm through her absence. Every client meeting was captured in Zocks, with follow-up tasks organized and ready to be assigned. The team — including Shawn's son-in-law Noah, who'd recently joined full time — could keep work moving without losing the institutional knowledge Erin held.

Despite the gap in the office, the firm posted a double-digit revenue increase during her year out.

“We were actually preparing for growth,” Shawn says. “We were putting things in place that we believed would help us grow and maximize our capacity — not recognizing that it would also backfill a gap of not having an integral person there.”

That growth has only accelerated. Strategic Wealth is now on track to double its net-new asset goal with Osaic. Shawn credits the trajectory to deeper relationships with the right clients, made possible by the time Zocks gave the team back. The firm is intentionally seeing fewer clients while average AUM per household keeps climbing.

“To me, the job is being present with clients … listening, understanding their goals and dreams, building trust. That's what we're hired for. Anything that lets you do more of that and less on trying to capture every bit of information in the meeting is taking away from what you're ultimately hired to do.” Dylan closes, “The advisors that adopt AI to help them build these deeper relationships are the ones that are going to thrive over the next one, two, five years.”