Every small business advisor knows the feeling: Your client list is growing, the complexity of each engagement is increasing, and somewhere along the way, the promise of "trusted advisor" started feeling less like a relationship and more like a race against the clock.

We've spent the past year talking to dozens of advisors: CEPAs, CPAs, wealth managers, M&A brokers, and attorneys, and heard the same refrain over and over: I don't have the bandwidth, the process, or the time to step back and think about working on my practice.

One advisor put it bluntly: "I like the client that's like, 'Here it is, I don't have time. I trust you.'" The irony wasn't lost on either of us. Advisors are so pressed for time that they're hoping their clients are too busy to ask questions.

Advisors are stuck in AI’s messy middle

Here's what we observed: advisors are racing to prepare for client meetings; often pulling up ChatGPT to synthesize documents, draft agendas, or make sense of a fact pattern they haven't had time to fully digest. It's fast, it’s convenient, and it's quietly creating significant regulatory and reputational risk.

When you're opening ChatGPT for one client, then moving to the next conversation, you're one careless prompt away from cross-pollinating confidential information. Most advisors we spoke with hadn't thought about this. The ones who had were worried but didn't have a better option.

Meanwhile, the business owners themselves are doing the same thing. They're asking ChatGPT what their business is worth, what questions to ask their advisors, and whether they even need an advisor at all. The information asymmetry that once justified advisory fees is eroding. The clients didn’t magically become more sophisticated, but they're more deeply informed, which can be even harder to navigate in the early days of building trust.

Advisors are caught in the middle: expected to deliver more insight, more quickly, while also somehow maintaining the depth of relationship that makes exit planning work.

Time vs. Technology

The shift isn't just about technology. It's also about time: both timing the exit and the amount of time available for advisors to fit ever increasing work into.

We heard from one broker who'd been in M&A for two decades: "I haven't come across enough people that really are banging down the door to find someone to build value. Usually, they're just at their wits' end, ready to sell."

That's illustrates the gap in readiness: Business owners don't seek exit planning advice until they're already in crisis mode—health scare, partnership dispute, burnout, etc. By then, the runway is too short to build real value. Even without the title of “broker”, the advisor becomes a transaction facilitator, rather than a trusted guide. Business owners view exit planning as a last step, what they don’t realize is what they’ve built might not be sellable.

Some advisors want to approach this differently. They want to engage earlier, build value over time, and guide owners toward exits that preserve legacies. Yet, they don't have tools built for that kind of engagement. They have rigid multi-step processes, 90-page reports filled with jargon, and software that demands they conform to someone else's methodology.

As one seasoned advisor told us: "No one's been able to come up with the perfect one-size-fits-all solution. Everyone has pros and cons about all of them."

From Workbench to SOP Engine

We didn't start with AI. In fact, when we initially teased ELLA at the EPI Summit last year, we started with a question: what would it take to build a best-in-breed digital workbench for exit planning advisors?

Through over a hundred conversations, the answer shifted. Twice.

First, we realized advisors didn't need a monolithic platform. They needed a fluid system that could hold context across their entire practice while letting them work the way they already work.

Second, we realized "exit planning" was too narrow. The advisors we kept meeting weren't just helping owners prepare to sell. They were strategic advisors across the entire lifecycle of building a significant business: wealth managers thinking ten years ahead, CPAs advising on structure decisions, attorneys navigating succession, consultants driving value acceleration. As one advisor put it: "We get in the weeds and actually help with the value acceleration beyond just exit planning. We're pulling the levers to actually change the value and make it grow.” Some engage long before an exit is on the horizon. Others come in after a transition to help with what's next. The common thread isn't exit planning specifically. It's the work of guiding business owners through consequential decisions where trust is the foundation.

That realization changed our trajectory. We’ve shifted from building tools centered solely around the nuances exit planning to building an AI-native contextual layer for practice systematization across disciplines.

The unsafe ChatGPT workarounds we described earlier? They exist because advisors don't have a tool that lets them use AI adequately, with centralized context, client separation, and the ability to build on previous work without starting from scratch each time.

Because here's what ChatGPT can’t replicate: advisors know what questions to ask. They know which stones to look under. They've built intuition through years of pattern recognition that no general-purpose AI can match. ELLA amplifies that judgment.

We solve this at the architectural level: everything an advisor adds to ELLA becomes part of a client sandbox with customizable permissions for all exit team members. When you move from one client to the next, there's no cross-contamination.

We’re also taking care of the back-office friction: making data intake seamless, pulling documents and facts into one place, and giving AI the context it needs to be genuinely useful. The goal is to free advisors to spend more time preparing, researching, and being the trusted voice in the room.

Instead of going through the motions of a rigid process, advisors get tools to explore, probe, and put their trusted reputation further ahead. All with confidence that they're doing so in a way that's secure, professional, and reflects their brand as much as their clients' hard work.

What We're Building: Practice Systematization

Malleability at every layer. We offer best-in-class defaults across fact-finding templates, sensemaking prompts, and deliverable structures, because starting from zero is exhausting. Yet, every layer is extensible. Advisors can modify templates, build their own, and collaborate with others on their exit team to iterate on what works. The system morphs as you move through an engagement, because no two cases follow the same path.

Fluidity between thinking and doing. We don't offer a 90-page report template, nor do we plan to. But we do offer the ability to move between sensemaking and deliverable creation without friction. Ask a question, get insight, pull that insight into a document, refine it, and share it. The deliverables you produce actually reflect the owner you're working with and the business they’ve built, not a generic output that confuses both of you.

Collaboration without chaos. When you're quarterbacking an exit team, you need everyone working from the same facts. One advisor described it this way: "Sometimes when there are that many chess pieces, this is the kind of thing that can help keep that type of thing clear and concise.” ELLA puts the team in one place, with the advisor in the driver's seat. No more chasing documents through email threads or wondering if everyone's looking at the latest version.

Context that compounds. Every document uploaded, every question answered, and every insight generated becomes part of a growing context layer. That context travels with the engagement (even across advisors) to inform better prompts, surface relevant patterns, and make each interaction smarter than the last.

In our conversations, we've noticed a divide forming among advisors.

Some (a meaningful minority) are actively thinking about how to adapt their practice for this new era. They see agentic AI on the horizon and understand that the advisors who figure out how to work with these tools will pull ahead. They're experimenting and learning, but still figuring out how to build durable and repeatable systems around them.

But many more are stuck in the crunch. The time keeps shrinking while the complexity of each engagement grows. Running so hard to catch up that they can't see the forest through the trees. They know something is shifting, but they don't have the bandwidth to figure out what, let alone adapt.

The squeeze is real. The pressure to do more with less isn't going away. But the advisors who figure out how to systematize their practice without sacrificing the relationship are the ones who will thrive as AI reshapes the landscape.

ELLA is how advisors are betting on that future. We're building for the advisors who are experimenting with ways to build a durable practice. The ones who want to improve their processes while systematizing what makes them unique. We're giving them a leg up to take their practice into the new era.

So, which type of advisor are you?