A new advisory firm's back office, built for a team of one or two
How Concentric Lab built a two-person investment advisory firm's back office, with compliant records and an AI agent checking the work daily.
Silver Oak is a California registered investment advisor run by a very small team. Before taking on clients, they hired Concentric Lab to set up the back office: the procedures, systems and records a regulator expects, sized for a firm with one compliance person, not a department.
Before Concentric Lab, Silver Oak's operations lived in my head and a scattered set of tools; now we run on a configured CRM, compliant recordkeeping, and documented onboarding and billing workflows, so a two-person RIA can operate with the structure and audit-readiness of a much larger firm.
Allyn, Founder, Silver Oak
The problem
A new advisory firm has to keep many kinds of records for years in a form that can't be altered, follow written procedures with every client, and be able to prove it. Most templates assume a full compliance team. Silver Oak had one person.
What we built
- An operations binder with 12 deliverables: procedures, policies and a compliance calendar tied to the firm's actual filing deadlines.
- A records map covering 52 types of records across 8 categories, each with its home system, how long it's kept, and where its tamper-proof copy lives. A gap review surfaced 15 issues, worked through with the firm.
- A tamper-proof archive, so records can't be edited or deleted while they must be kept.
- A 7-step client onboarding playbook, from first contact to active client: CRM stages, e-signature packets for the advisory agreement and required disclosures, and a firm rule that no account opens without the client's e-delivery consent.
- A simplification pass that cut procedures written for larger firms down to what one person can actually run.
- A client portal where the firm reviewed and approved each deliverable.
- A daily AI monitoring agent that checked the firm's shared drive every day for three months (72 daily reports) and flagged anything that needed attention.
How the agent helped
When Silver Oak onboarded its first client in June, the agent picked up the new records the day they appeared and checked them against the onboarding playbook. It confirmed what followed the procedure and flagged the one item that mattered most: making sure the client's agreements and disclosures were signed before planning work began. The agent reported. A person decided.