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Ron Bullis
CEO & Founder at Lifeworks Advisors, LLC
Ron Bullis is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lifeworks Advisors, a modern Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) and technology firm.1 He has been in the wealth management industry for over two decades, managing hundreds of millions in assets.2
Bullis started his career as a Wealth Management Advisor at Northwestern Mutual in February 2008, where he worked for nearly nine years before co-founding Lifeworks Advisors in November 2016.14 At Lifeworks, he aims to push the boundaries of wealth management by disrupting outdated business models and delivering personalized solutions to clients and advisors through their modern software platform.1
Under Bullis's leadership, Lifeworks Advisors has experienced significant growth, expanding from $0 to $600M of Assets Under Management (AUM) since 2017, utilizing unique Facebook and Instagram ads for client acquisition.3 The company has developed innovative approaches to financial planning, including:
- A subscription-based financial planning platform
- The first liability-driven wealth management system
- A digital marketing platform to help advisors grow their businesses3
In addition to his work at Lifeworks, Bullis is also the President and Founder of The Ella Bullis Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting families impacted by premature birth and infant loss.14
Bullis is known for his insights on industry trends and has shared his views on the future of wealth management, including the importance of digital marketing, transparent fee structures, and personalized client experiences.23
Highlights
Wealth management is more than just financial planning.
It's a holistic approach to your financial life.
Think about it:
→ Tax planning to minimize your burden → Risk management to protect what you've built → Estate planning to secure your legacy
But in my firm, we push to go even deeper for clients.
We dive into philanthropy. Help you align your wealth with your values.
We tackle business planning. Because your company's success is intertwined with your personal wealth.
And of course, we build retirement plans, so you can live the life you've worked so hard for.
This comprehensive approach requires a team of experts in each field, working together.
The goal is simple and unified:
We’re here to help you achieve your financial plan and live the life you want.
And that can’t happen if we just focus on one thing, on JUST financial planning. It takes a comprehensive package of services, with experts to guide you through each.
Crazy as it sounds, wealth management is not just about growing your wealth.
It's about building toward the retirement, the future the client has always wanted.
So next time you think "wealth management", think bigger.
Think life management.
Because that's what true wealth management delivers.
What aspect of your financial life needs more attention? Tax? Estate? Business?
The 5 biggest mistakes I made building Lifeworks:
Building a wealth management firm from scratch taught me hard lessons.
Expensive ones.
Mistake #1: I changed our messaging to win an advisor.
We had a .80% AUM fee prominently displayed on our website.
Transparent. Fair.
An advisor wanted to join us. Loved our vision. But he balked at our fee.
Why?
He charged his clients 1.25%.
Didn't want them seeing we offered more for less. He asked us to remove the fee from our site. I almost did it.
Big mistake.
Never compromise your values for a quick win.
Mistake #2: I built the business I wanted, not what clients needed.
I had grand visions and innovative ideas.
But I forgot to ask: "What do our clients actually want?"
Always build for your market.
Not your ego.
Mistake #3: I focused on impressing investors instead of serving clients.
This usually took the form of fancy pitch decks with ambitious projections.
They look great in boardrooms — but they don't help real people manage real wealth.
Put clients first. Everything else comes second, third, or one thousandth.
Mistake #4: I tried to scale too fast.
Wealth management isn't a tech startup. You can't "move fast and break things."
It's more like hand-to-hand combat. House to house. Client by client.
There are no shortcuts to trust.
Mistake #5: I stopped our digital marketing.
At one point, we pivoted to focus on advisors and poured everything into our platform.
Then advisors (not so surprisingly in retrospect) told us that their biggest challenge was actually getting new clients.
We'd stopped doing the very thing they needed most.
Never lose sight of what drives your business.
These mistakes cost us time. Money. Opportunities.
But they taught me priceless lessons that have paid themselves back tenfold.
P.S. If you want to copy everything I got RIGHT when building Lifeworks, I've launched a self-paced course breaking down all of the strategies, tactics, and tools that me and my team use: https://hubs.ly/Q02GJQHM0
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.