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About

There’s a better way to run these firms.

I spent twenty years inside the biggest ones working out why the old way stopped working.

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Mike Levine, founder of BlueEye Advisory
Mike LevineFounder, BlueEye Advisory
The thing I kept seeing

I spent twenty years watching good training fail.

I’m not talking about bad training. I built a lot of this myself, at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, for advisor populations in the tens of thousands. The designers were smart and the budgets were real. It was good work.

It still didn’t stick. A great session on Tuesday is gone by the following Monday, because nobody practiced or repeated it and nothing in the daily work brought it back.

I watched it happen from three seats. First as the advisor sitting in the training, then as the executive signing off on the budget, then as the person building the thing. It ended the same way every time.

However good the content is, without practice and repetition and something that carries it into the actual work, it doesn’t last.

Why now

For most of my career there was nothing to do about it.

I couldn’t sit in on every conversation. Nobody coaches forty people a week. And I couldn’t say what my best producers did differently, so I had nothing to teach anybody else.

That part has changed.

The conversations are readable

The meetings a team is already having are the most valuable data in the building. Almost nobody has ever looked at them. Now they can be read at scale, every week.

People practice before it counts

Advisors used to get their repetitions on live clients, which is an expensive way to learn. Now they get them first, against the exact conversation they’re about to walk into.

It works at any size

This used to take a wirehouse budget and a department to run it. A forty-person firm can have it now. It takes weeks.

What comes out of it is a view of a firm and its people that wasn’t available before. It shows what’s actually being said and by whom, and what it produces, instead of a survey or a manager’s impression.

What I bring to it

Advisor, executive, and the person who built the programs.

Most people in this work have done one of the three. A program written by someone who never ran a team gets ignored, and a team run by someone who never built a program doesn’t scale past that one person. I’ve been all three.

AdvisorCarried a book. Sat through the training like everybody else.
ExecutiveRan advisory and sales teams. Before that, a territory at ExxonMobil with full P&L and twelve direct reports.
Program builderBuilt the learning architecture behind some of the largest advisor populations in the country. Onboarding and ramp, sales and client service curricula, manager development, certification, and the measurement underneath it.
Since 2021The same work independently, for wirehouses, banks, and independent and hybrid firms.
What that turns into

Three ways to work together.

01  BUILD

The system your firm runs on

Sales process, scorecards, curriculum, and the CRM setup that makes it visible. A project with a start and a finish. You own what gets built.

Build →
02  RUN

I take the seat

Sales leadership, operations, or learning and development, on a monthly retainer. I run it until the team holds the standard without me. Then I leave.

Fractional leadership →
03  AMPLIFY

The part that makes it stick

Practice environments and conversation analysis, running inside regulated firms, on whatever stack they already own.

Amplify →

Most engagements start in one and grow into another. Plenty stay in one and finish there.

Straight up

Who I’m wrong for.

You want a big firm

You get me, in the room, for the whole engagement. You don’t get the bench of a large consultancy. If your problem needs forty consultants, I’ll say so on the first call.

You want to hear you’re fine

I say what I think. I’ve talked firms out of software they were about to buy. I talked one out of hiring me, because a full-time person was the better answer. It cost me the engagement.

Outside the work

I’m based in Florida and Arizona. I speak and write about performance, AI in financial services, and why most sales training doesn’t stick. The longer version of the career is here →

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