The numbers were right. The margins were healthy. The clients were loyal. The valuation was attractive.

So why did it feel like someone else’s firm?

Would You Build This? is the story of a successful financial advisor who realizes that the firm he built faithfully over two decades is no longer the firm he would design today, not because it failed him, but because he grew past the assumptions on which it was built.

Through the journey of David Carter, a composite drawn from real conversations with advisors across the country, Mike Garrison explores the quiet, high-stakes moment that arrives when everything is working well enough to justify changing nothing at all. In that moment of comfort, not crisis, is where the most important decisions about a firm’s future are made.

This is not a tactical manual or a polemic against institutional capital. It is a book about alignment, about examining whether your compensation, your growth assumptions, your referral posture, and your daily allocation of attention actually reflect what you say you provide. It is an invitation to ask one deceptively simple question before the pace of change asks it for you:

If you were starting today, would you build the firm you are currently running?

For advisors navigating recapitalization offers, succession decisions, fee transparency, and the accelerating impact of Al on professional services, Would You Build This? offers something rare: the space to think clearly about what matters before someone else’s timeline forces the question.