How Creekmur Wealth Advisors Save 50-200 Hours On Every Acquisition Transition

Challenge

Solidifying client portfolio fit with ongoing risk alignment

Over the past three decades, Creekmur has built its reputation on helping clients achieve financial security through a more personalized approach to wealth management. However, as the firm entered its scale-up phase, nearly doubling its number of acquisitions and advisors in just one year, its existing risk management tools couldn’t keep pace.

The primary bottleneck was a lack of interoperability. Creekmur’s existing risk management tools couldn’t integrate cleanly with the firm’s CRM and financial planning solutions. That meant each new acquisition required hundreds of hours of manual data handling, draining bandwidth for other growth-focused initiatives while limiting the number of clients and firms Creekmur could reliably absorb.

For Andrew Creekmur, Director of Advisory Services and Wealth Advisor, low confidence in risk metrics was an even greater challenge. Because Creekmur’s risk management tools were operating in a silo, his advisors were hesitant to report on potentially incomplete metrics. As a result, advisors would spend hours manually validating the data, which limited their ability to engage deeply with clients in conversations tied to long-term goals. While Andrew had flagged these shortcomings to the provider, answers often came in the form of links to support pages rather than human intervention.

Andrew knew that for Creekmur to successfully navigate its next phase of growth, it needed a solution that would not only integrate seamlessly with its fintech stack but also deliver a single source of truth for risk management. After analyzing several options, Andrew discovered StratiFi through a recommendation from a trusted colleague, and immediately knew he had found the answer to his dilemma.

“Whenever a risk metric didn’t hold up under scrutiny, we would have to manually validate it before bringing it into a client conversation. For a fast-moving firm focused on growth, that’s not a great use of anyone’s time.”

Solution

Unifying risk alignment, proposal creation, and acquisition workflows with StratiFi

Creekmur implemented StratiFi as its unified operating system for risk alignment, proposal generation, and acquisition transitions. 

The rollout began with a structured onboarding plan and training schedule that enabled Creekmur’s advisors to achieve confident usage within one quarter. “StratiFi has been great in that they’ve sat down with us and gone through their system and numbers multiple times,” Andrew shares. “If we come across something that looks inconsistent or unfamiliar, we can send it over to their team, and they’ll take the time to dig into it and provide a clear explanation.”

With StratiFi’s RiskIQ, Creekmur’s advisors established a consistent foundation for risk alignment that keeps pace with the firm’s rapid growth. Each new client receives an initial assessment via RiskIQ that breaks down their current risk willingness and risk capacity within minutes. And with StratiFi's automated assessments and quarterly client check-ins, advisors can effortlessly monitor drift and solidify client portfolio fit without the manual lift.

By connecting StratiFi’s engineers with Creekmur’s data partners, Andrew established a proposal workflow that produces risk-and-return analyses his advisors can stand behind. Now, clients have a clearer picture of portfolio risk, downside exposure, and the tradeoffs between current and proposed allocations through simple visual comparisons that take seconds to generate.

ScanIQ reduced the heaviest lift during acquisition transitions. By turning existing statements into usable portfolio data faster, advisors transition from document collection to proposal creation with fewer manual steps. For Creekmur, this cut hours, and in some cases days, out of the acquisition workflow, empowering the team to reallocate accounts into firm models sooner after funding events.

For a fast-growing wealth advisory firm scaling primarily through acquisitions, StratiFi’s unified operating system proved to be the ultimate force multiplier for Creekmur.

“Before StratiFi, we didn’t see a viable path to creating an all-in-one stop location for wealth management. Their team helped us deliver on that vision from day one.”

Results

Faster acquisition transitions, ongoing risk alignment, and firmwide adoption within one quarter

With StratiFi, Creekmur transformed risk alignment from a tedious manual process into a repeatable workflow advisors can trust in every client meeting. Advisors now spend less time interpreting questionable outputs or rebuilding analysis manually, and more time guiding clients through risk and return tradeoffs with charts they can explain confidently.

• 6K accounts and $1B in assets managed through StratiFi
• 14+ advisors supervised across the U.S.
• 50-200 hours saved on every acquisition transition

Looking ahead, Andrew is eager to launch ComplianceIQ and formalize a repeatable training process with StratiFi to support advisor onboarding as the firm continues to scale through acquisitions.

“We have a pretty unique opportunity in the next few years to really see our firm grow. The partners that we want to engage with need to grow and evolve with us. StratiFi has been willing to meet us where we are and help us think through what comes next.”

Drew Creekmur was not financially compensated for participating in this case study. All views and opinions expressed are his own.