75% more capacity, same personal touch: how Planning for Good Financial scaled with Zocks

Planning for Good Financial: a speciality no one else claimed

In 2007, Karen Melo Ticas met a gay couple married in Massachusetts but not recognized as legally married in their home state, Rhode Island. Because of this gap, the couple's taxes and benefits shifted depending on the state line. Recognizing that there was no advisor built to handle this challenge, Karen took it upon herself to become one. That's how Planning for Good Financial came to be: a fully virtual, financial-planning-first firm affiliated with Cambridge Investment Research, specializing in LGBTQ+ and blended families.

Kristen Heller joined Planning for Good in 2022, bringing deep corporate finance experience and a specialty in equity compensation planning that expanded the firm's reach into new client territory. The two quickly found their footing together — and the firm grew. But growth created its own problem: how do you continue scaling personalized, identity-specific financial planning without adding headcount or sacrificing the depth that makes the firm different? .

The challenge: growth capped by a pen 

Note-taking on a legal pad and pen proved to be disruptive during client meetings and often required hours of reconstruction. All in all, two hours a day were lost to note-taking and manual CRM updates. Executive summaries weren't built to scale, taking up to three hours each to create. On top of that, Karen was capped at ~20 financial plans a year.

“It caused interruptions in time and the attention on my client. It would disrupt the flow of the meeting,” Karen says.

Kristen felt the same strain from a different angle. In client meetings, she found herself half-listening for numbers and pain points to jot down, then losing the thread of the conversation itself.

“I found myself almost gamifying the conversation, listening for the numbers I needed to write down. It made things disruptive in our day-to-day meetings, and afterward I'd spend a half hour to an hour trying to remember everything … and I'd still miss things,” Kristen says.

The solution: 1 system, 10 templates, endless insights

Karen evaluated Fireflies and Jump before choosing Zocks. Zocks had the most compliance controls as well as the most robust two-way integrations with their existing tools, including Wealthbox and eMoney. 

“Zocks isn't actually recording any audio that you can download from online, so our voices are not captured. There is an enormous security element to that,” Karen says.

Karen wasted no time setting up workflows in Zocks to give her firm time back. She built ~10 templates around the firm's existing client-facing processes: personalized proposals with quoted fees and payment links, letterhead-ready welcome letters, follow-up emails, plain-English executive summaries, and client action lists — all populated with the client's own language, pulled from Zocks, Wealthbox, and eMoney.

“Clients love knowing that we heard you, and you said this to me verbatim, and that's what we're going to work on,” Karen says.

Kristen felt that shift firsthand, too. She adopted Karen's templates for her own clients and took the same approach into her role as chief of staff — using Zocks to track sentiment and follow-ups in staff meetings. She also uses the talking-percentage feature to keep her own client meetings balanced.

“I really pay attention to the talking percentages. Advisors can get verbose, and in the earlier stages, I realized the percentage of the client speaking was really low in some of my meetings. I wanted to change that, because I wanted it to be a more interactive kind of meeting — one where the client has time to ask questions and is engaging, instead of just being spoken at,” Kristen says, “Zocks taught me where I needed a little help and was able to highlight that for me.” 

The results: same heart, 75% more reach

Since adopting Zocks, Karen's capacity has grown 75% — from 20 to 35 financial plans a year, with no change in team size or depth of planning. Executive summaries now take about 5 minutes instead of 2–3 hours, and a full personalized deliverable takes 12 minutes instead of 2. The firm reclaims roughly 9 work-weeks a year as a result.

“A two-hour process became 12 minutes for me. It's an enormous change in saving time, but also giving me the capacity to elevate my services for everybody,” Karen says.

Every client now gets a fully personalized proposal, welcome letter, and executive summary — and the team can search months of meeting history to confirm exactly when a conversation happened, something they had no reliable way to verify before.

“It has saved me multiple times when I needed absolute proof that a client gave me permission ...that kind of minutia we've never had before. It didn't exist,” Karen says.

For Kristen, the impact goes beyond the time saved.

“At the end of the day, we are all just people, and we need to build trust with our clients. Zocks really fosters that relationship,” Kristen says.