Cut Your Meeting Prep From 60 Minutes To 15.
The Homework Sheet is one page holding every number a client review needs. Your team fills it in. You walk into the meeting ready, without opening the CRM, the custodian, or your inbox.
Built and used every week by Micah Shilanski and Matthew Jarvis, the advisors behind The Perfect RIA.
An Hour Of Prep, Twelve Times A Week.
An advisor recently told us it takes him at least an hour to prepare for a review meeting. Not a prospect meeting. Not a new client. Not the meeting after a major life event. Every single review. On a twelve-meeting Surge week, that is twelve extra hours gone before he does a minute of real planning work.
Without the sheet
~60 min- Open the CRM for the household details.
- Log into the custodian for current balances.
- Search your inbox for what you promised last time.
- Dig up last year's AGI and distribution history.
- Rebuild the agenda from scratch.
- Walk in hoping you didn't miss anything.
With the sheet
15 min- Your team enters the data, not you.
- SurgeTK generates the sheet.
- It's on your desk the Thursday before.
- Every number for the meeting sits on one page.
- Your notes and action items go on that same page.
- You walk in knowing nothing was forgotten.
Prep times reported by Micah Shilanski and Matthew Jarvis from their own practices. Advisors also report the sheet takes 15 to 30 minutes off the meeting itself. Your numbers will vary.
Everything The Meeting Needs. Nothing It Doesn't.
With the client's net worth, distribution history, AGI, agenda and age in front of you, there is nothing left to forget and nothing you have to hold in your head. Here is the whole sheet.
A simplified excerpt, using the demo household. The delivered sheet is two pages under your logo — full client details, the complete snapshot, and the twelve-month withdrawal, deposit and RMD grids on page two.
- Meeting information
- Type, date, time and time zone, settled before you sit down.
- Client information
- Names, ages, birthdates, employer and retirement date, with a flag when a birthday lands near the meeting.
- Financial snapshot
- Every account, asset, liability and policy, split by owner and totaled to net worth.
- Cash flow
- Checking, savings, income, spending and debt payments. The numbers a client actually feels.
- Outside investments and debts
- The old 401(k), the rental, the loan from family. What you don't manage still shapes the plan.
- Tax information
- AGI, taxable income, total taxes and marginal bracket off the last return.
- Agenda and notes
- Your agenda and your notes in the place you are already looking, with room to write.
- Action items
- What your firm owes the client, and what the client owes you, assigned before anyone stands up.
- Withdrawals and deposits
- Twelve-month grids for every tax-advantaged account, on page two.
- RMD tracking
- Every RMD-eligible account with its 12/31 value, ready for the distribution conversation.
It Looks Too Simple. That Is Why It Works.
Next to the rest of the software in this industry, most of it built by people who have never sat across the desk from a client, the Homework Sheet looks almost crude. It was built by advisors who deliver twenty to thirty client meetings a week and needed something that survives contact with a real one.
There is nowhere to play office
No endless report customization to disappear into. SurgeTK takes the information the meeting needs and nothing more.
There is nothing else to open
“It'll only take a second to check the custodian” works about as well as “I'll only eat one chip.” SurgeTK does Value-Adds and Surge prep. That is the whole menu.
Your team runs it, not you
Most software is complicated enough that only the advisor can work it. This was built by a team, for a team, so the data import never lands on your desk.
Every client gets the same packet
Not four hundred report options. The same prep packet, starting with the same sheet, every household, every Surge.
It Is A Checklist That Fills Itself Out.
Pilots follow checklists meticulously, which is a large part of why pilots are still around to talk about it. Most advisors are terrible at checklists. Maybe it is ego, maybe attention span, maybe plain discipline. Whatever the source, working through twenty checkboxes before every meeting is never going to happen.
So do not run a checklist. Just make sure the sheet is filled out. By the time it is, you have completed the checklist without the mental pain of checking a single box.
Self-completing checklists like this one are what let a firm run the way Michael Kitces described it: “highly profitable, hyper efficient, lifestyle practices.”
They Will Not Walk Into A Meeting Without It.
Micah and Matt do not take a client meeting or a client call without the Homework Sheet in front of them, and they do not leave the office for the week until every sheet for the next week is ready as part of the Surge Packet.
Not because it is a rule. Because it is the foundation. The agenda, the net-worth statement, the buckets or guardrails, and the Value-Add for that Surge all sit on top of it.
Their effectiveness depends just as much on what they refuse to do, which is build a custom packet for every client. It would feel bespoke. In practice it is amateur night. Pilots, surgeons and pro athletes all run the same routine again and again, which feels restrictive to a rookie and is the entire point of the freedom to a professional.
SurgeTK is built by The Perfect RIA, the team that popularized Surge and Value-Adds and teaches them to advisors across the country.
Try It Before Your Next Meeting.
The Homework Sheet will not convince you in an email. It convinces you in a meeting. Here is the entire test. It costs you one household and one afternoon.
Have your team enter one household by hand.
Manually, just the one. Importing at scale is a conversation for later. Right now the point is to see the page.
Generate the Homework Sheet in SurgeTK.
The sheet builds itself from what your team entered. No formatting, no report builder, no decisions to make.
Put it on your desk the Thursday before.
Then count everything you never had to look up, and notice how much shorter the meeting runs with it in front of you.