Direct indexing conversations often miss the mark before they even begin. Zach Conway, CEO and Founder of Seeds, compares the problem to a car salesperson selling sports cars to parents who need minivans—leading with product features rather than client needs.
“What is the most logical solution for me may or may not be that thing, including direct indexing,” Conway says.
Seeds’ platform aims to solve what he sees as a fundamental disconnect in how advisors approach portfolio personalization. While the industry has spent years perfecting the technical capabilities of direct indexing—tax-loss harvesting, values-based screening, concentrated position unwinding—the conversation often stops at the advisor level. The client gets a pitch deck. The capabilities sound impressive. But does direct indexing fit their specific situation?
Seeds seeks to flip the script by starting with a deep understanding of the investor before determining which product solutions make sense. The platform’s assessment framework helps advisors gather nuanced information about tax situations, account types, values preferences, and financial goals. Only then does the question of direct indexing enter the picture.
Beyond the Product Pitch
Conway believes the issue advisors face isn’t a lack of sophisticated investment tools. The market offers plenty of options, each with individual capabilities and use cases. The real challenge lies in helping advisors determine where those use cases fit within a specific client’s needs.
“How do we tie it back to it fitting into the client’s story?” Conway asks. “We think that starts with advisors understanding that investor in a deep way. Don’t start with the product narrative. Start with, who is this person that I’m serving, whose money I’m going to manage? And then, is direct indexing a logical output, a logical solution based on my understanding of the client?”
The abundance of sophisticated tools can create its own obstacles. “I think that’s the challenge sometimes with advisors is there’s so many product solutions out there,” observes Conway. “They all have their individual capabilities and use cases, but advisors need to know where those use cases fit in.”
The framework Seeds provides helps advisors answer several critical questions before recommending direct indexing: Which clients should get the solution? Is the answer every client with taxable money, or only those in certain tax brackets? Does the client have concentrated stock positions that require mitigation? Do they have values preferences they want reflected in single equities exposure?
Without a systematic framework for answering such questions, advisors face an awkward reality. They have a powerful new tool available but no clear logic for deployment. The result often defaults to using direct indexing everywhere or nowhere, rather than strategically placing the solution where client situations warrant.
Conway emphasizes the precision required in matching solutions to needs. “These are powerful solutions, but they’re only powerful if they’re matched with the clients who want and need them,” he says.
Storytelling at Scale
Once an advisor determines direct indexing fits a particular client, Seeds aims to help with the second layer of the narrative: how to talk about the solution in proposal discussions and ongoing review meetings.
A client unwinding legacy positions needs to hear a different story than someone primarily motivated by values-based exclusions. Both clients might benefit from direct indexing, but the value proposition resonates differently. Seeds seeks to help advisors identify which aspects of the solution will connect most strongly with each client’s priorities.
The narrative advisors construct at implementation should inform every subsequent conversation. “That’s the idea,” Conway says. “Tell the story at the moment of proposal, tell the story in your review meetings and continuously through the relationship with this client.”
Conway references choose-your-own-adventure books as an analogy for how advisors should approach client conversations. Rather than following a predetermined script of value points, advisors need to identify which chapters of the story will resonate most with the person across the table. The platform aims to serve up data, talking points, and portfolio developments tied directly to the advisor’s understanding of what the client cares about most.
The Operational Reality
Conway acknowledges a third critical dimension often overlooked in direct indexing discussions: how the solution fits operationally within a client’s total portfolio. Direct indexing typically addresses single-stock exposure for equities, but most clients need more than equities alone. What happens with fixed income? With alternatives? How does everything rebalance in coordination?
“A lot of times, we see direct indexing if it’s a siloed solution—I’m opening a taxable account to have a third-party manager manage it, but maybe there’s other taxable money or other things are happening,” Conway says. “Well, the other taxable money, how is that getting rebalanced relative to each other on an annual basis?”
He identifies two layers of operational integration advisors must address. “It’s not only how are you telling the story and how is that being clear to the client about how it all fits together, but then how are you actually getting that to happen in their real-life accounts?” Conway posits.
Seeds operates as a unified managed account (UMA) platform where direct indexing exists alongside other portfolio building blocks. Advisors can construct sleeves within the same account, with the platform handling rebalancing, tax transitions, cash management, and tax-loss harvesting across all components. The goal is eliminating the need for advisors to toggle between systems or email third-party managers about one slice of a client’s taxable money while manually trading another slice.
Conway argues advisors shouldn’t function as traders, yet many inevitably find themselves executing trades, monitoring cash flows, and manually rebalancing accounts. Seeds seeks to automate the entire trading infrastructure—tax-loss harvesting, tax transition, cash management, automated rebalancing—so advisors can redirect their attention to client relationships.
“All of those things should not be things that the advisor on a daily or monthly basis has to worry about,” says Conway. “That operational ease is a big part, and that’s ultimately what Seeds is trying to accomplish.”
The Framework Gap
What initially resonates with advisory firms, Conway reports, comes even before discussions of client experience or operational efficiency. The fundamental need centers on decision-making logic.
“Just that simple logic of who should have it, what are the reasons that that particular client should have it?” Conway says. “So, having a platform that essentially scales logic that says, ‘Here’s a legitimate framework for you as a firm.’“
Conway observes an art-and-science dynamic among experienced primary advisors. After two decades of discovery meetings, they develop intuition about which portfolio story fits which client. The problem? Such intuition doesn’t scale. Translating those mental frameworks to the next advisor joining the business proves difficult without a systematic approach.
Seeds aims to make the implicit explicit, creating repeatable logic that can be taught and applied consistently across a growing practice. Conway describes the transformation from instinct to system. “I think a lot of times you see primary advisors in their practices, that logic is in their head,” he says. “I would argue you can make that logic more logical than it may have just happened in the advisor’s head.”
Getting Started
Speed defines the Seeds onboarding experience. Advisory firms book customized demos through useseeds.com, receive usernames and passwords, and can begin client conversations the following day. The platform’s business structure allows firms to access assessment and proposal tools for a low technology-based fee, with AUM-based fees applying when firms use the trading implementation and asset management components for direct indexing or ETF-based models.
Conway emphasizes flexibility in how fees are handled, accommodating different advisory firm preferences. “If there’s a price paradigm for firms where typically they’ve passed that cost to the client, then we will happily do it that way,” he says. “We’re also happy to charge firms directly where they may be wanting to pay for the platform themselves rather than passing that cost to the client.”
The practical impact of systematic implementation becomes clearer through real-world examples. In one case, a firm launched just before the COVID-19 outbreak with $5 million in assets, the founder managing everything manually—research, trading, portfolio construction. Five years later, the firm oversees $110 million across 260 clients, each with customized portfolios.
Before Seeds, the founder spent up to one day per week on investment research and manual trading alone. The platform reportedly has automated 20–30% of the workload, freeing capacity for client relationships and business development. The efficiency gains proved substantial enough to scale the team with half the cost of building an internal trading desk.
The Human Element
Conway frames Seeds’ mission as making financial advice more human, accessible, and meaningful. The platform seeks to free advisors from busywork so they can engage with clients on a deeper level. Streamlining the time-consuming aspects of portfolio management aims to unlock advisors’ potential by allowing them to do what they do best—faster and at scale.
“Can we deliver this experience layer?” Conway asks. “Help advisors tell the story on the front end and the operational layer? Make it easy to bring it to life, press a button, go back to having more conversations with clients where they have this total portfolio solution that makes sense for the client? That’s what we want to do.”
The vision emphasizes delivering smarter conversations, not just more conversations. Some clients obsess over every basis point of tax savings. Others barely glance at the numbers, caring far more about excluding certain industries from their holdings. Conway believes that the difference between connecting with clients and talking past them comes down to understanding which narrative each person values.
Seeds provides the infrastructure for identifying those connections early in the relationship and communicating them consistently over time. The platform’s behavioral assessments help advisors categorize clients into one of nine investor mindsets, offering insights into not just what clients want but how they think and make decisions.
Armed with clarity about whether someone is a big-picture thinker or detail-oriented analyst, advisors can adjust their communication style accordingly—showing quarterly summaries and themes to one client while diving deep into specific trades and tax implications with another.
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Additional Resources
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Disclosures
This interview is a paid sponsorship by Seeds Investor LLC (“Seeds”). Scott Martin and The Wealth Advisor were compensated cash for the production and distribution of this content. Scott Martin is not a current client of Seeds. This arrangement creates a conflict of interest as the host has a financial incentive to present Seeds in a favorable light.
Any discussion regarding “tax alpha,” savings, or specific percentage returns during this interview are hypothetical examples used for illustrative purposes only to demonstrate how an advisor might communicate with a client. These figures do not represent actual performance of the Seeds platform or any specific client account. Actual investment results will vary.
Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. References to “low risk” in this interview refer strictly to the time or cost commitment required to schedule a software demonstration, not to the risk profile of any investment strategy or portfolio managed by Seeds.
Statements describing Seeds’ tools as the “best” or “unbeatable” represent the opinion of the host and have not been verified by third-party rankings.
