We Let Our Financial Planners Write the Agents — Matthew Ragone, Range

While one financial planner is on a client call, an agent drafts another client's cash flow or insurance analysis. The planner reviews every recommendation before anything reaches the client. At Range, Matthew Ragone and his colleagues built the skills behind that workflow without writing code. Six months in, he reports 24 skills across the company, including 17 in planning, with sales, product and marketing adopting the same approach without a mandate. The change came from capturing how the firm actually works: what a planner checks first, which questions must be asked and where an agent must stop. Ragone breaks the process into five steps: pick a repeated workflow whose output you can judge, teach it with real cases, package the judgment into a skill, test it five to ten times and ship it with an owner and a separate reviewer. Narrating why you open a document matters more than listing the clicks. Questions and limits belong in the skill alongside the procedure, including the rule that an agent drafts but never sends recommendations to a client. Testing exposes missing questions and confident mistakes; ownership keeps the instructions current as the firm's practices change. The remaining challenge is how to check quality at scale when the output requires professional judgment. Speaker info: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-ragone-cfp%C2%AE-crpc%E2%84%A2-a56a85106/ Timestamps: 00:00 - Financial planners building their own agents 1:31 - Drafting while the planner is on another call 3:16 - Pick a workflow you can judge 4:22 - Teach the judgment and package the limits 5:51 - Test real cases, assign owners and reviewers