A 90 percent payout is not 90 percent, and you probably already suspect that. Most advisors lack a full accounting of what comes out in between.

That missing accounting is why two people on the same stated grid can finish the year tens of thousands of dollars apart, and neither can explain how.

So it is worth walking the whole distance once. Gross revenue at the top, money in your account at the bottom, and every stop along the way.

For most of the last 20 years, LPL stood as the primary beacon for advisors who valued independence above all else. Is that still how you'd describe LPL? This is just a summary of what I'm hearing from a growing swell of advisors who once considered themselves LPL "lifers." It's just not the same. There is a real difference between choosing to stay and never having looked.

Most advisors assume finding the right firm is a few weekends of work. That plan rests on an assumption that doesn't hold: that the firms you have heard of are the same as the firms that would fit you. The names you know are easy to evaluate and frequently wrong for you. The names that fit are hard to find and harder to assess. The hard part is compressing a year of work into a month without anybody noticing you did it.

The next real recruiting differentiator in this business will not be the check, and it will not be the grid. It will be which firm can get you adopting AI in a way that is safe, compliant, and changes how your week runs. Having the tool is not the advantage. I believe adoption is the new recruiting pitch.

If you find yourself trying to determine what your "I've had enough" line is, I have a very simple exercise for you. Go into your notebook tonight and write down conditions or events that would make you leave your firm. You are not making a decision; you are making a list, and then you close the notebook and go run your business. Decide now what would change your mind, while you are "just" frustrated.

Vanguard just bought the most AI-native platform in custody. What I am interested in is the advisor who woke up the next morning still on the platform, doing fine, and wondering whether anything is about to change for them.

When a platform you are on gets acquired, everyone around you starts acting like the only open question is whether you will stay. That is the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. The right question is whether anyone involved in the deal is primarily focused on whether or not it’s the best landing spot for you. In most cases, the honest answer is no. The incentives heavily lie in the direction of retention for both the buyer and the seller.

Not exactly a scandal, but we can be honest about the rules here.

Ask an advisor who is philosophically ready to leave what is actually holding them back, and the answer is rarely the economics or the culture. It is the paperwork. The custodial spreadsheet, the redundant data entry, the fear of spending three months rebuilding a book from scratch. I hear this from advisors who have already decided a move makes sense and are still stuck on the mechanics of making it happen

If your firm sold twenty percent of itself a few years ago and nothing has changed since, it is easy to file that under settled business. I want to walk through why that read is usually wrong, and why the timeline matters more than the transaction did.

There is a difference between owning your business and running your own RIA, and most advisors don't separate the two until they are already committed to one.

I understand how advisors get there. You picked an independent platform because it was entrepreneurial, flexible, and built around people like you. Then the organization grew. More layers, more centralized decision-making, more standardization. The things that drew you in started to thin out. At some point, the conclusion feels obvious. If the platform keeps drifting, take everything in-house and control it yourself.

Every recruiter talks about fit. It's arguably the most important thing we are trying to accomplish when introducing you to potential firms, but what actually is fit? Fit is not a feeling. It is a set of specific, answerable questions that most advisors have never been walked through before signing with a platform. Some of them find out years later why they should have been.

A family-run RIA principal said something to me recently that I can’t unhear. “Private equity is doing to the RIA space what the wirehouses did in the nineties: standardizing everything, tightening everything, and calling it progress.”

I read a lot of advisor agreements. More than I would like to. These days, I’m absolutely seeing a trend in large broker-dealers and RIAs offering more perks in the recruiting pitch in exchange for less overall autonomy for the advisor. 

Here is an experiment. Open ChatGPT, tell it you are a $2.5M producer at a large broker-dealer, that you value autonomy, want better service infrastructure, and are thinking about making a move. Ask it for the best platforms to consider.

It will give you a list. The list will be coherent. It will include firms you have heard of, with reasonable descriptions of what each one offers. It will look like research.

There are two advisors this industry loves to talk about.

The first one moves primarily for the upfront money, collects a check, and calls it a business decision. The second one treats any conversation about transition economies like a personal insult. They’re too principled for the payout discussion.

Most of the advisors I talk to who are unhappy at an OSJ or hybrid RIA will tell you the same thing: the pitch was great. The reality took about eighteen months to reveal itself.

They are paying an override for support they are doing themselves. They cannot leave their custodian without leaving the OSJ. When something breaks, the OSJ points at the custodian, and the custodian points back. The advisor is stuck in the middle of a blame loop that they are paying for.

There is a growing wave of advisors making a second move, and it differs from the first in almost every way. The first move was about getting free. This one is about getting it right.

If you have been telling yourself the upgrade is too much hassle, I want to push back on that. Transitions have never been more accessible.

If you’re an advisor under 45, you likely don’t remember being in this business in 2008. I would suggest, though, that even the ranks of advisors who endured that terrible market cycle have grown a bit comfortable riding the wave of the last ~18 years of up-and-to-the-right.

I use this analogy with advisors more than any other. Think about the risk-averse client who loads up on fixed income to feel safe… and walks straight into inflation. By protecting against one thing, they fully exposed themselves to another. By doing nothing, they were still taking a risk. They just were not naming it.

Financial advisors are in the same position.

We’re back this week with more from my guy Kyle Campbell. He has been doing M&A in the wealth management industry for nearly a decade. He is a Certified Valuation Analyst, is currently Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at OneDigital, and has closed approximately 500 transactions. I have known him for about ten years.