An advisor called me last year with about $150M in assets and a very clear list of what he wanted from a new firm. He knew his RIA was winding down, and an acquisition was likely. It was just a matter of time until he got the email letting him know. His list:
No need for an upfront check.
Economics that improved as he acquired.
Access to multiple custodians.
No interest in running his own RIA.
An associate advisor and a group of peers nearby to grow with.
So he knew what he wanted, and he knew why. The path to find what he was looking for was the gap I want to talk about, because nearly every advisor I meet is standing in it.
The DIY Research Plan
Most advisors assume closing that gap is a few weekends of work. Make a short list of firms you have heard of, take a call with each, compare payout and platform, and the right one will stand out. That is a reasonable plan. It also 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 DIY Pitfalls (Just Being Honest)
The good news first: there are far more viable platforms than most advisors realize. I find most advisors know the top 7-10 names in the category they’re looking at, but there are literally more options than ever in the industry.
Now the less good news: each one takes three or four conversations before the truth surfaces. The first call is the pitch. The second is where the caveats show up. The third is where you find out what the transition support includes and who delivers it. The deeper you go, the more opportunities for concerns arise. Vetting is real.
Multiply that out by your 6-7 target firms, and you are looking at six to twelve months, done in the evenings and in the gaps between client meetings, while running the business that pays you.
That is why most advisors get overwhelmed when they get serious about transitions, or they oversimplify the process to their own detriment. They take three calls, get buried, and go back to work. Two years later, they are having the same conversation with themselves.
Every Good Name Is a Name You Have Not Heard
I’ll also add that for advisors who are increasingly distrustful of big firms racing for scale, the best options tend to be firms they haven’t heard of. They do not dump money into recruiting. They do not pay recruiters big fees (also why recruiters often skip them…). Their growth comes from advisor referrals, which is a good sign about the firm and a bad sign for your odds of finding it.
So the search gets harder in a specific way. 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 because there is very little public information about them.
Privacy Concerns Make Research Hard
This is the piece I do not think gets enough attention. Every firm's marketing says the same things, but you can only test those claims by talking to advisors already there, and asking around is exactly how word gets back to your current firm.
You have a book to protect, a staff that does not know, and clients who have no idea. So the job is rigorous diligence on eight or ten firms without anybody finding out you are looking. That is a hard problem, and patience does not solve it.
How That Search Went
Back to the advisor who reached out to me with his sense of urgency. We finished the whole search in several weeks.
We did not cut corners. We started with twelve firms instead of eighty, because I already knew which ones fit the list he brought me, and I knew which questions surface the truth in the first conversation instead of the fourth. The reference calls went through people who protected his privacy.
He ended up at a firm with a tiered grid that pays him more as he acquires, capital available for deals, and enough advisors in his region that he has people to call. Most advisors have never heard of it. He told me afterward that he never would have found it on his own.
That is the service. Access is not the hard part, because anybody can get a meeting. The hard part is compressing a year of work into a month without anybody noticing you did it.
If you are somewhere in the middle of that process and it has stalled out, that is normal, and it is fixable. You know where to find me.