Advisor Compensation: How to Pay Your Team the Right Way (Ep. 34)

The Compensation Conversation Your Firm Needs to Have Compensation is one of the most consequential levers in an advisory firmm and one of the most misunderstood. For years, firm owners relied on industry surveys to benchmark pay. Most of those resources are gone, and the ones that remain are pulling from data that is neither vetted nor reliable. At the same time, the firms themselves have grown and changed faster than their compensation models have. In this episode of The Fine Print, David Grau Jr. sits down with Julia Sexton, CVA, Director of Team Solutions at SRG, to work through what modern compensation design actually looks like for advisory firms. The conversation starts with benchmarking, where to find accurate data and why survey-based studies fall shortm and builds into a practical framework for structuring pay around the goals you have for your business, not just what the firm next door is doing. Julia walks through why production-based compensation creates silos even in firms that say they want collaboration, how to design different structures for farmers and hunters on your team, and why grid-based payouts that grow with market appreciation without added work put a slow choke hold on your margins and your firm’s value. The episode also covers eligibility criteria, career path design, and how to back-test any compensation change before rolling it out so your team barely notices the difference. Show Notes Compensation is the most powerful lever in an advisory firm — and one of the least examined. When the go-to industry benchmarks disappeared, many owners kept running compensation models they inherited from the wirehouse era without stopping to ask whether those models still fit where their business is headed. The data problem no one is talking about. The Investment News compensation study that the industry relied on for years is gone. What replaced it pulls from government sources with small, unvetted sample sets. SRG built its Talent Strategy Report from thousands of actual valuations, scrubbed, reviewed, and confirmed, because survey data and evaluation data are not the same thing. Location and firm size matter less than you think. Geographic pay premiums have largely flattened in a remote-first world. Firm size affects specialization of roles more than raw compensation levels. A smaller firm may actually pay more because fewer people are wearing more hats. There is no right compensation model, only the right one for your goals. Before designing anything, owners need an honest conversation about what kind of business they are building. An ensemble model built for scalability and enterprise value requires a fundamentally different compensation structure than a siloed model built around individual books. Production-based compensation creates silos, even in firms that call themselves a team. If advisors are paid on individual revenue, they will optimize for individual revenue. The incentive and the stated goal are working against each other, and compensation always wins. Farmers and hunters need different structures, not just different amounts. Farmers should be incentivized on assets serviced, net flows, and client satisfaction. Hunters should be rewarded for new business brought in. Putting a farmer’s compensation model on a hunter, or vice versa, produces exactly the wrong behavior. Grid-based payouts quietly destroy firm value. An advisor managing the same 100 households gets paid double seven years later because markets appreciated. The workload did not change. The complexity did not change. That margin erosion compounds over time and makes internal succession nearly impossible to structure. The BBP model: base, bonus, and profit. Splitting compensation into three buckets creates stability through salary, drives individual performance through bonusing, and aligns the team around long-term firm success through profit participation. Eligibility criteria, including fee schedule compliance, training, and client satisfaction scores, determine who gets access to the bonus bucket in a given year. Career path design is a capacity strategy. Progressively raising the minimum client tier an advisor is responsible for, and reducing their payout on smaller accounts, creates a natural delegation structure. Founders do not need to recruit expensive lateral hires. They need a junior advisor at the bottom of the org chart so everyone above them can move up. Back-test before you roll anything out. Run the new model against what your team actually made last year. If the output looks dramatically different, calibrate the levers before you announce anything. The goal is for the transition to feel like continuity, not a renegotiation. Hosted By David Grau Jr., MBA (Founder / CEO) Julia Sexton, CVA (Director of Strategic Organizational Planning)

Stop Guessing What to Pay Your Team

The Talent Strategy Report at a Glance The Talent Strategy Report (TSR) is SRG’s annual compensation and staffing benchmarking report built for independent financial advisory firms. This infographic breaks down what’s inside, how the data is sourced, and what makes it different from the generic salary surveys most firms rely on. If you’re making compensation decisions this year, start here. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form. Name * FirstLast Phone Work Email *How Did You Hear About SRG? *— Select Choice —ConferenceDirect MailExisting/Past ClientGoogle AdWordsOtherReferralSocial MediaSeminar/WorkshopWebinarWebsite Download

Building Your Team for Succession Success

Watch the Replay Does Your Team Structure Support Your Succession Plan? In this webinar, Succession Resource Group’s Julia Sexton, CVA, and David Grau Jr., MBA, explore how employment-related planning can strengthen an advisory firm’s long-term succession strategy. The session covers how employment structure, role clarity, and internal alignment all factor into a firm’s ability to execute a successful transition. Succession Resource Group walks through common organizational and planning gaps that create challenges during succession events, and what firms can do to address them before a transition is on the horizon. Advisors preparing for internal succession, evaluating their current team structure, or working to build a stronger operational foundation will find this session particularly relevant. Host David Grau Jr. MBA CEO/President Paper-plane Linkedin-in Host Julia Sexton, CVA Director of Strategic Organizational Planning Paper-plane Linkedin-in

Building Your Team for Succession Success

Watch the Replay Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.First Name *Last Name *Phone * Work Email * Would you like to join SRG's newsletter to receive industry updates and other webinar opportunities? Yes No Access Recording Does Your Team Structure Support Your Succession Plan? In this webinar, Succession Resource Group’s Julia Sexton, CVA, and David Grau Jr., MBA, explore how employment-related planning can strengthen an advisory firm’s long-term succession strategy. The session covers how employment structure, role clarity, and internal alignment all factor into a firm’s ability to execute a successful transition. Succession Resource Group walks through common organizational and planning gaps that create challenges during succession events, and what firms can do to address them before a transition is on the horizon. Advisors preparing for internal succession, evaluating their current team structure, or working to build a stronger operational foundation will find this session particularly relevant. Host David Grau Jr. MBA CEO/President Paper-plane Linkedin-in Host Julia Sexton, CVA Director of Strategic Organizational Planning Paper-plane Linkedin-in

Financial Advisor Compensation Guide for Advisory Firm Owners

Compensation is both the engine that drives a service-based advisory firm and the issue that keeps firm owners up at night. Everyone wants to pay their people fairly, but what fair looks like depends on your firm’s size, structure, growth goals, and the roles people actually play on your team. The challenge is that many advisory firms are still running compensation models that were designed for a different era; one where individual production was the primary measure of value and every advisor operated as a standalone business under a shared brand. Those models worked when the industry looked that way. For many firms, the industry no longer does. In a recent episode of The Fine Print Podcast, David Grau Jr. sat down with Julia Sexton, CVA, who leads SRG’s compensation design, employment agreements, and equity sharing services, to walk through the key decisions that firm owners face when redesigning compensation. This article distills that conversation into a practical guide — organized around the decisions you need to make, in the order you need to make them. Start with the Data: Know What the Market Is Actually Paying Before you redesign anything, you need a reliable baseline. Strategy aside, if your compensation is 40% above or below the market for similar roles, you have a problem that no structure can solve. For years, the industry relied on the Investment News / Moss Adams compensation study as the go-to benchmarking resource. It had an interactive dashboard where you could filter by firm size, region, and role. That resource was eventually shuttered, and while it has returned in a free version, it now pulls from government sources rather than industry-specific survey data — making it significantly less reliable for advisory firms. SRG developed its Talent Strategy Report (TSR) to fill that gap. Rather than relying on self-reported survey data, the TSR draws from thousands of valuations performed annually — meaning the compensation data has been vetted, reviewed on calls with firm owners, and confirmed for accuracy before it enters the data set. The report covers compensation by role, firm size, and staffing benchmarks so you can see what peers at similar-sized firms are paying and how they are staffing. A few things worth noting from the data: Location matters less than it used to. With remote work now standard at many firms, geographic premiums have compressed. Compensation for the same role is more consistent across regions than it was five years ago. Firm size does not create as big a gap as you would expect. A lead advisor at a $3 million firm and a $7 million firm often earn similar total compensation — but for different reasons. Smaller firms tend to pay more per person because each person wears more hats and larger firms requiring more bodies are able to specialize more in each role. So maybe at the core, a larger firm is ‘paying more’ for the core duties of the specific role, but the reality is that smaller firms have similar if not the same tasks and responsibilities, just shared across less people – so we don’t see this changing. You should be checking this at least annually. Compensation benchmarking is not a one-time exercise. At minimum, pull updated market data every year — every other year at the outside — to make sure you are staying competitive. The bottom line: any compensation redesign should start with current, reliable data. If you are working from a study that is three years old or based on a survey with a few hundred respondents, you are building on a shaky foundation. Choose Your Model: Grid-Based vs. Ensemble Compensation This is the foundational decision, and it flows directly from a bigger question: what kind of firm are you building? Grid-based (production-based) compensation assigns each advisor a book of business and pays them a percentage of the revenue they manage — typically 30% to 45%. It is simple, familiar, and effective at incentivizing individual production. It is the model that most of the industry grew up on, originating in the wirehouses and migrating to the independent channel as advisors went out on their own. Ensemble (team-based) compensation pays advisors a base salary reflective of their role and responsibilities, with variable bonuses tied to specific goals and behaviors, and potentially a share of firm profits. It is designed to incentivize collaboration, specialization, and enterprise value. The critical insight is that your compensation model will drive behavior whether you intend it to or not. If you pay advisors on individual production, they will optimize for individual production — even if you tell them you want collaboration. You cannot put the incentives in one place and expect behavior in another. About 95% of the teams we talk to say they want to build a collaborative, team-based firm. Yet many of them are still running a production-based compensation model. If that describes your firm, the structure and the strategy are in conflict, and compensation will win that fight every time. That said, grid-based compensation is not inherently wrong. If your firm genuinely operates as a collection of individual practitioners under a shared brand — what we sometimes call a “team in name only” — then production-based pay is aligned with that reality. The problems arise when the stated goal is collaboration and scale, but the compensation model still rewards siloed behavior. Before redesigning anything, be honest with yourself about your firm’s long-term goals and strategy. Are you building an integrated enterprise, or are you running a platform for independent advisors? Either is valid. But the compensation structure needs to match. The Hidden Cost of Grid-Based Compensation Even if a grid-based model made sense when your firm was smaller, it can become a serious liability as you grow. Here is the math that tends to catch firm owners off guard. You assign an advisor 100 households representing $100 million in AUM and $1 million in annual fees. You give them a 30% payout. They earn $300,000. Simple enough.

2026 State of Compensation: Pay, Equity & Incentives for RIAs and Advisory Teams

Watch the Replay Is Your Compensation Plan Helping You Grow or Holding You Back? Not sure what to pay your advisors and team in 2026, or whether your current compensation plan is actually competitive? In this on-demand webinar, SRG breaks down real-world compensation benchmarks for RIAs and advisory firms, including salary ranges, bonus structures, phantom equity, and staffing trends across advisor, operations, and executive roles. Using data pulled from valuation and compensation analyses, you’ll see what firms are actually paying and how to align incentives with the behaviors you want, so you can attract and retain talent without letting compensation outgrow the role. Download the Presentation Deck Here Download Speakers Host Julia Sexton, CVA Director of Strategic Organizational Planning Paper-plane Linkedin-in Host Ryan Grau, CVA, CBA Director of Valuations Paper-plane Linkedin-in

Equity Compensation: A Technical Comparison between Restricted Equity Grants

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form. Name * FirstLast Phone Work Email *How Did You Hear About SRG? *— Select Choice —ConferenceDirect MailExisting/Past ClientGoogle AdWordsOtherReferralSocial MediaSeminar/WorkshopWebinarWebsite Download Empower your team and strengthen the long-term health of your business with SRG’s “Equity Compensation: A Technical Comparison Between Restricted Equity Grants” white paper. This practical, easy-to-understand resource breaks down the key differences between Restricted Stock Awards (RSAs) and Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) — two of the most common tools for sharing ownership value and aligning employees with your company’s future. Whether you’re designing a new equity plan, preparing for growth, or looking to retain top talent, this guide clarifies the structural, tax, and ownership considerations every business owner should understand. From grant mechanics and vesting to 83(b) elections and S-Corp compatibility, you’ll learn how each approach impacts control, complexity, and long-term planning. Explore how the right equity strategy can motivate your team, support succession goals, and protect the value you’ve built. Download the white paper today and make confident, informed decisions about equity compensation.

Breaking the Cycle | Compensation Strategies That Protect Value & Drive Growth

Valuation expert Ryan Grau, CVA, CBA, and compensation strategist Julia Sexton, CVA, reveal the most common comp mistakes—and how to fix them. Learn how to build pay models that drive growth, retain talent, and preserve business value. Watch the Replay Host Julia Sexton, CVA Director of Strategic Organizational Planning Paper-plane Linkedin-in Host Ryan Grau, CVA, CBA Director of Valuations Paper-plane Linkedin-in

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