Financial advisor pay is ‘one of the most powerful strategic levers’ for RIAs
By: Tobias SalingerPublishing Date: March 17, 2026 Registered investment advisory firms or other advisory practices must create career paths and pay plans that evolve quickly enough to keep up with industry competition, advisor career advancement, geographic factors and the company’s long-term goals, according to a webinar last month on compensation trends led by Julia Sexton, the director of strategic organizational planning at consulting firm Succession Resource Group, and Ryan Grau, the company’s director of valuations. They presented the first of what will become an annual compensation study based on data from the RIAs that use the firm’s services. And the central takeaway revolved around the divergent impact among firms that have taken proactive steps, and those that haven’t. “Today isn’t just about benchmarking numbers,” Sexton said. “It’s about aligning compensation with role, clarity, behaviors, growth objectives and long-term enterprise value, because when compensation is designed intentionally, it becomes one of the most powerful strategic levers that you have in your firm and is so critical to so many transaction and business growth initiatives, succession planning, viability and just the overall cultural and financial health of your business.” On the other hand, Grau jumped in to add, failing to build an effective compensation strategy is “one of the quickest ways to derail value.” What do you make? Of course, any pay strategy begins with the basic amount that advisors will collect, and just as with any other profession, they will want to know how their pay compares to peers. Sexton and Grau’s presentation broke down advisor career paths into three general categories: Support advisors (less than five years in the field): Responsibilities include planning and investment tasks and starting to identify possible new clients, and compensation includes base salary, bonus and profit sharing. Service advisors (five to 10 years, CFP mark): Responsibilities include oversight of planning and analysis, delegating tasks to junior members and much more identification of new potential business, and compensation includes a base salary (a fixed amount plus some pay tied to assets under management), a bonus, profit-sharing and so-called phantom equity (deferred compensation carrying some of the same benefits as actual company stock). Lead advisors (10+ years, several certifications): Responsibilities include acting as the primary manager of client accounts, business development and the team’s staffing; compensation includes base salary with AUM-tied pay, a bonus and an equity grant or purchase opportunity. In terms of the dollar value of the compensation for those types of advisors, it varies significantly. Support advisors make total salary and bonus pay of between $50,000 and $85,000 per year with a median of $65,000; service advisors make total salary and bonus pay of between $66,964 and $120,000 per year with a median of $90,000; and lead advisors make total salary and bonus pay of between $108,000 and $235,750 per year with a median of $159,902. Disclaimer This article was first published by Tobias Salinger. The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by financial-planning.com.
Larger firms, rising multiples: Is this the new standard for advisor M&A?
By: Steve RandallPublishing Date: February 9, 2026 The M&A landscape for financial advisory practices is heating up, with 2025 emerging as a year of larger deals, richer valuation multiples and more complex terms. According to the latest industry benchmarking report from Succession Resource Group, drawn from 171 completed transactions totaling more than $14 billion in assets under management, there’s a clear shift away from small, relatively simple handoffs to deals marked by deeper capital structures, advanced financing and a heavier presence of institutional buyers. Among the most notable trends in 2025 was a meaningful uptick in multiples paid for recurring revenue and profitability. Transactions valued on an EBITDA basis averaged 9.98x business earnings, while recurring revenue books commanded an average of 3.27x. This increase continued a pattern of expanding valuations seen the prior year, reflecting strong buyer confidence despite broader macroeconomic uncertainty. One quarter of deals paid above 3.5x recurring revenue, with more than one in five surpassing 4.0x, a sign that strategic acquirers are willing to pay premiums for quality revenue streams. Third-party financing also played a larger role in closing deals, rising to 56 % of transactions as interest rates steadied and lenders grew comfortable extending leverage. In many cases, bank and broker-dealer financing now supports up to 70-80% of purchase prices, with sellers taking back notes on the balance. SRG’s data shows a pronounced decline in deals involving buyers from outside the seller’s home state, dropping to 24.8 % from a prior peak. At the same time, the buyer base has become more concentrated around experienced acquirers, reducing the ratio of buyers to sellers and suggesting more competitive processes. SRG’s President David Grau Jr. attributed rising valuations to the caliber of practices on offer and the financial discipline of buyers. “The valuations paid today are higher than they’ve ever been before, but the same core fundamentals still apply – the deals have to cash flow.,” he said. “Sellers can get a higher value than we’ve ever seen, but it is paid for large (multi-billion-dollar RIAs), well-run firms, and the value is paid ‘on terms’ meaning most of that value is contingent.” Who’s buying? Internal equity transactions, where succession occurs via sales to existing partners, expanded to 32% of all deals, reflecting a maturing succession planning ecosystem within advisory businesses. At the same time, nearly half of firms making internal transitions brought in outside capital to support equity buys by next-generation leadership teams. SRG also observed that earn-outs are increasingly used to bridge valuation expectations and share risk between buyers and sellers. Large private equity groups and aggregator platforms continued to invest aggressively, often structuring deals with smaller initial cash downs and significant future equity or earn-outs. These flexible structures are enabling sellers to access above-market valuations while remaining tied to growth outcomes. The SRG team forecasts continued expansion of M&A activity in 2026, albeit with a focus on larger, well-capitalized buyers and fewer but higher-value deals. Creative deal terms, innovative financing and a continued premium on firms with robust financial performance are expected to shape the market. “Founders who focus on building a sustainable firm, optimizing their business, and remaining focused on the best fit for their clients at their exit will always get the best value. Period,” concluded Grau Jr. To read the full article, please visit: https://www.investmentnews.com/ria-news/larger-firms-rising-multiples-is-this-the-new-standard-for-advisor-ma/265188 Disclaimer This article was first published by Steve Randall. The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by InvestmentNews.
How Firms Use Equity Stakes to Retain Top Advisor Talent, Drive M&A
By: Tobias SalingerPublishing Date: January 27, 2026 Internal transactions in which financial advisors buy equity in their firms represent a growing share of wealth management M&A deals, a new study found. Those deals boost advisors’ compensation via stakes in expanding firms, making them more likely to stay long-term. And they’re becoming more popular, according to a webinar last week held by consulting firm Succession Resource Group on its annual M&A study and hosted by founder and CEO David Grau and Parker Finot, its director of transaction advisory services. The study analyzed data from 171 transactions in 2025, including firms with about $14 billion in total client assets that Succession Resource advised, as well as other deals that used financing from Oak Street Funding and PPC Loan, which both collaborated in the study. Across M&A deals, a small group of highly competitive buyers continues to drive record valuations, leading to new highs in transaction volume. The number of potential acquirers per seller plummeted last year to 61 from 85 in 2023 and from 66 in 2024. Grau noted four main M&A trends from 2025: private equity investors’ impact on deal sizes, overall higher valuations, a smaller pool of possible buyers and a rising number of internal deals. “That’s not noteworthy in the sense that there’s more succession planning taking place,” he said. “But it’s noteworthy because most of these that we’re seeing are not supporting a partner retiring, and younger gen-two, gen-three folks buying them out. That happens too, but that’s separate. These are just straight-up purchases, buying into a firm that these advisors are working at and it’s happening a material amount of the time where we want to take note of it and share that with you today.” To read the full article, please visit: https://www.financial-planning.com/news/how-m-a-is-rewarding-top-financial-advisor-talent Disclaimer This article was first published by Tobias Salinger The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by FinancialPlanning.com.
RIA Leaders: Top 10 firms by number of financial advisors for 2025
By: Tobias SalingerPublishing Date: November 25, 2025 Whether or not publicly traded wealth management firms disclose their headcounts of financial advisors in their quarterly earnings, the number represents a closely watched industry metric. So the below rankings of fee-only registered investment advisory firms with the most advisors in Financial Planning’s annual RIA Leaders study reveal which companies are hiring and training at the largest volume. Executives that have led giant wealth management firms such as Ameriprise, Wells Fargo Advisors, Morgan Stanley and Merrill to remove their quarterly headcount figures frequently argue that the number of advisors is no longer as important as the amount of client assets, organic growth, productivity or, of course, revenue and profit. On the other hand, advisor headcount affects each of those other figures. And the firm with more advisors than any other, LPL Financial, proudly shared the size of its ranks of 32,128 advisors at the end of the third quarter. Fee-only RIAs such as Savant Wealth Management, Moneta Group Investment Advisors and EP Wealth Advisors don’t approach that level of scale. However, they’re operating in a field with a stagnant overall headcount of advisors, a massive succession challenge amid looming retirements and a possible hiring shortfall in the face of growing consumer demand for advice. Technology may solve part of those problems, said David Grau, the CEO of consulting firm Succession Resource Group. He compared the potential of technology like artificial intelligence to the difference between moving a big pile of wood with or without a wheelbarrow. While there’s “obviously a need” to hire more advisors, that dearth of incoming talent isn’t “as bad or as out of proportion as we have made it out to be in the past,” due to the AI and other tech, Grau said. To read the full article, please visit: https://www.financial-planning.com/list/fee-only-rias-with-the-most-financial-advisors-in-2025 Disclaimer This article was first published by Tobias Salinger The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by FinancialPlanning.com.
The RIA founder’s dilemma: Choose your successor or sell
By: Tobias SalingerPublishing Date: November 24, 2025 This is the 28th installment in a Financial Planning series by Chief Correspondent Tobias Salinger on how to build a successful RIA. See the previous stories here, or find them by following Salinger on LinkedIn. Registered investment advisory firm founders who build profitable businesses with a stable base of clients must one day decide how they would like to pick a successor. With around a third of the industry’s financial advisors expecting to retire in the next decade and a looming potential shortfall of professionals compared to the demand for advice, RIA successors will either emerge internally or through an acquisition. One path at that fork in the road likely poses a more lucrative exit from the field, but with less autonomy about the transition of clients to a new advisor after selling the firm. The other trail enshrines an advisor’s legacy with those clients under the same company with hand-picked successors. But developing those successors has proven challenging for many firms that are simultaneously fielding higher bids from RIA aggregators. Internal successions equate to a “natural discount of at least 30%” compared to selling to private equity-backed firms and other RIA and advisory team consolidators, said Steven Tenney, a former advisor who is the founder of consulting and RIA coaching firm Grandview & Co. and the author of a new book published earlier this month called, “RIA Succession Alpha.” They also require “empowering the next generation of successors,” so that “the firm starts to run on its own, with less input from the founder,” he noted. After an RIA has created its plan, its one or more owners and their team must work together through the transition. “Without clarity, you’re aimless, and so you’ve got to start there,” Tenney said. “Many people treat succession planning as an event, as opposed to a necessary part of business. There is near-perfect overlap between succession planning and good business planning. It’s one and the same.” To read the full article, please visit: https://www.financial-planning.com/news/how-to-hire-and-advance-an-ria-successor Disclaimer This article was first published by Tobias Salinger The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by FinancialPlanning.com.
The top fee-only RIAs ranked by AUM in 2025
By: Tobias SalingerPublishing Date: November 19, 2025 Read the full article here. The excerpt below is a brief snippet. To read the full article, please click the link above. Eventually, the largest RIA aggregators could begin to see some advisors “splinter off” toward more independence out of companies that have become “a large national or international enterprise,” said David Grau, CEO of consulting firm Succession Resource Group. For now, movement into those firms and out of the wirehouses and other brokerages is feeding into the biggest RIAs, as are two other trends: teaming and companies offering advisors many essential services in one place. “They’re able to compete on price, scale and service level. It’s really hard to compete with them, and, so, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Grau said. “The aggregation is at a really good inflection point for our industry. We’ve got large enough firms that can now focus on mentoring and training the next generation, not buying a book.” Over the past decade, RIAs have expanded at an 11% compound annual growth rate due to asset appreciation and advisors’ gravitation toward them, research firm Cerulli Associates found in a study released earlier this month. At the same time, more than two-thirds of RIA executives with billion-dollar firms said organic growth is a strategic priority, and 83% said advisors’ lack of available time to focus on that is constraining their efforts around that goal. Regardless, the firms with at least $5 billion are vacuuming up the RIA channel. In the past five years, their client assets jumped at an average annual rate 21% and their advisor headcounts surged by 19% while their share of the channel’s assets soared by 18 percentage points. Disclaimer This article was first published by Tobias Salinger. All rights to the original content are held by FinancialPlanning.com.
Planning for internal RIA succession? Experts say it takes a decade
By: Tobias SalingerPublishing Date: November 17, 2025 This is the 27th installment in a Financial Planning series by Chief Correspondent Tobias Salinger on how to build a successful RIA. See the previous stories here, or find them by following Salinger on LinkedIn. The growth of registered investment advisory firms is turning their widespread lack of succession plans into an even bigger problem. But planning to exit the business someday is typically much easier said than done for many financial advisors, who operate in a widely dispersed field of tens of thousands of RIAs and usually enjoy working with their clients much more than completing administrative tasks. If they aim to retire in the next decade with an internal succession that doesn’t involve selling the business to an RIA consolidator or another large wealth management firm, they may have already delayed their succession planning too long. “You need to start early. You can’t be wanting to retire in five years and think that you’re going to start this a year before you retire,” said Dominique “Dom” Henderson, a planner who is the founder of Dallas-based RIA firm DJH Capital Management and the Jumpstart Coaching Lab, an advisor training and coaching firm. He recalled a presentation at an industry conference this year by an advisor whose firm has about $300 million or $400 million in client assets but two failed succession plans in the past. “She had been trying at this for 15 years, so this is the reason that people hire consultants to help them with this,” Henderson added. “It’s a lot of moving pieces, so my advice to anyone is, start early.” To read the full article, please visit: https://www.financial-planning.com/news/how-rias-can-create-a-succession-plan Disclaimer This article was first published by Tobias Salinger The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by FinancialPlanning.com.
When should a new RIA start hiring support staff? It’s complicated.
By: Tobias SalingerPublishing Date: August 14, 2025 This is the 13th installment in a Financial Planning series by Chief Correspondent Tobias Salinger on how to build a successful RIA. See the previous stories here, or find them by following Salinger on LinkedIn. Registered investment advisory firms that hire new staff members can harness much greater productivity, but the first employee in the door after a founder represents a costly investment. For financial advisors who have recently launched RIAs or another solo advisory practice, that raises the stakes for picking the right person at the correct time — an essential step for growth-minded firms seeking to gain value as a business and boost their client services. Like many practice management and professional development quandaries facing RIA founders, the pivotal question leads to no single answer that fits every company. Rather, the solution lies in every single RIA’s approach to issues such as whether to outsource tasks with vendors like brokerages, aggregators, custodians or financial technology firms, the number of clients that an advisor can serve before they have topped their capacity and the extent that automation or artificial intelligence could obviate the need for more employees. To read the full article, please visit: https://www.financial-planning.com/news/when-should-a-new-ria-hire-more-staff Disclaimer This article was first published by Tobias Salinger The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by FinancialPlanning.com.
WealthManagement.com: Succession Resource Group’s New Platform to Help FAs Find Lenders
By: Erick BergquistPublishing Date: May 7, 2020 LendingWell to take advantage of the tightening of lending standards that has arisen due to the coronavirus pandemic. Succession Resource Group, a succession planning consulting firm that helps advisors buy and sell their practices, is launching LendingWell, a free online platform that connects advisors with lenders. The new offering, expedited in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, is intended to help advisors find the right lenders for buyouts, buy-ins, working capital, refinancing, commercial real estate, startup, and recruiting. LendingWell intends to offer an alternative to Devoe & Company’s DeVoe CapitalWorks, another free, although telephone-based, platform that connects RIAs with lenders, and SkyView Partners, which brokers loans from a host of community banks. LendingWell was launched to take advantage of the tightening of lending standards that has arisen due to the coronavirus pandemic. “We saw a significant increase in the number of client contacts we were getting about refis to lower their payments or to secure capital for extra breathing room now that the markets are down,” said David Grau, president and founder of SRG. Lenders, he said, are tightening the amount they will lend; it used to be deals were 100% bank financed, but now that number is down to 50% to 80%. Loan-to-value ratios, he said, have dipped since the outbreak of the pandemic, meaning that “deals that were on the fence no longer qualify,” he added, because values have dipped in lockstep with revenues. Part of the impetus for LendingWell, said Grau, was that in the mid-to-late 2000s, PPC Loan was the only player in RIA lending. Then in 2013, Live Oak joined the fray as an SBA lender to RIAs with capital needs. Now, Grau said, there are at least seven lenders who make capital available to RIAs, and contacting them each can be a time-consuming process that takes months—enough time to sink a deal. SRG “brokers” deals together by negotiating things like the price, the terms and timeline, and does about 50 deals a year in the sub-$1 billion range, Grau said. (Larger deals are usually financed by private equity shops or with the buyer’s balance sheet capital.) DeVoe & Company is a San Francisco-based consulting firm and investment bank, while SkyView Capital acts more like mortgage brokers and connects RIAs with lenders with community banks. But these community banks, Grau says, simply don’t have enough experience with RIA lending to make it onto the LendingWell platform. “We have dozens of lenders we have worked with, but we only want those who have enough experience and who consistently provide capital. There is nothing more frustrating than dealing with a community bank who in their underwriting asks you questions about your IRA when they really mean your RIA. They just don’t know the difference, or understand or know the industry or are here for the long term,” said Grau. Of the 30 participating banks and lenders signed up for the DeVoe program, none is a community bank. SRG features seven banks, but to make it onto LendingWell’s list, a bank has to have provided a certain level of consistent capital for RIA deals in the past 24 months; SRG has set the minimum number of deals at five. LendingWell, he said, performs the same function as SkyView, which connects RIAs to funding sources, without the “middleman” services that SkyView performs for a fee. “When you call SkyView you have to talk to an individual and rely on human knowledge and their familiarity with banks to get matched, for a fee,” said Grau. The DeVoe platform also features a 30-minute phone call during which they “talk through the needs and guardrails” of each advisor and “evaluate lenders and capital providers,” DeVoe Managing Director Brad Grubb said. “We are always honored when others try to copy us,” said Dave DeVoe, founder and managing partner of DeVoe & Company. “We don’t see this as competitive to our offer because we focus on larger RIAs, and just as an HNW investor would not fill out an online tool to find an advisor, our clients appreciate our live discussion to assess their needs and identify the best capital partner,” he said Scott Wetzel, CEO of Minneapolis-based SkyView, said that he was contacted by SRG about participating in LendingWell. “After reviewing the site, we decided to pass; we did not perceive the value of an intermediary who is brokering loans to a very limited number of industry participants [Live Oak, PPC, etc.] conducting RIA financing,” he said. “In addition, the 1% fee that Lending Well/SRG receives from each lender adds unnecessary cost for merely providing a name and we do not view Lending Well as a competitor, it is more akin to Advisor Loans who brokers loans for a fee,” said Wetzel. Grau said that so far LendingWell has attracted a fair amount of users. “In the last four days, we have 60 users. Ten percent of those have been using our chat function, and 5% have called us with questions.” The site is free to use, but SRG is hoping to use it to flag new deals and capitalize by offering its consulting services to those in need of capital. “Really the ultimate benefit for us is, it gives us the opportunity, when clients submit a request for financing, to offer to provide additional services which they may or may not need,” he said. The SRG tool is meant to be very simple. The user is asked up to nine questions, and based on the responses is given a LendingWell Score. The tool then matches the user with the appropriate lender and lending program based upon that score. In seconds, it produces detailed lender profiles, including the lender’s typical interest rate, loan term and specific bank covenants. Disclaimer This article was first published by Erick Bergquist The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by WealthManagement.com.
Citywire USA: Behind Creative Planning’s purchase of Coe Financial Services
By: Jake MartinPublishing Date: May 20, 2020 How a spousal push, and a geographical pull, helped a deal come together Deb wanted him to sell. Long before Richard Coe turned 70 last year, his wife had been ‘strongly advocating’ for his retirement. Coe – who founded his namesake firm in 1983, loved his career and knew nothing about selling a business – was slow to proceed. By the time he sold Coe Financial Services, a Wichita, Kansas-based RIA with about $126m in AUM, his outlook had completely changed. ‘I went from reluctance to acceptance to, now, excitement,’ he said. Trusting the process Coe used RIA consultant Succession Resource Group (SRG), based in Portland, Oregon, to help with the sale process. ‘That kept me out of the emotional side of the negotiating,’ he said. SRG narrowed a list of more than 50 interested parties down to 10 before Coe got involved. The seven finalists ranged from very large to very small. On the small side, there was a Wichita-based advisor in his 30s who left a favorable impression on Coe and his wife. ‘We thought he would operate similarly, in many ways, to how I’ve operated,’ Coe said. But although the conversations went well, an offer did not result. ‘I can understand why someone might get a little reluctant with the market going crazy,’ Coe added. Nonetheless, Coe did get three ‘very attractive’ offers. ‘I cared about financial planning emphasis, likely investment results and the likely client experience,’ Coe said. One of the larger bidders, Creative Planning, checked all those boxes. Personal touch SRG chief executive David Grau said that Creative Planning also distinguished itself from other large firms by having CEO Peter Mallouk, rather than a subordinate, at the deal table. Mallouk said that after an initial ‘checklist’ talk with one of his colleagues, potential sellers deal directly with him. ‘There’s no M&A team, at all,’ he said. ‘It’s me talking with the principals and key team members of the firm, and I also make sure to meet all the employees before a deal is signed.’ From Creative Planning’s perspective, geography was a big factor behind the purchase. Creative Planning already had clients in the Wichita area, but they were covered by a group of advisors working out of the company’s Overland Park, Kansas headquarters. Mallouk said that extending physically into Wichita is an opportunity to ‘localize’ services while testing out a secondary market close to Creative Planning’s home base. However, there was a hitch. Coe wanted to orchestrate a quick exit. It was Mallouk’s first time working with an owner who wanted to exit in less than a year. ‘All of our other deals have been owners who want to stay and continue to grow,’ he said. However, Coe’s timeline aligned with Mallouk’s desire to promote a financial planner from the Wichita area to a wealth manager position. Adding Coe’s office gave Mallouk the perfect outpost to dispatch his new manager. Meanwhile, Coe agreed to stay on for a three-month transition period that will come to an end in mid-June. Another advisor and administrative staffer at his practice will continue working at Creative Planning. With everything set, even the economic turmoil and market crash caused by the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t derail the deal. Early in the process, Mallouk told Coe: ‘We will close quickly, within a week, if we have an agreement.’ ‘I’m thinking, “Wow,”’ Coe said. ‘In the midst of all that was going on in the market, to have a firm that was able to close within a week, that was very significant to me.’ Disclaimer This article was first published by Jake Martin. The original article can be found here. All rights to the original content are held by Citywire.