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.
Citywire USA: Deal structures shift to give sellers more certainty
By: Jake MartinPublishing Date: July 23, 2020 Just 25% of deals in 2020 have contained a clawback feature, down from 67% in 2019, according to RIA consultancy Succession Resource Group. RIA sellers are trading higher values on their firms for less risk in M&A transactions so far in 2020, according to consultancy Succession Resource Group (SRG). The search for certainty has resulted in a sharp reduction in deals with contingencies and clawback features since the end of 2019, the Lake Oswego, Oregon firm said in a recent M&A outlook report. While values dropped despite initial expectations for a ‘strong’ 2020, SRG found that just 25% of deals this year have contained a clawback feature, down from 67% of deals in 2019. Meanwhile, 50% of transactions were all-cash deals. SRG helps financial services firms and professionals value, buy, and sell their businesses, as well as plan for succession and long-range transition of ownership. The firm’s RIA clients typically have $1bn or below in assets under management. Despite a short-term decline in revenue through June, values for RIA firms remained consistent, dropping less than 1% through the first half of 2020, the firm said. The average multiple of revenue of 2.72x in 2019 slipped to 2.70x through the end of the second quarter of 2020. SRG said the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on advisor revenues ‘rebounded much quicker than initially anticipated,’ but that the market volatility will likely serve as a catalyst for advisors who were considering a sale at any point in the next 1-3 years. Kristen Grau, executive vice president of SRG, said she anticipates increased deal volume as early as this summer based not just on the pandemic but increased compliance challenges (Regulation Best Interest, for example), the ‘graying of the industry’ and aging clients, as well as a lack of succession planning. According to SRG, the average advisor age is 55 while the average age of an RIA seller is currently 63. Meanwhile, going into the pandemic, 33% of advisors already expected to retire in the next decade. Brian Lauzon, managing director at investment bank InCap Group, said there continues to be an ‘aggressive appetite’ for acquisitions and that multiples have remained steady for RIA firms in the range of $400m to $3bn in AUM. ‘Leading up to Covid, earn-out periods were shortening and it wasn’t unusual to see a deal with a one- or two-year earn-out,’ Lauzon said. ‘Currently — and we believe going forward — we expect earn-out periods to return to historical norms of three to four years.’ For InCap’s end of the market, Lauzon said all-cash deals have ‘historically been rare’ and will likely continue to be so for the foreseeable future. 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.
RIABiz: Focus Financial CEO pumps brakes hard on M&A market, waiting for a return to ‘normal’ — and buyers of Focus stock bid up price as debt ratio improves
By: Charles Paikert Publishing Date: August 24, 2020 Focus Financial’s deal pipeline is being squeezed this year by the COVID-19 pandemic and soaring RIA multiples, but CEO Rudy Adolf says Focus has the discipline –and the cash–to stick to its business model until the market “normalizes.” When, and if, that happens are big questions at the moment–and whether the new normal will be anything like the old normal isn’t guaranteed. Those questions were central to analysts during the company’s second quarter 2020 earnings call. Adolf used the word “normal” or “normalize” in a recurring mantra on the call, but a quick reversion to the mean may be wishful thinking, says Karl Heckenberg, CEO of Emigrant Partners and Fiduciary Network. “Multiples of six- to seven-times earnings haven’t been ‘normal’ for several years,” he says, “A billion-dollar firm that’s growing is going to get a multiple of at least ten, if not closer to 11.” Adolf didn’t state what a normal market looks like to him, notes Matt Crow, president of Memphis-based M&A valuation firm Mercer Capital. “If RIA valuations are too high, and Focus’s multiple is around 12 or 13, then what’s ‘normal’ for Focus?” So far, Focus has completed only eight deals this year, adding two partner firms and six tuck-ins. Last year at this time, Focus and its partners had already made 21 transactions on their way to a year-end total of 34, the most in the industry. Still, Adolf is willing to sit tight on his business model–and a mountain of cash–until the market turns his way. “We absolutely are committed to our minimum IRR [internal rate of return] target of 20%, which means we continue to be very selective. And of course, our multiple discipline speaks for itself,” Adolf told analysts. “Quite frankly, discipline is our middle name, and this has made us the largest player in this industry,” he reminded analysts. Muted market Focus Chief Financial Officer Jim Shanahan acknowledged that Q2 M&A activity was “muted,” and the firm expects limited activity during Q3. “The pandemic resulted in an industry-wide decline in M&A as prospects prioritized client service over strategic transactions,” he noted. But the M&A market, overall, radically rebounded in July with 13 RIA deals totaling nearly $20 billion of AUM, the largest numbers in those categories for any July, according to Fidelity’s M&A transaction report. A “surge” of acquisitions following the COVID slump has already begun, says David DeVoe, an M&A consultant DeVoe & Co. Echelon Partners is predicting that the number of deals in 2020 will nearly match the record number recorded last year. But at what price? Adolf made clear the market is too rich for Focus, right now. He made no attempt to disguise his frustration about the price Canadian wealth manager CI Financial paid for the Chicago-area RIA Balasa Dinverno Foltz calling it “insane.” “It’s more like international players, sometimes private equity supported players that are — that seem to be way out of sync with typically industry multiples and in what they are doing right now.” The Canadian firm’s US wealth assets have swelled to about $11 billion over the course of a roughly six-month spending spree that landed three U.S RIAs, according to citywire. Indeed, a big factor in the market run-up is the entry of private-equity and deep-pocketed players in the RIA roll-up game. The trend was evident last September when Oak Hill Capital, a private equity firm with roots managing the Bass brothers’ family fortune, bought a stake in Mercer Advisors, the fast-growing Denver registered investment advisor aggregator. Mercer has made six major acquisitions to date this year, according to DeVoe. Goldman purchased United Capital, another RIA aggregator, for $750 million in July a year ago. See: Goldman Sachs readies splashy RIA retail debut as it (likely) adds $24-billion United Capital to $35-billion AUM Ayco for $59-billion 82 office behemoth; months after buying RIA lure from S&P Thomas H. Lee Partners (THL) is trying a different roll-up tack in financial advice — this time aggregating TAMPs that turn insurance reps into budding financial advisors. See: As Thomas H. Lee Partners asserts itself, Dave Pottruck steps down as chairman of HighTower’s board of directors The Boston-based private equity giant, which bought a majority stake (Jan. 2020) in AmeriLife, is the force behind Brookstone Capital Management’s roll up of FormulaFolios, a financial planning and automated portfolio management company. Hightower Advisors has either bought or made minority investments in five firms as has Creative Planning, a major RIA owned by Peter Mallouk, with private equity backing from General Atlantic. In June, Creative said it bought Sunrise Advisors, based in Leawood, Kan., and picked up about $700 million in client-managed assets, according to a news release. It was the firm’s seventh deal in 2020, according to InvestmentNews. Emigrant Partners has done four deals and Captrust, with backing from GTCR, has done three. And CI Financial has become a major new player, having bought three U.S RIAs this year after two last year. Private equity firms, for their part, have participated in 5% of all RIA merger transactions since 2013 and accounted for 26% of the deals as measured by assets under management, according to DeVoe. All of which begs a question: Will the new normal ever return to the old normal? Seller’s market As a pioneer in RIA M&A, it’s understandable that Adolf would long for his company’s youth when it could call the shots in doing deals, according to Matt Cooper, president of Beacon Pointe Advisors, another serial acquirer that earlier this year sold a minority interest to PE firm Abry Partners. “Focus was used to paying six- to seven- to eight-times EBITDA and [that] just doesn’t exist anymore for quality firms,” he says. The mismatch between supply and demand and increased competition “will begin to erode Focus’s M&A market share long-term,” David Grau Jr., CEO of M&A consulting firm Succession Resource Group, predicted earlier this year. Steve Levitt, managing director of Park Sutton Advisors, estimates there are 10 buyers for every seller. Grau believes
When it Comes to Growth, Location Matters
By: Tobias Salinger Published Date: August 6, 2025 When it comes to growth, location matters The role of geography in potential business opportunities for financial advisors can be hard to calculate in exact numbers, but the impact of location is changing in notable ways. Together, the rise of remote and hybrid offices across the industry and the continuing consolidation of registered investment advisory firms have altered the landscape of geographic expansion strategies and M&A deals. Both trends also add complexity to the question of, say, which states have the most potential assets under management in play. In 2024, out-of-state buyers completed a third of M&A transactions, according to the latest annual survey by deal consulting firm Succession Resource Group. The higher prices that those acquirers paid and the fact that out-of-state investors are “becoming more normal” reflect the altered geographic dynamics after the pandemic, said David Grau, the firm’s founder and CEO. In the past, “Very few retiring advisors or sellers would consider a buyer who was not within driving distance,” he said, citing the continuing rise in the share of transactions involving out-of-state buyers. “That’s an absurd figure in a professional service business.” To read the full article, please visit: https://www.financial-planning.com/news/how-geography-ties-into-wealth-management-growth 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.