Category: RIA Best Practices
44 posts categorized as "RIA Best Practices"
The Fear of Change, Part 3: The Emotions of Breaking Away
October 7, 2019
The Fear of Change: A 3-Part Series for RIAs As the RIA industry matures, consolidates, grows, and evolves, many of our clients contemplate M&A transactions, changing their technologies or workflows, or they may strive to break away from their current employer to build their own RIA. We focus our attention on building and improving the…
The Fear of Change, Part 2: The Emotions of New Technology
October 1, 2019
The Fear of Change: A 3-Part Series for RIAs As the RIA industry matures, consolidates, grows, and evolves, many of our clients contemplate M&A transactions, changing their technologies or workflows, or they may strive to break away from their current employer to build their own RIA. We focus our attention on building and improving the…
The Fear of Change, Part 1: The Emotions of an M&A Transaction
September 27, 2019
The Fear of Change: A 3-Part Series for RIAs As the RIA industry matures, consolidates, grows, and evolves, many of our clients contemplate M&A transactions, changing their technologies or workflows, or they may strive to break away from their current employer to build their own RIA. We focus our attention on building and improving the…
New RIA COO? How to Prepare for Success on Day 1
September 17, 2019
In the eighth episode of The COO Roundtable, featuring David Canter and Scott Slater of Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions, we talked about an uncomfortable but extremely important topic: how and why COOs often fail in their role at RIAs. We’ve previously written about this unfortunate phenomenon on our blog, but with David and Scott’s…
RIAs Are Struggling with Too Much Technology, Not Too Little
August 28, 2019
The objection we hear most often from prospective clients (delivered in a sarcastic tone) is, “I don’t want to hire an operations and technology consultant. Not only do I have to pay your fee, but you are going to tell me I can’t continue to do business unless I spend an additional $200,000 on new…
Integratable ≠ Integrated
August 21, 2019
In our work with new and established RIAs looking to build and/or improve their technology stack, we encounter many frustrated advisors who lament, “We were told that the benefit of being an RIA was that all of our technology systems would be integratable with one another – while that may be the case for other…
What RIAs should learn from Uber and Lyft
August 15, 2019
Most RIA owners are obsessed with growing top-line revenue at all costs, with little thought to the bottom-line profitability of each additional dollar of AUM A recent New York Times article called Uber and Lyft two of “the largest and most anticipated … companies to have gone public this year,” but in the same breath…
Where to Start When Developing Workflows
July 23, 2019
In our work with large RIAs looking to increase their scale and efficiency, we often begin with a review of their various systems, people, and processes. We walk through a comprehensive list of their executives, advisors, and employees to better understand the broader team’s roles and responsibilities. We then begin to dive deeper to gather…
Don’t Charge for Reporting On Outside Assets
July 16, 2019
Advisors looking to grow their business must constantly grapple with client acquisition costs. As advisors struggle to differentiate themselves and the services they offer, many have concluded that providing a higher touch to existing clients and working to gain a larger percentage of their investable assets is a more profitable way to grow, rather than…
Two Key Ingredients to a Proper M&A Strategy
June 27, 2019
Not a day goes by that the RIA press isn’t reporting on another merger or acquisition. At industry conferences, the panels discussing M&A are the most highly attended. With more and more outside capital circling, everyone wants in on the RIA M&A game. Given this is an industry-wide trend, why do we only see press…
