Financial Advisor Practice Vs Business: What Are You Trying To Build?

Michael Kitces | Nerd's Eye View, July 2016

Summary: The path of becoming a financial advisor is viewed as a very entrepreneurial one, starting from scratch and building a client base who pay you for services, growing over time into a business that can generate substantial income for the advisor/owner/founder. The growing trend of independent advisors, whether in RIA or broker-dealer form, just further emphasizes the entrepreneurial spirit of the financial advisor community, and their desire to build businesses of value… or at least, a practice that can generate substantial ongoing income throughout their working years.

Highly successful practices don’t necessarily need partners, and they don’t build out a lot of staff infrastructure. You don’t need to. If you’re trying to build a business, you absolutely must. The ongoing question for a business owner should always be, how much revenue do we need so we can do our next hire and keep growing our business?"