Added on March 2014 in M&A Issues
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Summary: RIAs are looking to grow and are seizing on the opportunity to scoop up smaller firms, according to new report by Schwab Advisor Services. RIAs were the biggest buyers of other RIAs last year, with 44 percent of the 54 overall merger and acquisition deals for 2013 completed by RIAs. Smaller firms in particular utilized the deals as a growth strategy during the second half of the year, Schwab found.
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Summary: To really grow, a financial advisory business needs to find ways to become more efficient. Those ways often involve new technology and systems to make their expanding ranks of advisers more effective at tending to clients and their money, and bringing in more of both.
Added on March 2014 in Join an RIA
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Summary: Looking to attract and retain top advisors this year? Expect senior-level executives to demand equity and career growth, says Kathy Freeman.“When we started the survey five years ago, executives were more focused on the health of the company,” says Freeman, president and CEO of her eponymous executive search firm. “Now it’s all about their own careers.”
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Summary:Every month, I try to determine the most important issue to write about, yet most of the time I end up delving into the seemingly boring topic of regulation. Why? Because I think the massive lobbying effort by the brokerage world and the Financial Services Institute to make FINRA the chief regulator of the financial planning and RIA community poses an existential threat. I actually believe that FINRA regulation would snuff out the creativity and idealism of our profession - and put a lot of great advisory firms out of business, reducing a lot of pesky competition for FINRA's brokerage firm members.
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Summary: When most owner-advisors talk to me about succession planning, the first thing they tell me is the value of their business (based on a recent valuation or a model formula). Then they spell out their plan for how the partners should pay for it. They think succession is about the numbers, and what they are usually looking for is a spreadsheet for how it's going to work. When it comes my turn to talk, I tell them that's all very nice and ask, “What have you done to groom your successors into leaders?”
