Growth You Can Build a Future On

I have spent forty-two years watching advisor practices grow, first as an advisor and then as an executive. Over the past decade, I have also had a front-row seat to the work of Praxis Distribution Partners, whose team has spent years engaging advisors and investors through direct outreach. One thing has become increasingly clear: while organic growth has always mattered, its value has never been greater, and the thing standing in the way is not what the tool vendors think it is.

This business has taught me that enduring practices are built one relationship at a time, and almost every one of those relationships began at a moment when someone's life was changing. A business sale. An inheritance. A retirement. A new job with equity on the table. The advisor who engaged with the right timing, the right context, and the right relevance usually earned the relationship. And that moment was rarely the day the event occurred. It was the point at which someone became ready to make an important financial decision.

Winning those relationships is what our industry calls organic growth, and it has moved to the top of the agenda. When Charles Schwab surveyed the leaders of nearly 1,300 advisory firms managing a combined $2.4 trillion this year, organic growth ranked as their number one concern. Ahead of markets. Ahead of regulation. Ahead of succession. I spent the past year working on that same problem myself, and this piece is what I found.

What the Research Actually Says

Start with the size of the gap. The typical firm in that study grows organically, meaning new assets won from clients with market gains stripped out, at about 3 percent a year. McKinsey's analysis of the industry goes further: close to 70 percent of asset growth in recent years came from market performance, and once acquisitions and recruited advisors are also set aside, true organic growth across the industry runs close to zero.

I can put a personal frame around that market number. When I started at Dean Witter in 1984, forty-two years ago, the S&P 500 stood near 160. Yesterday it closed above 7,500. My career happens to span one of the great market runs in history, and that finding says plainly what the run did for our industry: it supplied most of the growth. Market performance is a wonderful tailwind, but it isn't something any firm controls. I read the survey as 1,300 leaders recognizing exactly that.

Here is the encouraging side of the same research. Cerulli's data shows the share of affluent investors willing to pay for advice climbed from 38 percent in 2010 to 68 percent in 2025. McKinsey projects the industry will be short roughly 100,000 advisors within a decade. Demand for advice is rising and the supply of advisors is shrinking. The growth is there to be won.

Growth Is Worth More Than It Looks

The value of solving this is bigger than a year of new revenue, and the M&A data spells it out. Advisory books today change hands at roughly three times revenue and around ten times earnings, and deal research from SICA Fletcher and others consistently identifies demonstrated organic growth as a top driver of premium multiples. A buyer pays up for a practice that can prove it wins clients on its own.

So growth pays an advisor twice. It lifts the income this year, and it lifts what the entire practice is worth on the day it is sold, taken to a partner, or handed to the next generation. One new million-dollar client is not a ten-thousand-dollar fee. It is that fee every year for the life of the relationship, plus a lift to the value of the whole book on top. Very little else on an advisor's desk compounds like that.

Where the Standard Playbook Runs Out

For twenty years our industry has treated growth as a marketing problem. I no longer believe it is. It is an execution problem. We don't lack data. We don't lack technology. We don't lack prospects. We lack the ability to consistently reach the right person during the window when a change in their financial life has made them ready to act. That is a completely different problem, and it demands a completely different solution.

The standard growth playbook is on display at any advisor conference. Newsletters. Marketing support. Websites and search. Seminars. Purchased leads. I have no quarrel with any of it; most of it is good work and it belongs in a practice. But nearly all of it shares one design: it puts something attractive into the world and waits for the right client to walk toward you.

The purchased-lead model shows the limit of waiting most clearly, because of how the economics work. Many lead services sell the same prospect to multiple advisors at once, and the sale goes to whoever dials first. Most advisors know the frustrations that come with shared leads. Advisory relationships are usually earned over time, not won by being the fastest to dial.

Here is what the research and four decades of experience both say about how they are formed. Heirs are the clearest example. Cerulli found that more than 70 percent leave their parents' advisor once the wealth transfers, and that movement does not happen at the funeral. It unfolds over the months and often the year or more that follow, as the estate settles, accounts consolidate, emotions cool, and the heir begins asking who should help manage what they now hold. The life event opens the door. Readiness is when someone walks through it. The opportunity is not being the first caller after a trigger. It is being the right caller at the moment a life event becomes a financial decision.

Fidelity's research names the deeper constraint. In its study of wealth management firms, the number one barrier to organic growth was not strategy and not skill. It was time. New relationships start when someone reaches a real person at the moment that person is ready to engage, with the right context and something relevant to say, and that work takes exactly the hours a full practice does not have.

What I Learned Trying to Solve It

This is where my year got personal. Last year I went out and bought what I judged to be the best organic-growth technology available to advisors. I looked at the prospecting platforms, the data services, the AI copilots, and many of them are genuinely impressive. I wanted to see the technology work in the real world, not in a demo.

The technology held up. The assumption behind it did not. The products in this category hand the advisor a tool and ask the advisor to work it: learn the platform, run the searches, make the calls, or hire and manage someone who will. The advisors I sat with over that year told me the same thing in different words. They were never short on software. They were short on time.

So we rebuilt the model around the result instead of the tool. The technology does the finding, quietly in the background. It watches for life events, and more importantly for the period that follows them, the window when people begin reassessing their financial relationships and are most open to a thoughtful approach. It surfaces the right person inside that window. Then real people make the calls, under the advisor's own brand, cleared through compliance. The advisor does not learn software or manage a caller. The advisor takes the meetings. For the first advisor we ran this for, that model put eight qualified prospects across the table in the opening five weeks, with no new tool and no new hire on his side. Most of them asked for a second meeting.

The Part That Never Changes

I do not believe AI made organic growth easy, and I am wary of anyone who says it did. What changed is narrower and more useful. The finding, the timing, and the first outreach, the hours that were the real barrier all along, can now be done for an advisor rather than by an advisor.

The rest looks the same as it did in 1984. A client whose life just changed, a phone that rings, and an advisor good enough to earn what comes next. That model is now a service we call WealthHawk: the finding, the timing, and the first outreach done for you, under your own brand, so you take the meetings.

Markets will rise. Markets will fall. Technology will change. AI will become more capable every year. None of that changes the truth I learned forty-two years ago. Every enduring advisory relationship still begins the same way: one person's life changes, and an advisor earns the privilege of serving them by showing up when they are ready for the conversation, with the right context, the right relevance, and the right advice.

After forty-two years in this business, I would still rather be the right caller than the first caller.

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Sources

Research referenced in this article includes:

• Charles Schwab 2025 RIA Benchmarking Study
• McKinsey & Company wealth management research
• Cerulli Associates research on advisor growth, wealth transfer, and investor behavior
• Fidelity Investments research on organic growth and advisor productivity
• SICA Fletcher research on registered investment advisor valuations and transaction multiples