FP+Careers - Part 29

Why The Financial Engines/Edelman Financial Deal Could End The 401(k) Rollover Bonanza

May 3, 2018 03:31 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Industry News

The blockbuster announcement in the RIA space this week was that private equity firm Hellman & Friedman is buying Financial Engines and taking it private for a whopping $3 billion dollars in cash, and in the process will be merging it with mega-RIA Edelman Financial – of which Hellman already owns a majority stake from a purchase back in 2015 – to make a new combined entity of both Financial Engines and Edelman Financial. Which is a mega deal not just because Financial Engines got bought for $3 billion dollars (and has an estimated $169 billion of assets under management in the managed 401(k) space) but also because Edelman Financial itself has $21 billion under management and is one of the largest independent RIAs in the country with almost 35,000 clients of their own for whom they do investment management and financial planning, with more than 100 (human) financial advisors.

In this week’s #OfficeHours with @MichaelKitces, my Tuesday 1PM EST broadcast via Periscope, we explore the implications of this massive deal to pair together managed 401(k) accounts with human financial planners (at a size and scale that few others besides perhaps Fidelity have ever even attempted), and particularly how this may be the beginning of the end of advisors growing their businesses through 401(k) rollovers!

First and foremost, thouggh, it’s worth just recognizing that a brilliant deal it really is for Financial Engines to be merged with Edelman Financial. From the Financial Engines perspective, this is an opportunity to add a new higher “financial advice” service tier to its top 401(k) clients, in a world where they’re reportedly only charging between 0.2% to 0.6% for their managed account service, but Edelman’s fee schedule starts all the way up at 2%. Of course, what Edelman charges individual retail clients and what Edelman will charge for advice "distributed" through 401(k) channels as an enterprise-level advice solution will likely be different, but the point remains that the pricing power of human financial advisors providing personal financial planning advice is much stronger than "just" managed accounts with great technology. And from Edelman Financial's perspective, this deal also looks like a huge win to me. Because the magic question for years with Edelman Financial has been how will Edelman Financial grow without Ric Edelman (since Ric's books, radio show, and speaking generate so much growth)? The answer: Give Edelman Financial an opportunity to be distributed to the one million clients that Financial Engines already serves (or about 30X the size of Edelman’s client base!).

From the broader industry perspective, though, it's important to recognize the significance that the company that is arguably the original robo-advisor has been buying a series of human advisory firms – first the Mutual Fund Store in 2015, and now Edelman Financial – to deliver increasingly sophisticated human financial advice to their “robo” clients. In other words, even robo-advisor platforms are recognizing that technology is better as a means to augment human advisors than compete against them – a prediction I had made back in 2012.

In addition, the fact that Financial Engines is moving deeper into the (higher-priced) human advice business also suggests that the robo-advisor price point isn’t actually going to be the end point for financial advisors after all. Despite fears that all advisors were going to need to drop their fees to 25 basis points from the popular 1% AUM fees, it appears instead that robo advisors were actually pricing too low all along, and now are increasingly looking for ways to add more human services so that they can charge fees closer to the traditional 1% AUM fee that human advisors were charging. Or stated more simply, human advisors aren't capitulating to robo-advisor prices; instead, robo-advisors are capitulating towards human advisor prices (and blending in the human advisor value proposition).

All that being said, though, the biggest trend being portended by this Financial Engines and Edelman Financial deal is one that the industry has missed so far. And that trend is that the rise of human financial advice solutions directly in the 401(k) channel (as Financial Engines is ostensibly going to soon offer through Edelman Financial), which could be the beginning of the end of the 401(k) rollover bonanza. Because historically, defined contribution plans were self-directed... which meant that consumers both accumulated their wealth in a retirement plan, and didn't have an advisor help with that retirement plan, such that the act of retiring was the “money in motion” event that financial advisors have used for the better part of 30 years to grow their businesses. But with firms like Edelman providing human financial advice in the 401(k) channel, retirees will increasingly no longer need to find an advisor at retirement, as they'll just continue with the advisor they have had all along with their existing 401(k) plan. As a result, the entire market opportunity for independent financial advisors to grab 401(k) rollovers for unaffiliated consumers that don’t have an advisor, may begin to vanish.

Ultimately, this does not mean that firms will have no opportunities to win business away from RIAs serving clients in the 401(k) channel, but it will mean that firms will need a (more) compelling reason to do so (e.g., by serving clients through a well-defined niche or specialization). But the key point is to acknowledge that the announced acquisition of Financial Engines, and merging of Edelman Financial into Financial Engines, is an indication that we could be seeing the beginning of the end of the 401(k) rollover bonanza, as financial advice shifts into the 401(k) channel itself, rather than just for rollovers from 401(k) plans!

#FASuccess Ep 070: Taking Leaps Of Faith As An Introverted Career Changer To Build A Successful Advisory Firm with Sue Stevens

May 1, 2018 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome, everyone! Welcome to the 70th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Sue Stevens. Sue is the founder of Stevens Wealth Management, an advisory firm in the Chicago area that serves 150 clients with nearly $350 million in assets under management.

What's unique about Sue, though, has been her ability to take "leaps of faith" in making several major shifts in her career, both in the decision to launch her own advisory firm, to create her own job opportunities at major companies like Vanguard and Morningstar... and her decision to enter the financial services industry in the first place and eventually get her MBA and become a CPA, a CFA, and a CFP professional, after spending her 20s as a freelance and professional cellist who played in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra!

In this episode, we talk about the leaps of faith that entrepreneurial financial advisors have to take, why even as such an entrepreneurial person Sue still took an entry-level job and worked for years in a lower-paying apprenticeship position when she started her career, why building your own self-confidence is such an ingredient for success as a financial advisor, and why managing your own personal finances is also a crucial ingredient for success as a financial advisor and an entrepreneur who sometimes has to take leaps of faith.

We also talk about Sue's own advisory firm, including how she cultivated clients over time as an introvert through writing on Morningstar.com, why she started out with a flat-fee retainer model but eventually switched to the AUM model, the annual strategic planning process she uses to keep the business on track, how she leverages the Strategic Coach framework of having free days, focus days, and buffer days, and why all of the employees in her firm are women (even though she didn't set out to hire an all-female staff).

And be certain to listen to the end, where Sue talks about the process she went through to craft her own dream job description as the owner of the advisory firm... and why that ultimately led her to decide to sell her firm to a much larger one, not so that she could retire, but so that she could regain the freedom to focus her energy where she wants to, both inside and outside the business.

So whether you are interested in learning more about taking a leap of faith as a career changer, why an advisor who set out to run a flat-fee retainer model switched to AUM, or how you can craft your own dream job description as an advisory firm owner, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Apr 21-22)

April 20, 2018 03:00 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the official release of the SEC's new Advice Rule, which aims to lift the standards for brokers giving advice recommendations with a new "Regulation Best Interest" but stops short of imposing a full (and uniform) fiduciary rule, while also raising the possibility that brokers would at least be restricted from using the "advisor" or "adviser" labels (but not for hybrid B/D-RIA firms that actually comprise the overwhelming majority of all brokers in the first place).

Yet also in the news this week is the acknowledgement that advice itself continues to be increasingly central to both the investment adviser and broker-dealer model, with a research study from Cerulli Edge showing that the majority of clients are now receiving some kind of financial planning services from their investment adviser or broker (up from 1/3rd just 5 years ago), and a consumer study from J.D. Power which found that even as Millennials demand higher quality technology from their financial institutions, it's still the financial advisor relationship that actually drives Millennial loyalty to a firm!

From there, we have several articles about the insurance industry, including a recap of the highlights from the recent Intercompany Long-Term Care Insurance (ILTCI) conference about the latest trends in the LTC insurance industry (including that traditional LTC insurance is stabilizing but carriers are still rolling out more flexible hybrid life/LTC policies as well), a discussion of the rules regarding the important but often overlooked 2-year Incontestability Period for life insurance policies, and a look at how the fact that most people have declining needs for life insurance over time means that layering multiple life insurance policies with separate time horizons may be more cost efficient than just buying one large 30-year term policy.

We also have several advisor-technology articles, including a look at how some firms are starting to try to proactively leverage artificial intelligence to support the productivity of financial advisors, a second that looks at the growth of the new United Capital "FinLife CX" platform (which can be bundled to an advisor's existing CRM instead of requiring the advisor to use theirs), and the (re-)emergence of FinFolio 2.0 as a competitor in the space of portfolio accounting and reporting solutions for advisors.

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of financial independence and retiring early: the first explores the growth of bloggers that show consumers (especially Millennials) how to live frugally in order to retire early, with the caveat that the most successful bloggers in the space may be achieving early retirement primarily because they earned a well-above-average income, not because of their frugal spending habits; the second goes deeper in exploring the "FIRE" (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement that is attracting more and more interest from Millennials in particular; and the last is a fascinating discussion about whether and at what age someone should try to retire early to balance out their earnings and life potential with their desired standard of living and freedom... at least, for those who have the incomes that make it possible to save enough to do so in the first place!

Enjoy the "light" reading!

#FASuccess Ep 068: Becoming A Non-Revenue-Producing Partner In A Multi-Niche Financial “Design” Firm with Heather Fortner

April 17, 2018 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome, everyone! Welcome to the 68th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Heather Fortner. Heather is a partner and the Chief Operating Officer of Signature FD, an independent RIA that calls itself a "financial design" firm and now serves more than $3 billion of AUM for nearly 1,000 clients.

What's unique about Heather's firm, though, is not just the nature of its holistic "financial design" process that aims to help clients with all their types of wealth – both money, time, and relationships – but serves its clients by organizing the firm and its advisory teams into "communities", or what essentially are a series of various niches, all under the Signature FD umbrella, including SignatureLaw, SignatureHealth, SignatureEntrepreneur, and more.

In this episode, we talk in depth about why and how Signature FD transitioned from a broad-based generalist firm into a series of niche communities, the way it has adopted Angie Herbers' "Diamond Teams" structure to grow and develop their advisor talent, the Entrepreneurial Operating System it uses – built from Gino Wickman's book "Traction" – to help ensure that every employee understands how they connect to their department's 1-year goals, the firm's 1-year goals, and the long-term outcome for the firm, and why SignatureFD uses an Industrial Psychologist as a part of the final screening process for everyone the firm hires to help really ensure they're a good long-term fit.

We also talk about Heather's own career track in the firm, from joining as a "client care associate" in the operations team nearly 15 years ago, to becoming the Director of Operations and later the Chief Operating Officer, getting involved in several industry Executive Leadership programs, and eventually making partner in the firm... in a world where it's still relatively rare for such "non-revenue-producing" members of the firm to have an opportunity to become a partner, especially women, despite the value that good executive leadership in operations can create for a firm.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Heather talks about how advisors can identify the "right" firm to stick with in the long run, and the skills that she believes are most important for everyone, but especially women, to develop to climb the career track in an independent advisory firm, and why she believes that the challenges of family dynamics and caring for children may be one of the biggest and most understated issues limiting the career growth of women in independent advisory firms today.

So whether you are interested in learning more about how large firms can serve multiple niche markets, how to best structure teams to grow and develop talent, or are interested in how non-revenue-producing employees can progress to executive leadership positions in an advisory firm, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

Why Households With Significant Debt Tend Not To Pay It Down

April 4, 2018 07:35 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: General Planning

One considerable (and unfortunately common) challenge for financial planners is getting clients to focus on the goals they ought to focus on from a purely financial perspective, despite the psychological and behavioral biases which may direct their attention elsewhere. For instance, many households overemphasize accumulating assets (when they should be paying down debt), or overemphasize paying down debt (when they should be accumulating assets). To further complicate things, household preferences for accumulating assets versus paying down debt can sometimes shift in a seemingly confusing manner. However, an interesting new line of research points to one seemingly irrelevant factor which can be lurking in the background and influencing how clients perceive their wealth: whether their total net worth is positive or negative.

In this guest post, Dr. Derek Tharp – a Kitces.com Researcher, and a recent Ph.D. graduate from the financial planning program at Kansas State University – examines research on how our net worth may influence our perceptions of and preferences for holding assets and debt, and particularly the tendency to prefer having more assets when our net worth is negative, but less debt when our net worth is positive.

Mental accounting is a key concept of behavioral finance, which refers to the ways in which we mentally categorize assets, transactions, and other financial information in our heads. In theory, all of our resources should be fungible – dollars are dollars, regardless of what (liquid) account they’re in – but in practice, this is not how we typically behave. A study by Abigail Sussman and Eldar Shafir explores one particular form of mental accounting – the ways we tend to categorize assets and debt based on our net worth. By presenting participants with financial profiles that were equivalent in net worth but varying in the structure of their balance sheets, the researchers found that people tend to prefer having more assets when net worth is negative, but less debt when net worth is positive. For instance, despite the fact that net worth is actually the same -$100,000 in both scenarios, households tend to indicate a preference for having $100,000 in assets and $200,000 in debt over just $10,000 in assets and $110,000 in debt. However, if the assets and liabilities in the scenario above were reversed (i.e., net worth was positive $100,000 instead), then households would tend to prefer simply paying down their debt (even if it means having less in liquid assets)!

And this finding is notable, as it has several important implications from a financial planning perspective. For instance, it can help explain why people struggling with debt tend to accumulate assets and not pay down their debt, even if they're keeping cash in a 0.25%-yield savings accounts while compounding 22% credit card interest rates. Additionally, this may be why affluent clients who can afford lots of leverage still often want to pay down their mortgage. Which, ironically, may mean that the people who can afford to "prudently" use leverage tend to eschew it, while those who can least afford leverage tend to engage in high-debt-profile behaviors that may actually amplify financial fragility! Further, preferences may seem to shift suddenly, particularly as households pay down student debt and begin to move into positive net worth territory, which may (or may not) align with what they should actually be focusing on. And for those who enter positive net worth territory quickly, there may be an overemphasis on paying down debt relative quickly (now that they "can"), rather than saving into investment accounts which may grow at a higher rate in the long-run.

Ultimately, the key point is to acknowledge that seemingly irrelevant factors (such as a household’s net worth) can influence how households perceive their financial situation, the decisions they make as a result, and their willingness to keep accumulating assets (while not paying down the debt) versus liquidating assets to reduce their debt profile as well. As a result, the way we as financial planners communicate with clients and frame these discussions can have a big impact on whether clients do (or do not) ultimately adopt our recommendations. Which means it's important to understand the factors which may be lurking in the background and influencing client behavior, even if those factors should (in theory) be irrelevant to a client's behavior!

#FASuccess Ep 066: Turbocharging Inorganic Growth With Outside Capital To Fund Mergers & Acquisitions with Adam Birenbaum

April 3, 2018 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome, everyone! Welcome to the 66th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Adam Birenbaum. Adam is the CEO of Buckingham Strategic Wealth and BAM Advisor Services, a combination of wealth management firm and TAMP platform that oversees more than $30 billion of assets under management.

What's unique about Adam, though, is that he took over as the CEO of the Buckingham companies just over 10 years ago at the age of just 32, when the company was "only" $6 billion of AUM, and has nearly quintupled its size since then, as one of the youngest CEOs of any major advisory firm.

In this episode, we talk in depth about the Buckingham and BAM growth strategy, particularly on how a major investment by Focus Financial has helped to power the firm's growth, giving Buckingham access to capital from Focus at 0% interest rates to fund its acquisitions (because Focus ultimately profits from the growth as an owner anyway), and the way Adam and Buckingham have been able to leverage the capital to accelerate their inorganic growth.

We also talk about the actual structure of Buckingham and BAM itself, why Buckingham has chosen to grow offices in multiple locations, how BAM Advisor Services aims to work with advisory firms by providing what they call a "Turnkey Wealth Management Platform" that provides back office services but does not require its advisors to use standardized investment models, and how the company is positioning itself for an increasingly competitive environment with threats from both low-cost robo-advisors and also large financial services firms like Schwab, Fidelity, and especially Vanguard getting into the advisory business.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Adam talks about what it's like to be the CEO of a $30 billion AUM firm, where he focuses his own time as a leader in the business, and why he believes that strategy is important, but the real determinant of the most successful advisory firms of the future will be all about the firm's ability to execute, and deliver on the client experience.

So whether you are interested in learning more about using outside capital to fund mergers and acquisitions, how you may be able to utilize a Turnkey Wealth Management Platform in your business, or are simply interested in what it's like to be a CEO of a $30 billion AUM firm, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

The True (Hidden) Costs Of Migrating Data To New Financial Planning Software

March 26, 2018 07:01 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Technology & Advisor FinTech

As we live in the "Golden Age" of advisor fintech, the number of great products to help financial advisors increase the value they deliver to clients continues to expand. Yet, an unfortunate reality of switching from one technology solution to another is that such changes can often come with substantial switching costs, both in terms of the financial costs that might be incurred during the process, and also the costs of the time and effort that must be invested by staff and advisors in order to get data transferred to the new tool and the entire team up to speed on using it. And when it comes to financial planning software, these costs can be even higher, as planning software generally doesn't have an export functionality needed for migrating data from one program to another, and the required training of advisory staff is higher relative to some other types of technology (e.g., CRM and performance reporting software), since advisors increasingly need to be able to confidently use planning software "live" in the client meeting in order to not undermine their credibility with clients.

In this guest post, financial planner Matt Cosgriff shares his perspective on BerganKDV Wealth Management's recent transition from MoneyGuidePro to eMoney, including their lessons learned, how to build an internal transition team, tools for "gamifying" the process, and how the transition can actually serve as a great training opportunity for both advisors and administrative staff. As Matt notes, a successful transition is crucial not only for preserving your existing work for clients, but also understanding how much variation exists between the results of your old software and your new software and why, so that you can effectively use your new software going forward and communicate any different outcomes to clients.

So if you’re contemplating a transition from one financial planning software program to another, or perhaps are just interested in how you can incentivize staff to make progress on a large goal by "gamifying" the process, I hope that you find today’s guest post and the insights from BerganKDV's transition from MoneyGuidePro to eMoney helpful!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (March 17-18)

March 16, 2018 02:34 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the big news that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against the Department of Labor and its fiduciary rule, and moved to vacate the DoL fiduciary rule entirely... with the caveat that a separate decision from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals this week upheld the fiduciary rule, setting the table for a potential final showdown in the Supreme Court, and creating even greater uncertainty about the fiduciary rule in the meantime. Also in the news this week was the revelation that the SEC's own fiduciary rule proposal may be coming soon – sometime in the second quarter – and its likely to focus more not just on fiduciary disclosures, but also whether advisors and brokers need to be clearer with their titles.

From there, we have several practice articles this week, including: how to conduct effective staff/team meetings (which are especially important as your team grows!); why "compensation" problems with employees are rarely about compensation alone, and effective employee retention is about the more holistic job opportunity and offering; why rearranging your office space (and who sits where) can spur creativity and innovation in the business (albeit at the risk of impairing productivity); and a look at what it will take in the future to be a true "destination" advisory firm (for both future clients, and future employees).

We also have a few articles on retirement planning, from a look at planning strategies to discuss with clients in their 50s when they're still 5-10 years away from the retirement transition (or in the home stretch to saving enough to achieve it), to recent research that finds a disturbing spike in the mortality rate (especially for men) upon reaching age 62 and becoming eligible for Social Security, and a look at the pros and cons of so-called "bucketing" (or time-segmentation) strategies for retirement portfolios.

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of household spending and cash flow: the first looks at the phenomenon of "lifestyle creep", and why it's so important to establish systems that aim to save your future raises going forward (so they don't automatically creep into your lifestyle spending); a fascinating study that finds, due in large part to how judgmental society is of the rich, that most affluent people actually try to hide their wealth and are hypersensitive to being judged about it); and the last looks at how, because money is often a major point of contention between couples in a marriage, that one of the best ways to reduce marital conflict over spending is to give each spouse a guilt-free "allowance" that they can spend on any discretionary expense they want (without fear of being judged!).

Enjoy the "light" reading!

#FASuccess Ep 063: Overcoming A Material U-4 Disclosure To Build A $125M AUM Advisory Firm with Kevin Kroskey

March 13, 2018 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome, everyone! Welcome to the 63rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Kevin Kroskey. Kevin is the founder of True Wealth Design, an independent RIA based on Akron, Ohio, that has grown to nearly $125M in assets under management with 6 employees serving 160 clients, built over the span of the last 10 years.

What's unique about Kevin's practice, though, is that he's been able to persevere in building his practice despite what for many advisors would have been a "catastrophic" setback in his early career... the fact that in his mid-20s, just a few months after his first job at a broker-dealer, he went to prison for 17 months after the law finally caught up with him for selling ecstasy back when he was in college.

In this episode, we talk in depth about Kevin's journey, from starting out as a high school physics teacher straight out of college, to switching into the financial services industry by working at that independent broker-dealer in his mid-20s, then finding his entire career and life brought to a halt by his criminal conviction for selling ecstasy – despite the fact he had already stopped and left that life behind several years earlier and how he began the process of trying to rebuild a path back into the financial services industry after he got out, starting with a 3-year ordeal with multiple appeals just to try to get a license to become a mortgage loan officer as an ex-con, before finally switching to hang his shingle has an independent RIA.

We also talk about how Kevin actually built his advisory business, by falling back on his early teaching skills to begin doing local adult education classes on personal finances, borrowing money with a bank loan to be able to send out 10,000 mailers at a time to get participants in the class, and then slowly and steadily accumulating a client and asset base over time, supplemented in more recent years by trying to further establish himself more visibly in his community, including by writing a regular financial column in a local community newspaper.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Kevin shares his advice about what any advisor can do to try to persevere through the highly adverse challenges that can hit us in life, and how he handles the situation today when prospective clients still sometimes ask him about a crime that is still a felony disclosure on his U-4, despite being completely unrelated to the financial services industry, for events that happened in his life nearly 20 years ago now.

So whether you are interested in learning more about visibly establishing yourself within your community through writing, how advisors can address talking through disclosures with prospective clients, or are interested in how advisors can persevere through highly adverse challenges more generally, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

The 26 Steps I Took To Set Up And Launch My Own Independent RIA

March 12, 2018 07:01 am 5 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

One of the virtues of working in a broker-dealer or especially a wirehouse environment is that the firm makes a number of decisions for you as the advisor, greatly expediting the process of being able to quickly launch your business and focus on working with your clients. The bad news is that in at least some cases, it's much less expensive to simply set up your own advisory firm instead - especially if your focus is on charging AUM or other financial planning fees, such that there's no need to have a broker-dealer affiliation in the first place. The caveat, however, is that breaking away to become an independent RIA isn't "just" about the economics of working under a broker-dealer (or as a dual-registered advisor with the corporate RIA) versus your own RIA; it's also about going through the actual steps to actually create and launch your own RIA, because being independent truly means it's your responsibility to handle the setup process and make all the technology, platform, and other vendor decisions! Which for many advisors, is a process that can feel downright overwhelming.

But the reality is that many financial advisors have successfully made the transition, and it isn't necessary to reinvent the wheel with each breakaway to independence. In this guest post, Aaron Hattenbach of Rapport Financial, an RIA that he founded when successfully breaking away from Merrill Lynch in late 2016 (while retaining 100% of his clients), shares his own experience in breaking away from a wirehouse early in his career to go independent, including a detailed, step-by-step overview of his process to successfully launching his RIA.

Ultimately, the process does take a lot of work, from creating the legal RIA entity and going through the compliance registration process, to establishing your business bank and credit card accounts and getting a logo and business cards, setting up your initial technology platform (from a web domain and email provider, to your CRM and portfolio performance reporting tools), to choosing your initial vendors from your RIA custodian, and your office space! Unfortunately, the pressure to get launched quickly - especially when changing firms for a fast-launch RIA - means that a few mistakes may be inevitable, and Aaron does note the areas where, in retrospect, he could have better avoided unnecessary expenses, kept start-up costs lower, and curated better technology and service providers for his firm. But for any advisors who are serious about breaking away and forming their own independent RIA, Aaron's overview should provide much food for thought on your own breakaway, as well as some things you may want to consider in order to navigate it successfully!