Solving the succession planning problem for RIAs

Well, certainly, there's a lot of firms that are looking to acquire in rollups, you know, smaller firms. But typically, these are mega-firms that are looking for other RIA firms that have $100, $200, $300 million under management. There's really not a lot of good options for smaller RIAs that have $30 to $50 million under management that want the resources and efficiencies that everybody else needs to compete today. Certainly, the industry is changing, and you need a lot of resources to compete today. Compliance has gotten more difficult. Technology solutions have gotten, you know, a lot more difficult, require a lot more resources. Marketing is really much more sophisticated than it used to be, and so, advisers are trying to wear every hat, and it's really difficult to do that. So, when they partner with someone like us, they can get back to focusing on financial planning, acquiring new clients and maintaining client relationships. Ultimately, it's always about what's best for the client. Yeah, I think this is actually a really great succession planning solution because there's a lot of advisers who are looking for retirement plan, but they did not want to fully get out of the business. They just wanna slow down a little bit, and if they did not have to build and manage their own portfolios, they didn't have to build and manage their own website, they didn't have to-- they had help with compliance and marketing and everything else, and they just needed to maintain existing relationships, they probably could scale back the hours that they're working, and they'd be happy to do that for another, you know, 10 or 15 years as long as they could, you know, travel to Europe for a month because they can forward their phones to us. We're managing the clients. We know the clients. So, I think, for people who really want to start thinking about succession, it's really a perfect fit. Our goal is never to be the biggest RIA firm. We'd like to bring on a couple of advisers a year. We wanna make sure that we have a time to fully integrate their businesses, to give them the support that they need, to make sure they understand the technology and how to access all the resources on our team. So we're just looking to grow by a couple of advisers per year. We're advisers ourselves. We're bringing on our own clients as well. And in the next five years, we figure we'll have about $500 million under management.