The Power 25 Elite: Charles "Chip" Roame

Age: 34

Founder and managing principal, Tiburon (Calif.) Strategic Advisors LLP

Power play: He teamed up with Rydex Global Advisors in Rockville, Md., to launch AdvisorBenchmarking.com, which helps advisers to compare their operations with other firms’.

Mr. Roame started his consulting firm in 1998 to fill what he says was a void – a focus on research.

Tiburon provides strategy consulting and market research to financial service firms. “The brokerage and investment industry has historically done little research about their consumers and their intermediaries, meaning the advisers and brokers who represent those consumers,” says Mr. Roame.

Before forming Tiburon, Mr. Roame was a business strategist at Charles Schwab & Co. He began his career at New York consultancy McKinsey & Co.

His new website compares a firm’s operations with those of others, based on benchmarks developed from a 50-question survey completed by 250 advisers. The goal is to survey 3,000 firms.

Bottom line: “I knew Chip from his work at Schwab. He is an extremely knowledgeable person in the industry, both on an everyday and long-term basis,” says a client, Bob Smoke, president of Seton/Smoke Capital Management in San Francisco.