After 11 years at Edward Jones, Tennessee-based advisor Les Smith has departed to affiliate with LPL Financial and form Smith Complete Wealth with around $135 million in current assets.
Smith says he left Edward Jones in April with about $185 million in client assets, including roughly $125 million in fee-based accounts. He has already moved about $135 million to Smith Complete Wealth on LPL’s platform, with around $110 million of that in fee-based assets, and he expects to reach around $165 million in total client assets once all pending transfers and annuities arrive.
“LPL is anti cookie-cutter, which I love. My investment management style is that I'm big into individual equities, I'm not a big product guy,” Smith told InvestmentNews. “LPL has the tools and technology to be able to block trade, to hold more percentage of an individual equity, like an Apple, Amazon, Google, Tesla. If the client wants to own 15, 20, 30 percent of their portfolio in an individual equity, they're fine with it. So just having that flexibility, autonomy, discretionary trading is huge—that allows me to be a faster, more efficient advisor.”
Smith Complete Wealth’s team includes four support staff and one other advisor, Clay Mallard, who had been registered with Raymond James since 2022 after having previously met Smith while both worked at Edward Jones. Smith had joined Edward Jones in 2015 at 24 years old, after a baseball career that saw him get drafted in the 27th round by MLB’s Detroit Tigers in 2010 followed by two minor league seasons as an outfielder in the Tigers organization.
“I just felt like LPL was true independence. They allowed me to pick what financial planning software I wanted, what tax planning software I wanted. I didn't feel that LPL was going to get any handcuffs. My entire career, there's always been some sort of handcuff, and I didn't want any handcuffs,” said Smith. “I do love that LPL has that RIA channel that makes the transition easy and seamless in the future, if me and my team chose to go that route.”
Smith, a Tennessee native, “went knocking on doors for six years” to help grow his practice organically at Edward Jones in Spring Hill, a suburb about 30 miles south of Nashville. Upon his exit from Edward Jones, Smith says he was bringing in $1.525 million of production per year, ranked in the top 1,500 of 21,000 advisors at Edward Jones, and was top three in gross production for his region while servicing 430 households.
“I think Edward Jones was a great place to start for me, I think I needed that brand name behind me, but over time I just simply outgrew the firm,” said Smith, 36. “I had a burning desire to be able to do more for clients and be able to truly look out for their best interest, instead of hitting quotas.”
A report earlier this year from advisor recruiting firm Muriel Consulting found that advisor departures from Edward Jones increased to 1,458 in 2025, marking the St. Louis-based firm’s highest exit total in five years and a 35% increase from 2024. Edward Jones has also reduced its home-office employees while outsourcing support staff roles to India.
“I think [Edward Jones] tried to evolve in the past several years. The problem is they were just very slow to unveil the new things that they wanted. It was just very time-consuming. It was like trying to turn the Titanic,” said Smith. “When I left Edward Jones, even though I was in the top 1,500 [advisors] of the firm, they had to cater to the lowest common denominator. So a lot of stuff that rolled out, it was just delayed, and I was growing frustrated with that delayed rollout.”
During his minor-league baseball career in the Tigers organizations, Smith was teammates with future MLB stars such as Eugenio Suárez and Nick Castellanos. “I think a lot of people view failure as the end. For me, baseball calloused my mind in regards to failure. I'm numb to failure,” said Smith. “I'm not scared to knock on a door, pick up a phone, or have a tough conversation with the client.”
“I know it's a numbers game, and as long as I continue to have bats, all I need is to get three out 10 hits to be a Hall of Famer,” added Smith, who now coaches his son and other kids in the Spring Hill Little League.
“I view this business the same way, it's like my investment strategy. So many advisors I think are scared of individual equities, but it only takes a few equities to generate way more alpha than the S&P 500 delivers.”
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