Why I traded transactional sales for fee-based financial planning

In 2022, I audited my own business the way I do every year, and what I found broke my heart a little. My planning manager was still in the office at six o'clock on a Friday night, working through fee-based financial planning cases for prospects who might never become clients. I had known him since high school. Watching him give away hours he would never get back, for people who hadn't committed to anything, was the moment I knew our process had to change.

Why free advice isn't actually free

I've coached hundreds of advisors, and I see the same two failure patterns in veterans who've been in the business more than a decade. Some get stuck and quietly decide they've hit their ceiling. Others get comfortable, which is worse, because comfort doesn't feel like a problem until the numbers stop moving. In my case, we were keeping 20 to 30 fact finders a month under the old model, running full discovery meetings for prospects who often didn't implement anything. The work was free, but the cost was real: my team's time, my own bandwidth, and a pipeline that looked busy without being productive.

That's a recent InvestmentNews analysis of advisors raising planning fees points to something I learned the hard way: pricing signals value. When you charge next to nothing for a comprehensive financial plan, ultra-high-net-worth prospects don't read it as generous. They read it as evidence you have nothing worth paying for. One peer in my study group put it bluntly: don't be so cheap that you come off like a scam. That reframed how I thought about fee-based planning entirely.

What the discovery process actually looks like

The old model taught us to dive straight into a fact finder on the first call. I now believe that's a mistake if you're building a genuine fee-based planning relationship. Our process starts with a short introductory call, no more than 30 minutes, that's purely about mutual fit. If there's alignment, we send a short list of documents to review before a deep-dive discovery meeting, typically 60 to 90 minutes. Only after that meeting, once we understand a prospect's full financial picture, do we quantify the value we can add and name a fee tied to it.

This isn't just my firm's process. Cerulli's projection that most advisors will operate under fee-based models by 2026 reflects an industry-wide shift away from transactional, product-first relationships. Since restructuring around this framework in 2022, our fee-based planning revenue has grown from roughly $6,000 to more than $1 million, and firm-wide revenue has grown from $450,000 in 2017 to more than $6 million today. Those numbers aren't the point, though. The point is that we now keep about eight fact finders a month instead of 25, and we close a materially higher share of them, because we no longer spend hours qualifying prospects who were never going to move forward.

“When you're cheap, high-net-worth clients don't see a bargain. They see evidence you have nothing worth paying for.”

Where artificial intelligence fits, and where it doesn't

I believe artificial intelligence will replace the advisors whose value proposition begins and ends with a product. Clients can already ask an AI model to compare investment products, weigh the pros and cons, and estimate compensation faster than most of us can explain it face to face. What AI won't do is call a client unprompted to flag a gap in their tax return, or connect a business owner's real estate plans to a bonus depreciation strategy before they think to ask. That kind of proactive, relationship-driven advice is exactly what a fee-based planning model is built to deliver, and it's the reason I don't believe in racing competitors to the bottom on fees. The advisors who compete on relationship and process, not price, are the ones who'll still be standing.

It's a point another advisor's account of shifting from AUM to planning-based fees makes as well: planning-based compensation forces a focus on problem-solving rather than simply managing what a client already has. I recently spoke to thousands of advisors at Northwestern Mutual's 2026 Annual Meeting about this shift. The discussion resonated strongly with veteran advisors who found themselves having to rebuild long-standing processes in response to a changing industry.

None of this happened overnight. My first year in fee-based planning, we collected $6,000 in fees. I made plenty of mistakes before the process worked. But the industry's retention problem, and the growing client demand for transparent, education-first advice, tells me the shift toward fee-based planning isn't a trend advisors can wait out. It's a rebuild worth doing deliberately, one fact finder at a time.