Breakaway advisor praises smooth, 'no BS' exit from Commonwealth

Commonwealth Financial Network advisors considering defecting from the firm amid its $2.7 billion sale to independent broker-dealer giant LPL Financial could depart knowing their former network will support a smooth transition, according to one advisor who spent seven years affiliated with Commonwealth before launching his own $400 million RIA in July. 

“They've been nothing but amazing — no BS,” said Adam Spiegelman. “They have been bent over backward, saying let me put you in touch with this person, here's the off-boarding team. Do you want your data? No problem. I even had to call them back within a day or two of transitioning, because there was a little bit of snag with some of the email servers like, and they were so helpful.”

This was not Spiegelman’s first time spinning out of an independent broker-dealer, but it was a far better transition than his first move. Adam’s father, Alan Spiegelman, founded the practice in 1989 as a unit of Northwestern Mutual before shifting under Commonwealth in 2018. 

“I had quite an experience when I moved from Northwestern Mutual, that was very different. I had, I don't want to say PTSD, but from the last transition I did, I wasn't sure how friendly and outgoing they [Commonwealth] would want to be,” said Spiegelman, who took over his practice from his father in 2014. 

His new SEC-registered RIA Spiegelman Wealth Management uses Fidelity Institutional Wealth Management Services as its main custodian. The RIA’s tech stack also includes Black Diamond, Wealthbox as its CRM, and financial planning software RightCapital. 

“A lot of these companies we've started to or we had used for many years at Commonwealth, and now we get to go direct with the vendor. One of the challenges was dealing directly with the vendors, and understanding that maybe you're not going to have as much negotiating power because you're not a huge organization,” said Spiegelman. 

LPL Financial, whose stock hit a record-high last month, recently reaffirmed its confidence in hitting its goal of keeping roughly 90% of the 3,000 advisors who worked at Commonwealth. While Spiegelman will not be one of them, he feels “energized” by his move to go independent and reclaiming autonomy for making business decisions. 

“I don't have a corporate compliance culture telling you what I can and can't do, ultimately it's up to me to be responsible for making sure that we are in compliance, and I'm okay with that,” he said. “Maybe there's an esoteric investment that a particular client wants, we can do that research and provide our standpoint without having a compliance department tell us, 'yes or no.'”