Young advisors are making the move to RIAs, Rossby CEO says

Andrew Evans loves using metaphors to explain concepts. Not only does it make it fun, it also helps to paint a bigger picture.

The founder and CEO of Melbourne, Florida-based RIA Rossby Financial started in the financial wealth industry in 2004. He’s currently celebrating the one-year anniversary of Rossby, an RIA platform for independent advisors, which he founded a year ago Friday. Rossby currently has 10 advisors over six firms.

Evans has been fully independent since the age of 30, after getting a taste of the broker-dealer world.

“I had more fun playing the franchise mode of John Madden Football than playing the game,” he said. “How do we work through the draft? How do we work through the salary cap? How do we work through training camp? Now there's the season, I love that,” he says, comparing the general manager attitude.

“Working directly with talent to help them grow and expand is where I really thrived and found where I have the most fun and the most that I could do for people there,” Evans said.

He noted that he also has a “very strong attitude of being a GenXer.” It’s also one of the reasons he decided to go independent. “My defiance, my nature of thinking, with an attitude of, ‘No, I want to control my own destiny. I could do this on my own,’” Evans added.

The positive aspect of being an RIA, Evans says, is being able to look at any situation with an open mind, not being hamstrung by a specific product or set of rules that somebody else wrote for him.

“It's rewarding that these are the rules that I created, that the people that have joined me embrace those, and we collectively are going down a path of trying to change this paradigm of financial advice and how can we interact with people?” he says.

Having control of his own destiny is a double-edged sword, because it’s also one of the most challenging parts of being an RIA, Evans said.

While he still maintains a few of his private clients from his broker-dealer days and makes sure they’re taken care of, his book of business isn’t terribly large, he noted. It also helps to maintain a collaborative effort with other advisors.

“What I found in maintaining that book of business and not just turning it over to somebody, it's kept me in tune with what advisors are actively dealing with and what they have to go through from all areas of operations,” Evans says. “I can hear from advisors and what they're dealing with to get that user experience, but then I have my own user experience that I can then either confirm or double down on what they're saying, or I can give them direct ways of how I solved the problem.”

Clients who are seeking out financial services at Rossby range from those who have multimillion dollars' worth of assets and those who are paying a subscription for ongoing financial advice. Retirement planning, better income strategies and guidance for younger clients across their financial lives, including advice on employee benefits and how to best structure their new business, are the kinds of advice most sought after, Evans noted.

“My clients are getting what they want,” he said. “What we offer is a really nice platform for clients to be able to access their data or my advisors, providing them with really solid tools, so that they can provide that great advice and guidance. We still want to maintain, from the firm to the advisor, a solid partnership that says, ‘How can we be better? How do we get better?’”

Evans did a lot of research to come up with the name “Rossby.” Using the phrase “calm blue ocean,” he and his team tracked what makes a calm, blue ocean and the weather factors associated with that. They started with water, which led to waves, which led to turbulence.

“Turbulence makes journeys rough to deal with but in all areas, we can navigate around turbulence. Not 100 percent, but we can navigate around it. So how do we do that? What's the technology? … All that led us all the way back in time to a gentleman by the name of Carl Rossby, who is essentially the godfather of modern-day meteorology,” Evans said.

As for current trends in the RIA space, Evans noted a few things, including a push for the younger generation to go RIA-only. “More people are starting to just give up their Series 7 licenses,” he said.

Additionally, advisors are getting to a point of saturation with the technology their firm provides that comes across as “you're giving us too much stuff,” Evans said. “We're paying for too much stuff that we don't use.”

Name: Andrew J. Evans
Position: Founder and CEO
Company: Rossby Financial
Founded: 2023
AUM: $185 million