More wirehouse blues?

So put yourself in the shoes of the CEO of a nationally branded wirehouse. You have 15,000 to 20,000 advisers spread across all 50 states. As a senior executive of a publicly traded corporation, your mandate is to grow your business to give a return to shareholders (which includes yourself and your entire salesforce and management staff). I'm told by senior executives that big firms will have approximately 2% attrition, regardless of market conditions. These are the advisers who are leaving the industry: Death, disability, retirement, termination for HR or compliance reasons. So, for example, with 15,000 as a starting point, you are now down 300 advisors. Count on it. No problem, you say, you can recruit that many in a year. But because you are big, and your advisors are known as among the most productive in the industry, everybody is recruiting against you. Not only are your peer big firms gunning for you, but the regionals are going after you in their strongholds. Frustrated by the cost cutting efforts that you needed to impose to survive the worst markets in generations, advisers of all sizes are deciding to go out on their own. In past years, only the advisers who could not get offers from other firms went independent. With your brand tainted and the technology and product advantage that you once enjoyed diminished, advisers of all sizes are setting up their own shops or are exploring new firms and alternative models. You realize that you can attract your share of recruits from your peer group, but your peer group is shrinking just like you are. Your war for talent used to have just one “front”: You went toe-to-toe with your direct competitors, winning some and losing some. You still are fighting those battles, but at the same time, you are beset by dozens of smaller competitors chipping away bit by bit. And very, very few of THOSE advisers, from the smaller firms, whether regional or independent, new or old, are even considering you as an option. In 2009, over 6,000 wirehouse advisers changed firms, with 4000 of them choosing to go to another wirehouse. In 2010, through August, only 2000 wirehouse advisers moved, but only half of them moved to another wirehouse. The total number of wirehouse advisers in the industry has not grown in over ten years. You have jump started your training program. You count the rookies and, indeed, all personnel who are registered when you give analysts your headcount numbers, but conveniently reduce the denominator in the equation by excluding those same rookies and registered personnel when you compute your average production. You increase your recruiting packages to increase your headcount numbers because you have no other competitive advantage to sell. What is your value proposition, today and in the future, that will attract advisers from all channels to your model, and to your firm?