Growth: a constant drumbeat in our industry. The promise to help advisors and firms realize it reverberates from every corner—B/Ds, practice management, tech providers, coaches, marketing and now AI.
Yet despite endless efforts, the stark truth is that traditional growth strategies—greater efficiency, enhanced tech, better sales techniques and more marketing have fallen short. Meaningful organic growth remains elusive for most advisors despite a growing demand for advice.
So Why?
The data offers compelling insights.
While organic growth evades most advisors, McKinsey & Company, Tiburon and Fidelity all reveal a consistent pattern: a small subset is realizing significant growth.
-
McKinsey reports that 10% of advisors are achieving double-digit organic growth
-
Tiburon shows that 6% of RIAs capture 71% of net new assets
-
Fidelity finds that 17% of advisors report they are “truly thriving
Maybe this is just a classic 80/20 story?
Not quite. Because the issue isn’t just about new client acquisition. Many advisors also fail to captivate the clients they already have—let alone retain assets across generations.
-
65% of clients have more than one advisor
-
Industry NPS still hovers around 50
-
70% of surviving spouses switch advisors
-
81% of next-gen millionaires say they’ll leave their parents’ advisor
This data reveals that the issue isn’t just about attracting new clients. Still, many advisors also fail to fully captivate the ones they already have, let alone retain assets across generations. All combined a stark picture for growth, whether through new clients, wallet share or generational retention.
So why is it that some advisors thrive while most don’t?
The Hard Truth: Value.
Much of what advisors deliver isn’t that compelling—or, in a word, valuable—in the eyes of today’s consumer.
Research from J.D. Power supports this: only 14% of advisors deliver a “highly valuable” experience. These findings correlate with McKinsey’s and Tiburon’s growth data and are aligned with wallet share and generational retention.
And as an industry, we are falling short on delivering value.
Practice Management 2.0: Advisor Performance
Advisor performance is the predominant way value is created, how advisors engage clients and how they deliver advice. It is distinct from traditional practice management, which often focuses more on efficiency, tech, sales and marketing. All are important, yet advisor performance, more than any other lever, drives growth at scale.
Yet most still rely on outdated engagement models rooted in sales. The familiar “discover and prescribe” approach is inherently transactional and opaque—and, as the data shows, creates limited value.
In contrast, clients assign far greater value to a more collaborative and transparent approach. This co-creative process results in highly personalized plans and clients who make well-informed, confident decisions.
This isn’t a tweak in process. It’s a wholesale shift in how advisors create value by moving from a sales process to an advice process, a.k.a. modern financial advice.
While some advisors find this instinctual, the advice process is a teachable competency. It’s repeatable and scalable across teams and firms, whether for new entrants and G2 or for the most seasoned advisors.
And how advisors engage clients and create value may be our industry’s most underleveraged growth lever.
We Perform to What We Measure
But process alone isn’t enough. We must also use modern metrics to assess better how well advisors create value.
Traditional metrics like client satisfaction and NPS fail to predict growth or diagnose value gaps.
Metrics like the Relationship Quality Index provide a clearer view of loyalty, advocacy, and perceived value. Combined with frameworks like J.D. Power’s, these measures offer a more accurate and actionable picture of advisor performance.
And the most potent insights are local. You can’t manage to the industry average. Advisors and firms need to know how their clients experience their value.
What Now?
Our industry’s growth challenge impacts everyone, from the value of the experience clients realize to advisor success and multiple expansion to enterprise value.
If we want to solve for growth, we have to solve for measurable, durable, client-defined value.
And that doesn’t come from efficiency gains, tech stacks, or marketing campaigns. It comes from rethinking how we engage, how we deliver advice, and what we measure.
The data is clear: the firms and advisors that grow are those that build deep, valuable relationships through a collaborative advice process.
That’s not a marginal improvement. It’s a fundamental shift.
Organic growth isn’t elusive because it’s complex. It’s elusive because we keep solving for the wrong problem.
It’s time to change that.
#Organic #Growth #Elusive