The RIA channel is experiencing rapid change. Rock stars in the space, like Ron Carson, Michael Kitces, Ric Edelman and Angie Herbers, are helping to define the transformation.
For Ron Carson, there's more change than meets the eye — though his recent beard has attracted plenty of attention. The Carson Group, which he leads and includes Carson Group Coaching, Carson Group Partners and Carson Wealth, switched its broker-dealer affiliation from LPL Financial to Cetera Financial about a year ago.
Carson regularly imparts his best practices on how advisory firms can grow. One of his top tips is "to have a simple message, [which] trumps 'value proposition' every day." Rely on partnerships for important operations, like technology, rather than go it alone, he also says, and focus on being the disruptor and not the disrupted.
"If you're not moving as fast as the outside world, you're going to go away," the wealth manager shared recently on Twitter. "Remember, the price of progress is the pain of change, but a little pain is good!"
Michael Kitces writes "The Nerd's Eye View" blog, is a partner and research director of Pinnacle Advisory Group and a co-founder of XY Planning Network. Advisors turn to the popular blogger and speaker for everything from tech updates to tax analysis; they also count on him to push the envelope.
"Risk tolerance is about a heck of a lot more now than just 'does your investment not grossly violate your time horizon and your willingness to take risk?'" Kitces said during a webinar last year.
Advisors should consider linking clients' investment accounts with risk-tolerance software, for instance, which "gets us to the high-touch conversation faster than we did before," he points out. They also should keep financial planning front, right and center: "There are too many very large, very scaled-up asset managers and direct-to-consumer companies."
