In a recent article for the Journal of Financial Planning, Gretchen Halpin wrote on the importance of networking.
It’s hard to go more than a few days at a time without seeing in an industry periodical or one of your social media feeds that Firm A has been acquired by Firm X in a deal worth a zillion dollars. It’s not hard to understand why. In our business, scalability and sustainability go hand in hand, and one way to get a lot of scalability in a short time frame is to buy it.
But it’s also important to remember that the heartbeat of the financial advisory business is and always will be our interactions with clients on a personal, one-on-one basis. It really is true, as some have phrased it, that “business happens at the speed of trust.” For that reason, even firms that are growing through acquisition should care—and care deeply—about organic growth: attracting new clients and their assets to your firm and bringing in new assets from existing clients. In fact, according to a study by InvestmentNews, from 2019 to 2022, 41.5 percent of all increases in RIAs’ AUM came from organic growth.1 And if you’re just starting with a recently launched RIA firm, organic growth is essential—it’s your bread and butter. So, how can you build a strategy that allows you the sort of growth that can be maintained over time and that can serve as the foundation for yet more growth?
Read more in the article in the Journal of Financial Planning.