Informal plans for growth are breaking down at scale. Here’s what some of the most successful firms are doing about it.
Most financial advisors and firms want to grow. Fewer have a clear, repeatable strategy for how that growth actually happens.
In many firms, growth is still driven by individual effort, market tailwinds, or opportunistic decisions rather than by design. That can work—at least early on.
But as firms scale, particularly into the multi-billion-dollar range, that informal model starts to break down. Growth becomes episodic, and initiatives compete for attention—and no single person truly owns the outcome.
That inflection point is why more firms are appointing Chief Growth Officers (CGOs). This is not about fancy titles or “keeping up with the Joneses.” It is a structural response to firms that have outgrown informal, founder-led growth and need a more deliberate and repeatable engine.
Scale Changes the Job
At smaller RIAs, growth can be managed informally. At larger firms, that approach breaks down.
As RIAs grow, they stop behaving like practices and start operating like enterprises. They have multiple growth levers, competing demands on capital, and (particularly for firms backed by private equity) little margin for stalled growth. Organic growth, recruiting, and acquisitions are all important contributors to sustainable growth, and each draws from a leadership team’s attention.
At that stage, growth is not just about adding clients or closing the next transaction. It is about coordination, prioritization, and execution. That is where the Chief Growth Officer becomes relevant.
The Misconceptions Around the Chief Growth Officer Role
The CGO role is sometimes dismissed as a rebranded head of marketing or business development. That view misses the point.
Firms that are serious about scale are hiring CGOs to formalize accountability for growth. While execution still lives across the organization, growth requires a single leader responsible for setting priorities and driving follow-through. Without that clarity, growth efforts stall and results become inconsistent.
The CGO role exists to put real ownership around the growth mandate and to bring discipline to how a firm expands.
As Kayla Kennelly, Chief Growth Officer at Opal Wealth Advisors, put it:
“The CGO role is gaining traction because firms are realizing that sustainable growth requires intention, structure, and accountability. Having someone wake up every day focused on scale is an investment long-term-minded firms are starting to make. It also frees up capacity in founder-led firms, especially wirehouse breakaways, so they can focus on vision, their top clients, and the next phase of the business.”
That observation captures what many leadership teams are experiencing in real time.
What the Role Actually Looks Like
In practice, Chief Growth Officers tend to fall into one of three profiles, depending on the firm’s strategy and maturity.
- Some CGOs focus primarily on organic growth. Their mandate centers on improving advisor productivity, refining client experience, strengthening referral systems, sharpening brand positioning, and ensuring that marketing and business development efforts translate into measurable results.
- Others are oriented toward corporate development and inorganic growth. These CGOs focus on sourcing acquisition and recruiting opportunities, responding to investment banker led processes, overseeing diligence, negotiating economics, and sitting on top of integration. Many firms discover that doing a single deal is not the hard part. Making those deals accretive and integrated and having a repeatable strategy is where value is created or lost.
- The most sophisticated firms take a hybrid approach. In those cases, the CGO sits over both organic and inorganic growth, recognizing that these are not separate strategies. They compete for capital, leadership attention, and integration bandwidth. When aligned, they reinforce each other. When misaligned, they quietly erode enterprise value.
What We Are Seeing in the Market
Several scaled firms have recently made intentional Chief Growth Officer hires, each aligned with their specific growth priorities.
- The Mather Group appointed John Laurito as its first Chief Growth Officer, tasking him with accelerating client acquisition and driving organic AUM growth across a $14B platform.
- SEIA hired Schwab alum Matt Floit as the first Chief Growth Officer of the $30B firm, tasked with overseeing business development, driving organic growth opportunities, and strengthening its existing RIA referral network partnerships with Schwab and Fidelity.
- Dynasty Financial Partners created the role and named Tim Oden, former head of business development for Schwab Advisor Services, to the position to support strategic growth initiatives.
- Gries Financial Partners brought on Carina Diamond to shape growth strategy across both its RIA and parent company, aligning organic expansion, recruiting, and broader corporate development efforts. It’s a role that was so important it became a stepping-stone to her elevation to CEO.
Different firms, different mandates, but the same underlying realization: Growth can no longer be treated as a side responsibility.
Where Firms Get This Wrong
Hiring a Chief Growth Officer does not automatically solve growth challenges. When the role fails, the reasons are usually predictable.
Sometimes the CGO has responsibility without authority. Sometimes incentives are not aligned with measurable outcomes. Sometimes the mandate is unclear, whether the focus is top line growth, margin expansion, enterprise value, or all three. In other cases, founders are not ready to relinquish their role as the primary driver of growth.
In those situations, the role becomes symbolic rather than strategic.
The Bigger Signal
The rise of the Chief Growth Officer reflects a broader maturation of the RIA industry. As firms scale, specialization follows. COOs professionalize operations. CIOs institutionalize investment management. CGOs bring rigor and accountability to growth.
This is how durable enterprises are built.
The firms that get this right will not just grow faster. They will grow more predictably, with better margins, cleaner integration, and greater optionality when it comes time to monetize or transition ownership.
The question isn’t whether the Chief Growth Officer role is a fad. It’s whether a firm is ready to move beyond founder-led growth and build something that scales without relying on individual heroics.
