Growth Without Compromise: Building Around the Advisor Experience

Growth Without Compromise: Building Around the Advisor Experience

A conversation with Jason Diamond and Shannon Spotswood, CEO of RFG Advisory.

Jason Diamond:

Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for Financial Advisors. Today’s episode is Growth Without Compromise: Building Around the Advisor Experience. It’s a conversation with Shannon Spotswood, the CEO of RFG Advisory. I’m Jason Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors.

Mindy Diamond:

At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002.

Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual advisor transition report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport.

Jason Diamond:

The right partners make you better. The wrong ones can quietly hold you back. Most conversations about independence focus on platforms as providers of technology, service, or infrastructure. Shannon Spotswood sees them differently. She believes advisors should evaluate a platform the same way they’d evaluate any long-term business partner, by asking whether it will help them build the kind of firm they ultimately want to own. That’s exactly what we explore in this episode. Shannon is the CEO of RFG Advisory, a firm that has grown from a startup into one of the industry’s leading supportive independence platforms. Along the way, she’s developed a unique perspective on what advisors should be looking for beyond economics and technology, and why the right partner can accelerate growth, strengthen culture, and help create a business that’s built to last. It’s a conversation that goes well beyond advisor platforms. We explore why Shannon believes so strongly in growth without compromise, what private equity can look like when the partnership is aligned, why firms shouldn’t try to be everything to everyone, and how advisors can separate marketing promises from meaningful support.

We also spend time on a topic that comes up in nearly every transition conversation my team has with advisors, fear. Shannon shares her perspective on why outdated assumptions about making a move continue to hold advisors back and why asking better questions and demanding evidence instead of promises can fundamentally change the way advisors evaluate every opportunity in front of them. Whether you’re considering independence, evaluating your current platform, or simply thinking about what comes next for your business, I think you’ll find Shannon’s perspective both practical and though-provoking, especially the sage advice in her words, “Don’t tell me, show me.” There’s a lot to take away from this conversation, so let’s get to it. Shannon, thanks so much for joining me. Thrilled to have you here.

Shannon Spotswood:

It’s excellent to be here. I’m really looking forward to it.

Jason Diamond:

Me too. Let’s dive right in. I want to start with your background. You spent 20 years in San Fran as an investment banker, then as a portfolio manager at Symphony Asset Management before even touching the world of wealth management. So what made you walk away from, we’ll call it the institutional world and enter the world of wealth management?

Shannon Spotswood:

It’s a little bit of a circuitous story, but I’m going to take us on the short route. I fell in love with Wall Street as a teenager, so I knew I wanted to work on Wall Street. My dream job was actually the time that I spent at Symphony Asset Management. I was a hedge fund manager for them for six years running a long/short equity fund. I then had three children in three and a half years. The firm was acquired by Nuveen Investments, and we grew very large, and I was on this really interesting trajectory within the institutional investment management world. And somewhat of the unexpected happened to me in 2010, we’d come through the financial crisis. I looked around the room, I had these three young children, and having loved finance since a very early age, I couldn’t crawl on an airplane anymore.

I fell out of love with what was honestly my first love. And I made a pretty radical pivot. I left Symphony, the tallest building at the time in San Francisco, and I partnered with a woman, and we built a luxury children’s clothing company for the next three years. So about as radical of a move as you can make, a $30 billion firm, big team, a tremendous growth ahead of us to upside down boxes of infant cashmere in a garage that flooded when it rained. So I had my startup in a garage moment. And while I was running the children’s clothing company, my husband and I took a big leap of faith and decided to move from San Francisco to Birmingham, Alabama to get closer to family, to raise our kids in the South, and just manifest the life that we wanted.

In the third year of running the kids’ clothing business, we checked every box of our initial business plan, and I turned to my business partner and I was like, “Now what? Should we raise capital? Should we open stores? Should we diversify manufacturing?” And we realized this beautiful little luxury brand that we had created was exactly what it needed to be. And so we restructured the company and I punched out of that. And I spent, really for the first time in my life, about five months in deep contemplation. What was the first hedge fund that I was a part of in San Francisco, my tour of duty through investment banking as an analyst associate and helping them start an M&A group. This incredible decade that I’d spent at Symphony, and then this wild out of left field moment of building a luxury children’s clothing brand. And it had such an epiphany, Jason. And it was this, that I was on the ground floor of all of those businesses. And my aha moment was, oh my gosh, I’m a builder.

What I love more than anything is sitting at the intersection of talent and opportunity and what I think is truly one of life’s greatest gifts, and certainly I think the most fun way to live your professional life, which is building something. So I put my resume together and I titled… It wasn’t even really a job search. It was more, I was new to Birmingham. I wondered if there was anything I could be of service in being a part of building something. So I put that resume together and I titled it Seeking the Intangible. And I was looking for that opportunity of talent and building something bigger than myself. And it was through some networking with my across the street neighbor who went on to become a board member of RFG who thought all I did was sell his wife incredibly expensive clothing who networked me to Bobby White, who’s the founder of RFG.

And in the first 10 minutes of my conversation with Bobby, and I’ll tell you, both of us went into that meeting thinking it was going to be a filler meeting. He was doing a favor for a friend, and I had seen a little bit of the wealth management industry after Nuveen had acquired Symphony and was like, “That’s not really my bag. My jam is more on the institutional side of things.” And 10 minutes into our very first meeting, we both canceled the rest of our day, and we spent the next two and a half hours in his office having a conversation that really started with what if. What if we took RFG, which had been founded in 2003, and at the time was an OSJ with LPL, what if we took that business and we tore it all the way down to the ground? And we rebuilt it from the ground floor up to be a platform that is designed, that is intentionally engineered, to serve independent advisors? What would it look like to be a client experience company first, a technology company second, and a corporate RIA third?

And I’ll tell you, walking out of that meeting, I was like, “This is it. This is it. This is the intangible. This is an opportunity to really build something very special.” And that’s how I found myself sitting in this talking to you today.

Jason Diamond:

Wow. So there’s a lot to unpack there. Thank you for sharing. And you shared it with a degree of vulnerability that I personally, I have a two-year-old and a three-week-old as of this recording. So it resonates with me. I think it resonates with a lot of advisors, people in our, and honestly, probably most industries, the constant pull in multiple different directions. And I love what you called it, seeking the intangible. And it sounds like you didn’t go in with any preconceived notion about… Many of our guests, by the way, that is the case. They walk in saying, “I knew since I was two years old I wanted to be in wealth management. I wanted to help be a steward of client…” And I love that your circuitous route took you a different direction.

I want to talk more about the firm, and we’ll dive in on some of these elements of your background also. But before we do, you mentioned a little bit of, at a high level, what RFG is. Give me a little more context, types of advisors you serve, types of clients you serve. And if you don’t mind, provide some stats around size as well.

Shannon Spotswood:

Absolutely. So we are on a mission to help independent advisors build their business without compromise by driving organic growth to create enterprise value. And I share that because in our mission statement is the passion that links us all together, which is helping independent advisors build what they want to envision for their clients, what they believe is the best representation of their vision and their values. So we are a platform, a full turnkey platform for independent advisors. We talk about our services as a flywheel. There’s a very intentional interdependency from technology to marketing to compliance to talent to investment management to coaching, operations, transition services, and capital solutions. All of it is knit together very thoughtfully in order to be able to deliver to the advisors on our promise to help them operationalize and professionalize their business, to serve their clients and to generate that organic growth, which is what translates into enterprise value.

What is so cool about the RFG advisor community, and I think is really the thread that binds between our teams and our advisors team is this servant heart growth mindset that you find it in every nook and cranny of RFG and certainly within all of our advisor partners. So the advisor profile for us, we do tend to skew a little bit younger. Average age is 45 years old. Organic growth across all of our advisors is north of 10%. So we’re very focused and leaned in on growth. We do have advisors that are lifestyle. We talk about them as lifestyle scaling and enterprise, and they run all along that growth at growth spectrum, depending on what do they want to build in their lives, what is going to help them really realize their dreams? And we’ll talk about this a little bit and just the growth of the firm and what we’ve been building, but we are at $9 billion.

So it’s been a big run in 2026, as I say, 10 years of pre-game warmup to be able to really talk about that level of growth. So just knocking on the door of $10 billion and truly, Jason, I can tell you, I feel like we’re just getting started. I feel like we are just at the beginning of the J-curve as advisors are really realizing that their most valuable asset is their time and the amount of enterprise value that they can create being independent. There’s a lot of different flavors of that. We’ve got some incredibly well-capitalized and very strong competitors, but the collective awareness around this bull market for advice that we’re sitting at the very beginning of is shining such a bright light on what does it mean to be independent? What does it mean to be really supported by a partner who’s all in to help them win? And that’s where we find ourselves. And by design, that’s where we find ourselves.

Jason Diamond:

Yeah, and it’s an exciting time. I completely agree. The space, the vertical you’re in, probably as much or more than any other pocket of the industry. You took the words out of my mouth, the J-curve. I completely agree with the story you’re telling. There’s one component of your background that I do want to ask about, which is many RIAs, platforms, and the like, the leadership team is intentionally ex-advisors in their own right. So I’m curious, do you think of it as a benefit or maybe to what degree is it not a benefit that you have never been an advisor and served clients? I do love the idea that you’re a business builder and you’re helping advisors to build a business. That’s not lost on me, but I’m curious specifically about never having been an advisor.

Shannon Spotswood:

I think it is so critical that we were advisor-founded. What we like to say is we’re advisor-founded and professionally-led. Bobby founded the firm in 2003. We partnered in 2015. Our third partner, Rick Wedell, who’s our chief investment officer, managing partner, joined in 2016. So the three of us really co-founded the version of RFG that is-

Jason Diamond:

The right version.

Shannon Spotswood:

… expressed in the market today. But you’re a hundred percent right to double click on this. And I think it is such an important area for reflection for advisors in terms of where are their greatest skills? Where does their passion lie? And what are they interested in building? That very first day that I met Bobby, his telling of the story is he looked at my resume the morning that we were meant to meet, and he is like, “Well, why would I hire her? She could do my job.” And he often talked about that where you get to this point as an advisor where the business is scaling and growing. And we certainly are seeing this in a lot of the larger teams that we’re talking to and the relationships that we’re beginning to build within the pipeline of these advisors who were attracted to the industry because they wanted to serve clients and find themselves as accidental CEOs, COOs, their chief cook and bottle washer to advisor to all of these C-suite titles.

And it’s not amplifying their natural skillset and it’s not aligned with what is actually their passion for the business. So I give a tremendous amount of credit to Bobby for recognizing more than 10 years ago really what it would take and how he could align team around him and build partnerships around him to be able to maximize the impact that we can have for advisors. So that north star of keeping advisors front and center is truly our, it is woven into our DNA and it is our north star. So we are a client experience company by design. We talk about it all the time, whether it’s how we’re building our team, how we’re thinking about investing in technology, how we’re soliciting feedback for advisors. I always say one of our greatest strengths as an organization is we’re active listeners and then we actually execute on it.

Our best ideas come from our advisors, but you’ve got to have that posture as a firm that everything you do is orienting around how do we help advisors operationalize, professionalize, drive organic growth, and create enterprise value? And you can’t do it sometimes. You’re either all in, chips all in, only winning when your advisors win, and only having that lens of will this benefit the advisor and their team or not. It’s not something that you can just dip your toe in and out of. And I think RFG, having that foundation from which to always build is absolutely critical.

Jason Diamond:

Can I try and paraphrase or synthesize, and you tell me if I get this right? The pitch is something to the effect of, “We are really good at what we do. Let us take all the BS off of your plate so that you can go out and be an advisor. Service your client and prospect.” Do you find that story is resonating more over time? I mean, you’ve been with the firm now long enough to see this kind of cycle of movement towards independence. How has that story evolved over time? Do you find it easier to tell?

Shannon Spotswood:

Oh my gosh, without question. And I would even put a shorter term window on it. I would say in the last 12 to 15 months-

Jason Diamond:

Oh wow.

Shannon Spotswood:

… there has been a collective awakening by advisors, and I think there’s a lot of contributing factors to that. One is obviously as we are all aware, the majority of the industry is now private equity backed. There has been a real focus on the aggregator model, transitioning advisors into a W-2 model. And as that has played out and that financial engineering has translated into some incredible valuations and returns, there has also been simultaneously advisors picking their head up and like, wait a minute, I wanted to get independent so I could serve my clients in a way that I felt best represented my vision and my values. And I’m finding myself increasingly in a captive environment. All the while the technology is getting better, the valuations are getting larger, the ability to control both your branding and what that means for your family legacy is increasing.

So over the course of the last 15 to 18 months, that story has just, while it’s been there for a long time, the independent movement was obviously sparked more than, gosh, now 16, 20 years ago in earnest. Now it’s just the passion and the knowledge that advisors are showing up to conversations in recognizing I want more. I want to spend my time where I want to spend it. I want to serve more families. I want to be well-positioned for generational wealth transition. I want to own the enterprise value. I want to build my team and I want the best tech. And that to me is exactly why we’re at the beginning of this J-curve.

Jason Diamond:

Yeah, I think you nailed it. And I agree with you that this notion of independence is not a destination in and of… It’s too broad of a term I think to use. And there are plenty of advisors who either started at one version of independence and need something different now, or to your point, thought they were going independent only to realize perhaps there’s elements of the business that aren’t as independent as they realized. And that’s where I think a firm like RFG to me, it’s not an accident that your firm fills this niche. This was advisor demand driven. Advisors said explicitly and implicitly, “We want to be independent. We want to own our equity. We want to have control over the things we like, but we want a support partner that helps us with all the back office, the middle office, investment management, the flywheel,” as you call it.

Shannon Spotswood:

That’s right.

Jason Diamond:

One other element of your journey to this point that I want to ask about, the succession journey or the journey to CEO, and I’m only asking because it’s somewhat recent, I think it was 2024, so we’re about two years in CEO. For the eight years prior to that, you were president.

Shannon Spotswood:

Yes.

Jason Diamond:

And this dynamic is near and dear for a lot of advisors. This idea you’re the heir apparent, but the date hasn’t happened until it happened. Was that a smooth transition date or did you find yourself, and I hope you can be honest about it, and if not, I understand, but I think this is something that a lot of advisors in their own businesses struggle with. So as somebody who’s gone through a major succession journey in the last two years, I’m curious what your thoughts are.

Shannon Spotswood:

The timing coincided with us bringing on a growth capital partner. So we closed on that partnership with Long Ridge in the fall of 2023, and we really set our sights on how do we bring this capital into the business and invest in our team, invest in our technology, invest in this desire to help independent advisors build their business. And Long Ridge really shares that long-term strategic belief that independence and the corporate RIA model is the ultimate winning model. So we have a lot of room to run there. So entering into that growth partnership with Long Ridge really provided a natural opportunity for that succession conversation to take place and to be able to take the company to the next leg. So we’ve tripled the size of the company over the course of the last two and a half years.

Jason Diamond:

Good for you.

Shannon Spotswood:

And as I said, I feel like we’re just getting started. I always joke we’ve had the longest pre-game warmup in history. In a lot of ways that’s by design. For me, the way that I can sleep at night is knowing that we are waking up as a team in this unified front to walk the walk for our advisors. It is incredibly important to us to honor the promise that we’ve made, whether it’s on tech or talent or transition services or marketing growth. So being able to lean in and deliver that, it takes a long time to build that institutional know-how and to be uncompromising in consistently making hard decisions, whether it’s around talent or the investments that you’re making or how you’re running and growing and building the firm. And so Bobby reached and Long Ridge and all of us reached this point where it was just a very natural way.

And I think it was such a gift that I had such a long warmup, if you will, in the bullpen, running the day-to-day of the business as president, being so close to sweating the details of how we built the foundation, how we run the firm. And then obviously Ed Swenson joined us as president in last fall in October of 2025, having joined our board when we partnered with Long Ridge. So he joined our board in September of ’23, and he and I set up a call every other week. So we just became this incredibly trusted confidant of mine as we made a lot of strategic investments and key strategic decisions in that first 15 to 18 months of our partnership with Long Ridge. So to be able to build and attract the caliber of talent that we have to RFG, I mean, I’m totally biased and talking my own book, but I think we have the best leadership team.

Doug Nelson joined us from Long Ridge as our CFO in November of last year, just bringing that rigor, particularly around capital strategies into our C-suite. So it was the right time to make that transition. And what I would say for founder advisor-led firms, it’s all about what are your growth ambitions? It’s what are your growth ambitions? Without question, when I joined and Bobby and Rick and I set upon this journey to tear the entire company down and build this robust tech stack and be at the forefront as an innovator in that space, that was experience that I had from my 20 years in San Francisco. And Rick had this incredible institutional pedigree having spent 12 years at Bain Capital plus two years at Stanford Business School, complimenting this authenticity that Bobby brought as an advisor, bringing that together. So recognizing as a founder advisor, if you have growth ambitions to 10X your business, it’s going to require that you bring high caliber talent to the table and allow for that room both from an equity participation perspective, but also just from what does the business need as it continues to scale up?

Jason Diamond:

That’s exactly right. And part of this gets back to private equity sometimes gets a bad rep in our space, but the reality is capital from private equity enables a lot of what you’re talking about. And I give you a lot of credit. I mean, you make the half joke about the longest pregame warmup ever, but I think of it as you learned on your own dime and you built all the kinks and ironed out all the kinks prior to having this critical mass of advisors on your platform. And we’ve seen certainly plenty of firms go that route too. So I give you credit for that. I think because we’re on the topic, let’s talk about it, private equity. Positive experience, negative experience, neutral, neither good nor bad. Just give me your… I don’t want to make the episode about the perils-

Shannon Spotswood:

Right.

Jason Diamond:

… and benefits of private equity capital, but just curious what your experience has been.

Shannon Spotswood:

I think this is one of those life lessons. Choose your partners wisely and great things can happen, whether it’s in your marriage or your friendships-

Jason Diamond:

Spouse. Yep.

Shannon Spotswood:

… or your business partners. And Long Ridge found us very serendipitously. I mean, we were probably two years from even contemplating bringing in a growth capital partner. They were introduced to us by a former board member and they were in our offices in January of 2023. And the most important things for us were twofold. Number one, they shared our vision and belief that the corporate RIA independent is the winning model for the industry and for advisors and clients. And number two, who they are as people is very much who we are as people. They’re builders.

Jason Diamond:

Culturally.

Shannon Spotswood:

They have this servant heart growth mindset that they share with us. So I feel incredibly blessed to say they’re amazing partners. And what’s interesting, and I’ll share this very openly, they’re the majority owners of RFG. We were very early in that time of bringing them on. They have always honored the promise that they made to us, which is we run the business. They are a strategic partner. They’re a great thought partner. They are the capital provider, but there has been multiple examples where we have made business decisions where there’s been some heat in the kitchen, in the boardroom, and we’ve felt very strongly about it. So I just couldn’t say enough great things about them. And one thing that I will just share, and I say this because they’ve shared this with me, I have had this incredible personal journey of growth bringing such a deep bench in Long Ridge into the firm.

And that has been certainly challenging at times. Do hard things, get comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s the ultimate definition. But I really think that is something that never gets talked about is what it means in upskilling the caliber of your talent, yourself, how you have to grow and evolve as an individual has been really, I won’t say it’s been easy, but I look back on what I’ve learned over these two years and just feel prepared as a leadership team, how we operate as a team, what is expected of us to be able to deliver and execute for our advisors in this next leg of growth.

Jason Diamond:

I think your marriage analogy is the perfect one, and I’m going to use it. And honestly, in a lot of ways. First of all, marriage is hard, good or bad. It’s hard. Second of all, it’s the ultimate… The institution of marriage is not good or bad. Private equity capital is not good or bad, but your answer is the right one. Pick your partner very wisely. My favorite part of your answer, because it’s the most original, was around a good capital backer, a good partner, whatever you want to call it, pushes you to be better. And I think that you’re surrounding yourself with, by definition, some of the smartest people in the industry, and that can’t be a bad thing. And the proof is in the pudding. The growth trajectory you’ve seen, it’s certainly no accident. I think part of it is tied to your incredible stewardship. You don’t have to answer that. You don’t have to be humble, but I’ll attribute it to you. That brings me to my next question.

Shannon Spotswood:

I do have to say really quickly.

Jason Diamond:

Please do.

Shannon Spotswood:

I will be celebrating my 27th wedding anniversary in October. So yeah, pick your partners.

Jason Diamond:

Congrats. And I feel equally blessed, I assume as you do. I have a great partner, I’ll say. I don’t know if she’s listening right now, but she’s a great spouse. What I was going to say though, good segue, I think there’s been more in recent years, but not a ton certainly of female C-suite wealth management executives. How do you feel about your role? Do you feel an increased burden? Is it an honor to you? Is it something that you don’t think much about at all? I’m curious what your thoughts are.

Shannon Spotswood:

I feel immense gratitude. I mean, just in general, leading RFG and locking arms with our team and our advisors is, I mean, a gift of a lifetime. I was incredibly fortunate to not just have mentors during my 20 years in San Francisco, but to have true sponsors. Whether it was the first hedge fund I worked at, I took that job because it was a female portfolio manager and at the time one of the only in the country. And she really opened up her heart to me and poured into me. And then 10 years at Symphony, the founding partners of Symphony, they dropped me into the deep end of the pool and gave me a lot of rope to make a lot of mistakes and continued to invest. So I have this foundation from which to build and to lead and to be ready for this role.

I couldn’t do any of this without my partners. Rick and I have been partners for more than 10 years. It really does take a village in the same way that it takes a village to raise your family. It takes a village to find the courage and the strength to lead in a way that really honors the gravity of the mission. But I’ll tell you this. One, I knew I wanted to work on Wall Street from a very young age, so I chose this. I knew what I was getting into, that it was a male-dominated industry. I have made particularly, this is one of the unique facets of the wealth management business, we have phenomenal both male and female talent, and I have made the strongest female relationships on this side of the business as compared to the institutional side of the business. So I think there is a richness to our side of the industry that doesn’t get enough air cover.

There are just phenomenal leaders, and I think increasingly so, we’re seeing more women stay in the game and raise into positions within the C-suite and leading these firms. I will tell you one thing in 2019, and I really give a lot of credit to Bobby for this in coaching me, is I was raised by wolves on Wall Street without question. I sat on a trade desk, I was completely comfortable with compartmentalizing emotion, and I made it a mission to develop intentionally my emotional intelligence. And that truly unlocked everything for me, and I think plays such a huge part of who I want to be and who I challenge myself to be as a leader.

And so it’s funny when I get the question asked of me about being a female CEO, because I think that’s what people feel must be like came very intuitively to me, but I had to learn it. I had 20 plus years of being able to run with boys and I needed to develop that skill. And it is a skill that I challenge myself on a daily to continue to lean into. And I think it is increasingly important both for men and women who aspire to leadership to hone the strategic and execution alongside that emotional intelligence.

Jason Diamond:

Great answer. And I think you know I admire a lot about you, but it’s certainly one of the things I admire most about you is over the last couple years in particular you’ve been a real beacon of positivity, of empowerment in that regard. You’re active on socials, you’re active at industry events, you’re always willing to talk to people. And honestly, that to me is the answer. A lot of people complain about this as a problem, and I want to just take a second to applaud you because I think you and your firm actually do something to at least try and actively solve some of this. And also you mentioned it earlier, but same thing with some of the next gen dynamics. You skew much younger than the average firm on the industry. And I think that too is to your credit around, okay, we’ve identified that we have a major succession problem in our industry. What are we doing to solve that?

Shannon Spotswood:

Absolutely.

Jason Diamond:

Let’s talk about growth a little bit. I agree with your thesis. This space you occupy, no better time to be in it. We’re at the perfect spot on the J-curve. Unfortunately, we are not the only two people to think that. There are also, I think, some other firms. This space has become crowded. What do you think about that? Just the fact that there’s more competition than ever. I mean, my view of it is there are enough quality advisors to go around, but curious what you think.

Shannon Spotswood:

Anytime I find myself wading into the waters of fear and scarcity around this topic, I’m reminded that 67% of the assets still remain within the wirehouse and IBD space. We got lots of room to run. I believe in a mindset of abundance. The data will tell us that the demand for advice is increasing by 30% over the next decade while the number of advisors is decreasing by 1%. So we’ve got, find me another industry where you see a graph that looks like that. On top of that, next gen, which I think this is so fascinating, next gen actually wants more advice when compared to the baby boomers. So baby boomers created our industry, and here we are sitting on $87 trillion worth of generational wealth that’s going to begin to transition. That doesn’t even include all of the wealth that will be monetized through real estate and family-owned businesses.

It is a tsunami. And what is, I think, really interesting is that next gen recognizes the value of their time. I’m sure if I had a conversation, Jason, with you and my husband about how intentional you want to be in terms of showing up for your children and the equal nature of parenting, that alone is changing the way the next gen thinks about both their professions as well as their family life, which means you by default have to hire professionals to do the things that you don’t want to spend the time doing.

Jason Diamond:

Really good point.

Shannon Spotswood:

So we have this incredible convergence that’s happening right now, and it’s coming at a time that technology is finally going to allow us to serve more families more intentionally along that wealth spectrum. So it is like, bring it on. There is more than enough to go around. We are in an era of abundance. And what I worry the most about, and this, it’s like climb up on the soapbox and let’s roll, about independence because I see and have so many conversations with advisors where they have been willing to accept such a compromised service experience that they would never allow to be delivered to their clients. So advisors are delivering this 24-hour concierge, high-touch, deeply thoughtful experience, estate planning, tax planning, financial planning, multi-generational conversations. They’re in it. They’re in the trench. And then they turn around and their service partner is so subpar.

They’re compromising their growth. They’re burying them in compliance and ops and clicks and swivel chair and tech that doesn’t work. So we’re at the very beginning of this bull run for advice. And I think advisors who recognize, I want to serve more families, I want more control over my time, I want to be able to build enterprise value on my personal balance sheet, have room to do it. So I welcome the competition. I think the best way to talk about it is iron sharpens iron. I learn so much from our peers and like, ah, they did this or they did that. How do we think more disruptively, more innovatively? How do we do it differently? So I think there’s a lot of room for all of us. You’re going to be busy, my friend. You’re already sitting there advising the lion’s share of the big deals, and I think you guys are just getting started as well.

Jason Diamond:

Yeah, it certainly feels like a bull market for advice and also I think a bull market for some of the… You allude to an interesting paradox, which is some of the biggest and most sophisticated advisors in the industry have really high-touch impressive service models, but they don’t seem to demand the same in return. I have some thoughts as to why. I think one could just be Kool-Aid drinking, like you don’t know any better and you’ve been there for so long. There’s just so much friction associated with moving a business and fear associated that it’s unless things get really dire or unless I find something that’s better enough or meaningfully better enough, I can gut it out. But the third one that comes to mind is these firms we’re talking about have unequivocally, they do a lot of good, a lot of bad, but unequivocally one of the things they do really well is brand.

Shannon Spotswood:

Yeah.

Jason Diamond:

How do you reconcile that question with a firm that obviously doesn’t have a brand that the average American consumer would know?

Shannon Spotswood:

We take a posture on this that is rooted in an Accenture study that was conducted several years ago, but I think still remains so true today, is that advisors think that the value proposition that their clients are looking for, either it’s that big monobrand that’s advertising at the Super Bowl or the alpha they’re ever able to generate or the portfolio investments. But the clients tell us that what they’re looking for in an advisor is, do you get me? Do you share my values? And do I want to spend time with you outside the office? And that is basically distilled down the way we talk about it is people connect with people. So now more than ever, particularly if you take a big step back and you think about the influencer economy and how brands, big brands, Nike or big consumer brands have really leaned into niche branding.

How do I get my brand into the hands of someone who’s very passionate about it? So advisors who develop their own brand, who have a presence on social, who have a presence in AEO and SEO, who are leaning in and expressing not only their client experience, but their vision and their values through their brand, I actually think as this generational wealth unfolds, that authenticity carries so much more weight than is my name on a football stadium. So it is those three factors. It’s just I’m comfortable. I don’t want ripple. It is friction and fear for sure. And then it’s like that branding is up for grabs because we certainly see one of the most fun parts of advisors joining RFG, this is a big part of what we do is helping them design and develop or reimagine their brand name, their logo, all the rest of it.

Once that creative energy is unlocked and you get to tell your story, your my why, that connective tissue is so powerful with the clients and with the growth that comes from that because I mean, I truly believe people connect with people. They’re looking for that. And I think more so now than ever with AI.

Jason Diamond:

You just took the words out of my mouth. Do you think AI perpetuates that?

Shannon Spotswood:

I think people are craving that. And this is why advisors who are powered by AI without question are going to win. Advisors are not going to be disrupted by AI unless they haven’t made the move to get themselves in a position to be able to leverage the technology, the brand, the talent, the maximizing of their time. But especially with something as important and as personal as money, as you walk through life, I mean, you are at the very beginning. I’m sending, I’ll have all three kids in college. But as you make these critical decisions in your life, whether it’s getting married or starting a business or changing jobs or buying your first house, buying your vacation house, all of these things, you can go right or you can go wrong. And having a trusted partner who really understands you, I actually think that we’re going to see the fees paid for advisors increasing as there is a greater premium placed on, I want deeply personal relationships that are tailor-made for me.

Jason Diamond:

But I assume the flip side of that is you have to do more. You as a firm and you as an advisor have to do more, and you can’t just raise fees with the same service model. So I think what is the corollary of that? What are some of the ancillary growth areas that you do beyond the financial planning and asset management that says, “We’re worth that money you’re going to pay us”?

Shannon Spotswood:

It is, and I love the work that wealth.com is doing here. I mean, the estate planning and tax planning, making that more accessible along that continuum of wealth spectrum, the blurring of the lines between ultra high net worth and high net worth, and then mass affluent is so exciting. Better, more robust planning is good for our industry overall. Obviously there’s a huge amount of demand on the tax side of things, particularly the 1040. It’s easy to find a CPA to do the cool complex stuff. It’s increasingly more challenging for advisors. That’s an area that I know a lot of firms have leaned into. We’re certainly doing a lot of work. But so much of this, Jason, is showing up at the right time for clients with the resources. It’s a really interesting conversation about, yes, you have to do more for your clients, but you don’t have to do more for all your clients at exactly the same time.

Jason Diamond:

That’s well said. The flip side of that is as an advisor, because ultimately the advisors are the ones making this decision. There are a lot of firms, and not even just firms that you would be competitors with, because the reality is you and I understand the industry landscape and where various firms fit in. For many advisors, it’s a long list of various firm names that they’ve heard. So what are some things that you think advisors should be asking a firm like you or a business development person at your firm to suss this out? How does an advisor go about understanding if a platform is empty or is really going to be able to deliver in all these areas?

Shannon Spotswood:

Remember back in the day when the Wall Street Journal used to run have a monkey throw a dart and see if you can beat the pros on stock picking? I love to do that with regards to our advisors. We always tell our prospects, “Throw a dart at any advisor that’s affiliated with RFG and call them. Certainly we can provide a list of advisors who we think you’re going to most align with in terms of what your growth ambitions are or the way you want to run your business or who you are, life stage, all the rest of it.” But I do think that getting that unfiltered experience, the good, the bad, the ugly. We always are like, “Are we perfect? Absolutely not. Do we though immediately want the feedback so that we can iterate to excellence to get better? Absolutely. Get that firsthand testimony.” So that’s number one.

Number two is don’t tell me, show me. There are so many, and it always pulls at my heart because as much as I love to win business and transition advisors, and I think that we’re working certainly at RFG on some really interesting technology that is anchored around removing that friction and fear by speeding up the time that you can make that transition in. And the tech is finally there to allow for this. So I think we’re going to be able to take variable number two and at least make that box a little bit smaller. But if I’m sitting as an advisor, I would want to see the evidence. Show me how you’ve solved the problems that advisors have brought to you. How have you refined your tech stack? How have you invested in your team? How have you made the decisions where the ROI can be measurable and tangible?

And I think too often I’m surprised that advisors get, it’s almost as if they get overwhelmed by the amount of information that they’re taking in trying to compare all these different firms. If I’m ever asked, I’m like, please work with a third-party recruiter. You need someone not only to act as an interpreter, but you need someone to help really keep your top three priorities at the front of your decision-making matrix, because it really is apples to oranges to orangutans and you get decision fatigue. And then advisors end up making this decision that is anchored in like, well, this is the highest payout, and I’m willing to take all of these sacrifices and paper cuts for this highest payout. And that is just such a travesty.

So it’s like, know what you want. What are your top three problems that you’re trying to solve? Talk to advisors that you get to pick just so you can do some secret shopping, and then demand evidence of how the firm, the platform has responded to feedback and gotten better as a result because that will tell you, are they really going to walk the walk or are they just going to talk the talk?

Jason Diamond:

I’m super grateful that you gave specifics there because it’s an easy question to dodge and talk around. So I completely agree. Your first answer, actually all three of those points you just made, but certainly doing name-blind calls, and I say name-blind because advisors worry about confidentiality. I think that’s one of the best and most underrated tools to learn about a firm is advisors now have so many colleagues. There’s been this diaspora of advisors where advisors know advisors everywhere. And that’s a benefit if you wanted to go and just network and have conversations with other advisors on your own. But if you’re worried about confidentiality, there’s certainly the mechanisms, and we do this all the time for advisors to set up name-blind calls. You dial into a conference line, it’s John Smith, and you pick an advisor’s brain and say, “Hey, you moved your book from LPL to RFG, and tell me what that experience was like and what were the positives? Give me all the negatives.”

To your point, you want advisors to ask those questions in advance. It’s better to ask those questions than to end up in the wrong marriage with the advisor.

Shannon Spotswood:

Absolutely. And the other thing is what an easy answer to BS around is tell me who’s a good fit for your firm. And it’s like, “Everyone’s welcome here.”

Jason Diamond:

Everybody. Yeah.

Shannon Spotswood:

It’s just not true. RFG is not a good fit for an advisor who is not open to using technology, who is not interested in outsourcing investment management, who doesn’t want to have a conversation about how are you spending your time and do you want to create enterprise value? Do you want to grow? So it really is important to have that vulnerability and that honesty and the answer to that question.

Jason Diamond:

I love it. We have time for one more. I can’t believe it’s been almost an hour.

Shannon Spotswood:

I know, it flies by.

Jason Diamond:

We speak with plenty of advisors who aren’t considering a move, but I’m interested. I think you have a really nice lens into the industry. What is one thing you wish advisors knew? You have a megaphone to just talk to advisors who maybe are considering change, but maybe aren’t. What’s the questions they should be thinking about? What keeps you up at night? Just what would be your public service announcement?

Shannon Spotswood:

I’m going to focus on the friction and fear because that’s the number one barrier to making a move is PTSD, either first person PTSD or the collective negative experience that the industry has had. It took me 90 days to transition. I got sued by my former firm. I lost all these clients. I didn’t have income. The wise tales of fear are very widely trafficked and widespread. And what I would say to an advisor is everything you want is on the other side of fear.

And I look at all of this data that suggests exactly the opposite, which is you have the relationship with the client. You have the trust with the client. You are the one who they call on Sunday night when they need a shoulder to cry on or sage advice for making a decision. Just believe it with the core of your being because what we see is 99% of assets transition, whether it’s a restrictive transition or you’re taking full data, that the majority of assets are transitioning within 30 days, that this is still a free country, and you can make a move while honoring your contract around non-solicitation, non-competes, and non-associations.

So it is like this fear of holding advisors back is preventing them from realizing and monetizing this enterprise value, but equally as importantly, loving their business. Have fun. This should be fun. We spend the majority of our life at work. And so being able to surround yourself with people who win when you win, with a team who’s aligned and isn’t just drudgery with all their operations compliance headaches that they’re dealing with. Your team deserves to be happy. You deserve to be happy. And that fear factor is holding so many advisors back.

So that’s my advice is that it just doesn’t have to play out that way. And I think not just at RFG, collectively where we are as an independent industry with technology, with the way that AI is changing and our ability to harness data and business intelligence, getting to that point of next best action, how am I spending my time, how am I realizing, what is the blueprint for realizing my growth goals is more tangible now than ever. That’s immediately where I go.

Jason Diamond:

I’ve never been an advisor. I’ve never had a book of business, so I don’t want to minimize the fear, but I will say this. If we speak to advisors, let’s say a year post-transition, by far the number one thing we hear from them is, “I wish I did this sooner.”

Shannon Spotswood:

Wish I did it sooner.

Jason Diamond:

And that to me is the most telling data point there is to your point about fear and getting over it.

Shannon Spotswood:

So I do this exercise all the time with our team as we’re onboarding advisors is I want you to go home and look at your spouse and tell them, “I’m going to leave my job. I have no certainty that everything is going to work out. We might not receive any kind of compensation. Are you cool with that?” Walk that emotional journey. And while there’s plenty obviously that we can do with Capital Solutions to ease the financial fear associated with it, I still think at the baseline, it’s a great exercise to keep everyone very humble. You are asking an advisor to take their life’s work. And someone was sharing this analogy with me the other day and I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so good,” which is imagine moving houses. It’s such a hassle packing up moving one house. Now imagine moving 400 households or 1,200 households. It’s a lot, but I always hear the same thing, “I wish I’d done it sooner.”

Jason Diamond:

Thank you for sharing. You had some really sage wisdom that you shared with our audience. I can’t wait to see the next chapter, the continuation of the J-curve. This has been a fantastic episode, Shannon. Thank you.

Shannon Spotswood:

I love being with you, Jason. Thank you so much. We appreciate it.

Mindy Diamond:

As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibilities seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? is a book written with you in mind. It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and roadmap to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook.