How an RIA Serves Ultra-Wealthy Clients by Catering to Its Advisors

It’s a very high-touch service.

Your family office clients must have plenty of expectations. Correct?

They do. So the sense of advisor responsibility is different for a family office. For example, with less complex clients, an expectation might be:

I have a mortgage; and if interest rates come down, I’d like my financial advisor to proactively identify that issue and give me some leads on places that can refinance my mortgage and provide recommendations.

Now, on the family office side, the clients want you to go out and find the best [re-fi] deal and negotiate it, fill out the paperwork and bring it to them. And that goes all the way to the administration.

The distinction isn’t the strategy part or the proactive advice. It’s the administration, including filing tax returns.

How much tax-related work do you do for clients that aren’t family offices?

For all clients, we do tax strategy, like tax laws and what you should talk about with your tax advisor. But we don’t file the tax return.

For a family office, we’re doing all the administration, preparing the documents and filing the returns.

What’s Aspiriant’s organic growth strategy?

Because our focus is on both our clients and our advisors, most of our organic growth — new business — comes from referrals and outside providers.

We work closely with centers of influence. We have business-development people, a digital marketing strategy, and we create a lot of content for our website.

We have a podcast called “Money Tales.” It’s a place where clients go to listen to people’s stories about their relationship to money.

What’s your long-term goal as leader of Aspiriant?

To maintain an alignment of [serving] our clients and working as a team to bring the collective wisdom of our advisor group to bear on the [client] relationship.

What about acquiring other firms? Any plans along those lines right now?

Yes. But we don’t do acquisitions. We do mergers and always have from the beginning.

In our case, we’re merging two organizations together. Every partner in our firm has the same rights and obligations of ownership. We truly are one partnership as an organization, in which people have different ownership percentages.

What’s your succession strategy?

It’s a highly engineered “funnel” of partners to perpetuate the organization. We make new partners every year, and other people retire every year.

So at any given time, there are generations of partners that are closer to retirement; and there are partners, at earlier stages of their career, getting married and buying homes.

Do you have any firms in mind as possible merger candidates?

Yes. There are plenty of large organizations that are like-minded, and we’re constantly in conversations about merging those.

There are probably 75 firms that have remained 100% employee-owned and could benefit by merging for more competitive growth.

That’s a conversation we consistently have.

Please give me a historical rundown of your merger activity.

We did our first merger in 2008. It was the largest RIA merger that had been done in the industry and very attractive to other firms of like mind.

We did several other deals all the way up to 2018. What shifted is that private equity has driven the value of an organization to a level that has never been higher.

That’s put pressure on our merger model, which has struggled because of that, although we’ve done a couple of mergers in the last few years.

Pictured: Rob Francais