At a glance
- Trade exceptions, client complaint responses and vendor contract renewals all required his sign-off or, at minimum, his awareness, according to WealthManagement.com.
- For an owner weighing a COO hire or a sale, the bottleneck reframes the diligence question from headcount to which decisions, and which client relationships, actually leave the founder's desk.
- An advisor who personally touches every client interaction, service request and internal decision runs out of hours, and the ceiling tightens as the firm adds clients.
An 11-employee RIA managing nearly $800 million could not scale because every meaningful decision ran through its founder, WealthManagement.com reported in a Nov. 11 column.
Trade exceptions, client complaint responses and vendor contract renewals all required his sign-off or, at minimum, his awareness, according to WealthManagement.com. He built the firm over two decades from a client base that followed him from his wirehouse years, and described a firm that had "outgrown ourselves." His director of operations, six years into the job, said the title came without the authority to move anything without him.
For an owner weighing a COO hire or a sale, the bottleneck reframes the diligence question from headcount to which decisions, and which client relationships, actually leave the founder's desk. An advisor who personally touches every client interaction, service request and internal decision runs out of hours, and the ceiling tightens as the firm adds clients.
Reported by the Practice management desk from WealthManagement.com. Published . Corrections