[quote=rexy]

As an idea, this may be a great time to take your business to a fee based model, if you aren't already.  I am at Commonwealth, but I looked hard at LPL, a great firm, and they have a great fee based platform.

[/quote]   Actually my business is already 100% fee based. What I'm now looking to add is charging for financial planning and wealth management on a separate basis. I too looked very hard at Commonwealth and really liked them. It was a tough decision.

[quote=PinBroker]

Hows the transition going IndyWanaB?   Been awhile since we have heard from you.

[/quote]   I guess it's been a while since my last update... I'm glad to report that the transition is finalized. All in all it took about 6 weeks to "move" all our clients and most of the assets. Transition is a lot of work though. After assets and accounts are transferred there's a lot of little stuff such as verifying that all accounts moved and that there are no residual amounts at the old firm (we did find quite a few number of accounts that were not fully moved so this was an ongoing project). There's also annuities & managed futures to reregister, automatic deposits/withdrawals and automatic mutual fund purchases to re-establish so all in all there's just a lot of operational things that need to happen. Luckily I have someone that took care of all that allowing me to focus on other things.   Overall I'm very happy with the move and with LPL as a whole. The attitude of the people at the home office is great. There are some things I get frustrated at such as the organization of the info on the resource center (website) and the fact that they seem to roll out software w/o fully testing to find glitches (although I believe this is changing ever since they replaced their CIO. The positive thing about that is that I've actually received calls from executives within the organization to discuss the issues that I don't like and share w/ me what they are working on in order to improve those things. Every time I get one of those types of calls it just blows my mind. At my prior firm that would never have happened and it does show their interest in improving and providing good service to advisors. Are they perfect? No but then again what large scale BD is?   Compliance has been great. It's great to have a compliance department that actually helps you get things approved that will help your business as opposed to simply denying anything that's not their cookie cutter language. If you're looking to build a unique brand and message I think this is a key advantage vs. the wirehouses.   So overall I'm very pleased with my move. Now I'm focusing on getting back to growing my business while my planning specialist focuses on transitioning our existing clients into our new financial planning application (wealthvision/eMoney).