Three financial advisors who broke away from Edward Jones in 2023 have launched Uptick Partners, a new support platform designed to help other advisors from captive broker/dealers go independent. They added their first breakaway this week.
Long-time Edward Jones advisors Steve Barber, his son Jason Barber and Taylor Pankratz left the storied brokerage after more than four decades to create Nacogdoches, Texas-based Holistic Planning, which now has about $462 million in client assets. The three intend to use their knowledge and experience of the pain points and nuances of leaving a non-protocol, captive broker/dealer like Edward Jones to help others with similar transitions.
“We’re really focused on getting people from the captive broker/dealer space to full RIA independence, but not have to make the mistakes that we made,” Pankratz said. “We take this analogy of ‘sherpaing them up Mount Everest.’ We’re helping them miss the roadblocks, miss the stumbling points, miss the things that can really trip you up.”
“We are one of the only platforms out there that is run by actual practitioners—people who have actually done it themselves,” Jason Barber said.
Holistic Planning operates as an investment advisor representative of Uptick, and other advisors who join Uptick will come under its ADV.
Jonathan Dvorak, founder of Dvorak Financial Planning in Cullman, Ala., is the first breakaway advisor to join Uptick. Dvorak manages $275 million in client assets and made the move after 14 years with Edward Jones.
Barber said they’re not limited to Edward Jones advisors, but given their own experience, they expect advisors from the firm to be natural targets. They will focus on small-town advisors looking to transition out of captive firms that are not in the Broker Protocol.
“We expect to recruit a lot of people from Edward Jones because, at the end of the day, we are very, very, very knowledgeable about the intricate details associated with an Edward Jones transition,” Barber said. “We’ve made a lot of the mistakes along the way that we’re trying to help others not make, so naturally, we believe that’ll be attractive to folks at our former firm.”
Uptick will provide transition support, a technology stack, operational back office support, human resources, billing, marketing, and legal and compliance. Advisors retain 100% of their book of business and get a 95% payout. Uptick charges a platform fee between five and 10 basis points, which scales down the more assets an advisor has.
The tech stack will center around a customized version of Advyzon and will use Nitrogen, Right Capital, MoneyGuidePro, Presults and Holistiplan.
Uptick will use Pershing as its main custodian, but it will also custody some assets with Schwab and Altruist. Barber said one of the main reasons they chose Pershing was its in-person DocuSign capabilities. Many other custodians require clients to have email addresses to sign documents, but that’s not always feasible in the small towns Uptick will focus on.
“In Alabama, not everyone has an email address,” Barber said. “In East Texas, not everybody has an email address. Coincidentally, some of those people that don’t have email addresses are your best clients.”
With Pershing, they can generate the paperwork, put it on an iPad, and have a client pull up to the advisor’s office and sign the paperwork from their car, with no two-factor authentication required.
“We call that our ‘Chick-fil-A drive-through experience,’” Barber said.