Brian McLaughlin, who co-founded customer relationship management (CRM) software developer Redtail Technology in 2003, is stepping down from his role as president of advisor tech at Orion Advisor Solutions, effective Sept. 27.
The 48-year-old says he has no plans to join another company or launch a new venture; he’s stepping back to take a break and spend more time with his family and friends. The company will conduct a search for his replacement, and in the interim, his direct reports will report to Natalie Wolfsen, who was appointed CEO of Orion last September in the wake of Eric Clarke’s retirement.
McLaughlin remains a shareholder in Orion, and he will continue to serve on the company’s board of directors. He will also stay on as an advisor to the CEO for the rest of this year.
“I’ve been pouring my heart into day-to-day activities and operations and 100% full throttle for 20 years,” McLaughlin said. “I’ve decided that now’s the time for me to step back and take a breather, get back in tune with my family, friends, and so forth, other passions and hobbies I have.”
“Having him change the nature of his role but still stay actively involved in Orion is extremely important to me and an extremely important part of the future of Orion,” Wolfsen said.
McLaughlin follows in the footsteps of other founders of companies in the independent wealth management space who have stepped aside as their firms evolve from startups to sustainable businesses, including SMArtX’s Evan Rapoport, Allworth’s Pat McClain and Scott Hanson, InvestCloud’s John Wise and Nitrogen’s Aaron Klein. Orion’s Clarke, who founded Orion in 1999, also fits into that category.
McLaughlin sold Redtail to Orion in 2022. In September of that year, Orion was reorganized into three business segments, with McLaughlin serving as president of Orion advisor technology. In that role, he was tasked with unifying Orion’s collection of several different businesses into a single service platform for advisors.
“It’s been over two years since I sold Redtail to Orion, and a big part of my transition planning has always been to harmonize the teams, to bring them together and meld them in a way where everybody was feeling success and feeling opportunity in the company,” he said. “I feel like I’ve done a huge part of that work and actually accomplished that goal, so it makes me comfortable feeling it’s a good time taking less of a heavy foot, day-to-day approach.”
With the acquisition of Redtail, Orion saw itself as a “CRM-centric” wealthstack that can orient services around the client household, as opposed to simply processing a collection of accounts. That so-called “Entity Project” has been McLaughlin’s personal mission and a top priority at Orion. It lets the aggregated platform take in a prospect or client record from any one tool or service and flow the data through the rest of the ecosystem seamlessly.
McLaughlin co-founded Redtail with Andy Hernandez in 2003, to create a web-based CRM tool that would provide advisors anytime, anywhere access to their client and calendar data.
They also wanted it to be a dog-friendly company, hence the name “Redtail,” which came from McLaughlin’s red-tailed Golden Retriever, Tucker-Me-Out McLaughlin.
The Redtail name will live on, and that unit will continue to operate out of the Sacramento office, where McLaughlin lives.
Orion recently announced that its more than 800 non-remote employees will gradually return to an office. Managers will return for two days each week beginning in September, followed by all other non-remote employees in October.
At the same time as McLaughlin’s departure, Orion will also launch a search for a chief operating officer, a new position. Wolfsen said the firm needs someone focused exclusively on operations and service.
“When we talk to our clients about what they’d like to see more of at Orion, most clients say they’d like to see more of an emphasis on the support and training model, and we felt it’d been elevated to the level that it deserved an executive that lived and breathed that every day,” she said.
Orion is backed by private equity firms TA Associates and Genstar Capital.
