In a sense, Jason Barber was born to be an Edward Jones broker.
His grandfather, Paul Barber, created the first Edward Jones office in Nacogdoches, Texas, a small town of 32,000 people, in 1981. His father eventually joined the business. Jason says his earliest memories involve his father knocking on doors and building up his book.
“I even have a picture in my office that I drew when I was 6 that says, ‘When I grow up, I'm going to be a stockbroker,’” Jason said. “And it has a picture of me sitting behind a desk, and I have a little bubble that says, ‘Welcome to my office,’ of me talking to somebody.”
After college and a brief stint at Dell, Jason was the third generation of the family to join the firm. His cousin Taylor Pankratz came on board some 10 years later.
As they grew the business, Jason says the culture changed. They felt like they couldn’t do some things at Edward Jones they wanted for their clients, and often the things they could do didn’t make sense for their business. Forty years after his grandfather started the practice, they left and started their own registered investment advisor, Holistic Planning, in 2023.
After 40 years with Edward Jones, Jason said he cried when he turned in the resignation documents. But it turns out the transition from a non-protocol, captive brokerage firm like Edward Jones to their own independent RIA would prove to come with its own kind of pain.
While they looked at several different RIA support platforms, “it just seemed like nobody understood me coming from Edward Jones because so few, based on my estimation, Edward Jones people went RIA,” Jason said.
Indeed, most will join another brokerage firm or an independent broker/dealer before making the leap to full independence. Jason said he was not prepared for the complexities involved.
And while the transition was brutal, he said it planted in him a desire to use the experience to help others with similar aspirations.
So last July they launched Uptick Partners, a support platform designed to help advisors working for non-protocol brokerages ease the transition to independent RIA.
Jonathan Dvorak, founder of Dvorak Financial Planning in Cullman, Ala., was the first breakaway to join Uptick. Dvorak manages $275 million in client assets and made the move after 14 years with Edward Jones.
Uptick provides 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. It charges a platform fee between five and 10 basis points, which scales down as advisors bring more assets onto the platform.
They are so confident in their transition process that they recently rolled out a guarantee program in November, where Uptick will forgo its profit from a firm until an advisor gets back to 100% of the revenue they had before they left.
But the most compelling part of Uptick’s offer may be the battle scars of the founders, and their ability to relate to the pain points others have when making a similarly large leap in business models.
“If I could go back in time and think about what I would have wanted more than anything in the world when I resigned that day, I would've had a team of people that had literally stood exactly where I stood,” Jason said.
“As Taylor says, ‘Be my Sherpa and lead me up Mount Everest.’ It would be great too if that Sherpa had weathered skin.”
