Support staff are faithful when they are treated with respect and compensated fairly. This means rewarding them well for their efforts and treating them like partners. It also means taking their frustrations and concerns about your firm seriously. Staff members are often the first to notice issues impacting clients, so be sure they are heard and validated.

This is a big one! Intentionally or not, many brokerage firms ask their advisors to focus on the things that add the most to the firm’s bottom line—and those things are not always what your clients need. Asking advisors to cross-sell banking products, bring in a certain number of high-net-worth households, or adapt to new technology that the firm spent millions on (but you don’t believe adds value to your business or clients) are all examples of an incongruence that often exists between advisors and their firms.

We hear this a lot from top teams: “I want to be driven by what’s best for my clients, but the only way for me to protect my take-home economics is to do what the firm is asking of me. And they are not necessarily the same thing.” The more advisors feel their values and morals are at odds with what they need to do to please their firms, the more they will seek greener pastures elsewhere—with options that grant advisors greater agency over their professional lives.

To be sure, an expanded industry landscape means that an advisor is more likely than ever to find their version of utopia. But any change requires energy and time to do comprehensive due diligence—and any move comes with potential risks and disruption to momentum. The best advice is to make sure that the pain of the status quo is truly great enough and that you have found a firm or model that is more than “better enough”—that is, despite the risk and disruption, the upside is well worth it.

Conducting thorough and deep due diligence is the antidote here. Successful transitions are more likely when you take the time to look under the hood of any new firm—meet every person who will play a role in your transition and support, ask questions about anything and everything, and walk through every aspect of your business to understand exactly how each client account would map over. Keep in mind that the clearer you are on your goals before making a move, the more likely you are to achieve them.

Conducting thorough and deep due diligence is the antidote here. Successful transitions are more likely when you take the time to look under the hood of any new firm—meet every person who will play a role in your transition and support, ask questions about anything and everything, and walk through every aspect of your business to understand exactly how each client account would map over. Keep in mind that the clearer you are on your goals before making a move, the more likely you are to achieve them.