Uptick Partners, a new support platform designed to help other advisors from captive broker/dealers go independent, has launched a guarantee program.
Advisors who partner with Uptick typically get a 95% payout, and the firm charges a platform fee between 5 and 10 basis points. That platform fee covers the firm’s cost of doing business, including software, compliance, etc., while the 5% they keep is their profit margin. Under the guarantee, advisors who partner with Uptick will receive a 100% payout until they return to 100% of their revenue at their previous employer.
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. The three wanted 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, so in July, they launched the Uptick platform, with their first breakaway, Jonathan Dvorak, founder of Dvorak Financial Planning in Cullman, Ala. Dvorak made the move after 14 years with Edward Jones.
Uptick helped Dvorak get to 100% of his previous revenue in just four months.
The Uptick team recognized that one of the main concerns of an advisor considering a transition is a loss of revenue to their business.
“We were in that seat and going, ‘Hey, what’s keeping me from moving tomorrow? Well, I’m worried that my clients won’t follow me, and this is going to be a massive failure,’” Pankratz said. “‘I know the industry says 75% of your book will follow you, but that’s an average, and I don’t want to be the outlier and move 10 or 20 or 30, and I’ve gone and made a huge mistake.’”
Pankratz came up with the idea for the guarantee as a way to make advisors more confident about the transition.
“The goal is really just that we help these advisors to gain confidence that it's going to go well,” he said. “And if that means that it costs us money for that advisor to make that jump to independence, then we’re willing to do that.”
Uptick’s confidence comes from the fact that they made the transition themselves out of a non-protocol firm. They know the work that needs to be done on the front end, and they’ve refined the process with Dvorak.
Pankratz said they help the advisor with the preparation work before they even break away. That involves developing a robust marketing plan. During non-protocol transitions, advisors cannot take client information with them.
The marketing plan starts with helping the advisor create a professional website, with a lead funnel and a video of the advisor explaining why they made the move and why it might be good for clients. Uptick will also help the advisor run social media campaigns featuring video ads to try to reach people.
Dvorak’s social media ads weren’t just targeted to his clients; they went out to the entire state of Alabama, announcing that he had left Edward Jones.
“We feel very confident in the ability to put together a robust marketing plan so that advisors can have more inbound calls from previous clients calling them than them having to try to find these people’s phone numbers on the whitepages.com, et cetera, and making those outbound phone calls,” Pankratz said.
Once client information is collected, Uptick’s technology stack and workflows then make sure those clients don’t fall through the cracks and that they have a good transition experience.
The tech stack centers around a customized version of Advyzon and will use Nitrogen, Right Capital, MoneyGuidePro, Presults and Holistiplan.
Uptick also has a couple of back-office staff that can help open and service accounts.
The firm will also coach advisors on how to talk to clients about the transition, such as communicating to them about the letter they may receive from their prior firm and anticipating certain questions about it. They want to make sure advisors aren’t caught off guard by some of the tactics their prior employer may use to take their clients.
In fact, when Barber and Pankratz left Edward Jones, they had local advisors telling their clients they had died and other lies about them.
“It’s a dogfight, as we say,” Barber said.
Uptick currently has three or four other advisor teams in the pipeline that will likely transition in 2025, and they’re trying to limit the number of transitions they do per year to maintain that white-glove experience.
“We want to be boots on the ground because there’s something to be said about having people in the advisor’s office that have done it,” Pankratz said. “It’s not just transition experts that are mercenaries. They come in, and they do it for a couple of weeks or a week, and they leave. It’s us making sure that everything is going according to plan.”
