What Happens to Your Team When You Move Firms?

Every conversation about changing firms eventually arrives at the same sentence, usually said quietly and usually near the end of the meeting.

"I would need to bring my assistant."

That person has been with the practice eleven years. They know which client's daughter is applying to college, which widow needs the call before the statement arrives, and where every piece of paper is. Half the service model runs through them and none of it is written down.

The published guidance on advisor moves has almost nothing to say about them. The Broker Protocol does not mention them. The recruiting conversations skip them. And in our experience this question stalls more moves than economics ever has, because advisors sense correctly that it is complicated and then never get a straight answer about how.

The first thing to understand: the Protocol is not about your team

This is the misunderstanding that causes the most damage, and it is extremely common.

The Broker Protocol addresses client information and client solicitation. What you may take, what you may say, and to whom. It is a useful and well-understood framework, and its provisions are set out in the Protocol for Broker Recruiting explained.

It says nothing about employees. It does not override an employee non-solicitation clause, and courts have enforced those clauses against advisors who moved under Protocol cover. The Protocol was simply never addressed to the question.

So an advisor who has satisfied themselves that their client move is clean has answered a different question from the one about their team.

The document that actually governs this

Your employment agreement, and theirs.

Employee non-solicitation provisions are standard in advisor employment agreements at large firms. They typically restrict you from soliciting, recruiting or inducing colleagues to leave, often for a defined period after your departure, and they are generally enforceable subject to state law.

Two related exposures are worth naming separately.

Raiding. Recruiting one person is a hire. Recruiting several is a pattern, and departing advisors or managers who take multiple colleagues have faced raiding claims, which are treated more seriously than an individual non-solicit dispute and sit entirely outside the Protocol. The definition is imprecise, which is part of what makes it a risk.

Non-competes, which are not the same thing. Advisors conflate employee non-solicits with non-competes, and the legal weather around the two is different. The Federal Trade Commission's attempted nationwide non-compete ban never took effect, the agency dropped its appeal and formally removed the rule from the Code of Federal Regulations in February 2026. Enforceability is back to a state-by-state question, and several states impose their own restrictions. None of that changes an employee non-solicitation clause, which is a distinct provision and is treated differently by courts.

The practical version of all this: the only person who can tell you what you can do is a securities employment attorney who has read your specific agreement, in your specific state. That is not a hedge. It is the actual answer, and it is cheap relative to the alternative.

The timing problem, which has no comfortable answer

Here is the bind.

Tell your team early and you get planning, a coordinated arrival and a person who feels respected rather than ambushed. You also create a solicitation exposure, and you put your entire move in the hands of someone who now has a difficult secret and a manager who will ask them direct questions.

Tell them late and you avoid both of those. You also mean that the person who holds the day-to-day relationship for a meaningful share of your households learns about the move in the same hour the clients do, and is then expected to be reassuring about a decision they had no part in.

Some securities attorneys advise saying nothing at all until the resignation is complete and then extending an offer afterwards, specifically to avoid any argument that the departure involved recruiting the firm's employees. Whether that approach suits your agreement and your relationship is exactly the kind of judgment a specific attorney makes about a specific situation.

What is not defensible is drifting into it. Advisors who hint, who float hypotheticals, who say "if I ever went somewhere, would you come" over lunch, have created the record without getting the planning. That is the worst of both.

The part everyone forgets: they have their own registration to move

A registered associate is not a passenger on your transition. They have their own.

Their former firm files a Form U5. The new firm files a Form U4. State registrations follow. Until that sequence completes they generally cannot service accounts, and the timing is not guaranteed to match yours.

This matters more than it sounds, because the weeks immediately after a move are the weeks you most need someone processing paperwork. If a registered associate arrives two weeks into a transition and cannot touch an account for another two, you have a staffing gap precisely where the work is heaviest. That period, and why signatures rather than transfers are the bottleneck, is in the first 90 days after an advisor move.

Plan the gap. Do not discover it.

What changes when you are the one paying

If the move is firm to firm within the employee channel, the destination employs your associate and the economics are broadly familiar.

If the move is to independence, you become the employer. Salary, benefits, payroll taxes, and the management overhead of all of it move onto your desk and into your budget. That transition is a larger adjustment than the number alone suggests, because it converts a colleague into a headcount decision you now own.

On the number itself, a word of caution. Published compensation figures for client associate and registered client associate roles vary enormously across salary aggregators, from the mid-seventy thousands to well over one hundred and fifty thousand depending on the source, whether bonus is included, and how the role is defined. That spread is too wide to plan against. The only figure worth using is one built for your market, your registration requirements and your actual role definition, and it belongs in the same model as every other operating cost. What those costs look like layer by layer is in what an independent RIA platform actually costs.

If they cannot come

Sometimes the answer is no. The agreement is restrictive, the state is unhelpful, the person does not want to move, or their own circumstances make it impossible.

That is survivable, but only if you know it before you resign.

A long-tenured client associate is frequently the primary relationship for a slice of the book, particularly among households who call the office rather than the advisor. When that person stays behind, those households are a retention risk that has less to do with your relationship with the client than with theirs.

The response is not complicated but it does have to be deliberate. Identify which households run through that person. Plan to make those calls yourself, early, and in person where possible. And budget for a replacement hire sooner than you otherwise would, because arriving at a new firm with an unfilled service seat during a transition is the most expensive way to save money.

Where this belongs in the decision

Not at the end.

The team question gets treated as an implementation detail, raised after the economics are settled, and that is backwards. Whether your team can come, and on what timeline, changes the cost of the move, the retention math and sometimes the choice of destination structure. It belongs in the modelling alongside the package and the payout.

We work through it with advisors as part of the diligence rather than after it, including the conversation about who else in the practice has a claim on the same clients, which is a related and equally underdiscussed problem covered in advisor team splits. How the whole engagement runs is on financial advisor transition services.

Nothing here is legal advice, and on this topic more than most, the generic answer is worth very little. Get your agreement read before you have the conversation, not after.