What Makes a Book Portable

The short answer: Who follows you is decided by properties of the relationships that already exist, not by anything that happens on the day. Those properties are assessable now, and unlike almost everything else in a transition, a two-year runway can genuinely change them.

This is part five of the 18-Month File.

Advisors tend to treat retention as a result: a number you find out afterwards, somewhere between reassuring and catastrophic, largely determined by how well the move is executed.

Execution matters. It matters considerably less than what was already true about the book on the day you resigned.

The averages are reassuring and not very useful. Published research puts realized asset retention between roughly 78 and 89 percent depending on path, and advisors report bringing about 80 percent of the clients they intended to. The full picture is in what percentage of clients follow their advisor to a new firm.

An average across thousands of books tells you very little about yours. The question worth answering is which of your households sit at which end of that band, and it is answerable long before it is tested.

The four tests

Run these household by household. It takes longer than you want it to, which is why doing it with two years in hand rather than two months is the point.

Did you originate it, or inherit it? A relationship you built behaves differently from one assigned to you when a colleague retired or left. The inherited household chose neither of you.

Who does the client call? When something needs doing, does the client call you, or call the office? If the honest answer is the office, the relationship belongs to the service model. Service models do not move.

Have you met both decision-makers? In households with a spouse or partner, a relationship with one person and a name recognition with the other is a weaker position than it feels. The person you have never really spoken to gets a vote, usually at exactly the wrong moment.

Did they choose the institution first? Some clients selected a brand and then were introduced to you. That loyalty is real and it is legitimate. It also runs to the brand.

What to do with the results

The instinct after a first pass is discomfort, because the honest version of this exercise always produces a worse picture than the felt one.

Sort the weak households into two groups, because they need opposite responses.

Shallow but fixable. Relationships that score badly because nobody ever invested in them: inherited households you service competently and know slightly, clients who deal with your associate because that was always easier. These are the ones a long timeline is for. Two years is enough to meet them properly, meet the spouse, do real planning work and become the person they call. This is the single highest-return item in the entire series, and it is also just good practice management.

Genuinely institutional. Households whose attachment is to the brand, the statement and the perceived safety of a large name. You can work on these and the return is much lower. The useful response is an accurate assessment rather than a persuasion campaign, because knowing which households may not travel is what makes every downstream plan realistic.

The failure mode is refusing to place anything in the second group.

The part that has nothing to do with moving

A book where a large share of households relate to the office rather than to a person has a problem whether or not anyone changes firms.

It is a service dependency: the practice runs on a structure rather than on relationships, which is fine until the structure changes. It is a succession problem, because those are exactly the households that do not transfer to an internal successor either. And it is a valuation problem, because a buyer runs this same sorting exercise, which is part of what sits behind what is your book actually worth.

The exercise is worth doing if you intend to be in this seat for another twenty years.

One boundary worth restating

Assessing your own client relationships is ordinary practice management. Contacting clients about a future firm, or preparing them for a move you have not made, is not, and it is the fastest way to turn a clean position into a contested one.

The distinction is the subject of what not to do while you are still there, and it is worth reading before acting on anything in this piece.

Next

Part six, the practice changes that take two years, covers the structural work: revenue mix, concentration, and the things that change what the practice is worth rather than who follows it.

We run this sort with advisors household by household, and it is frequently the conversation that tells someone to stay. If you want yours run properly, request an introduction. Held in strict confidence.