Acquisition is having a moment. DeVoe and Company counted 322 RIA deals in 2025, the most ever, up from 272 the year before, which was itself a record. And here’s the quieter number in that report: the pool of buyers actually shrank, down to 95 from 117, with first-time buyers at the lowest share anybody’s recorded. Read those two facts together and you get something interesting. More deals than ever, done by fewer hands. The field is wide open for a prepared individual buyer, and most of the Advisors rushing in are about to find out that buying a practice is the easy part.
Because the hard part isn’t finding one, and it isn’t signing the paperwork. It’s the two things almost nobody prepares for, and they’re where the return is actually made or lost. Four beliefs get Advisors into trouble here. Let’s go through them.
Finding a deal is the easy part now
For years the whole game felt like it was about sourcing, hunting down a practice that might be for sale. That’s the solved problem. Between the record deal flow, the retiring-Advisor wave, and the fact that every firm’s situation is disclosed in public filings, targets are not the bottleneck anymore. If you’ve got a thesis and a little patience, you can build a list. So if finding a deal is where your energy’s going, you’re optimizing the part that no longer needs it. The money is made downstream, in what you pay and what you keep.
The price is almost never the problem
Everyone fixates on the number. Did I get a good multiple, did I pay too much. But price is rarely where these deals go wrong. Overpaying a little for a book that genuinely fits your practice beats getting a bargain on one that doesn’t, every single time, because the fitting book stays and compounds and the cheap one quietly falls apart. The real variable was never the price. It’s the fit. A deal priced perfectly on a book that doesn’t match how you work is still a bad deal, you just can’t see it on the spreadsheet.
The best book isn’t the biggest one
When a bigger practice comes up, the instinct is that bigger is obviously better. More AUM, more revenue, done. But a large book that doesn’t match how you serve is a trap. It overloads your capacity, forces you to serve people you’re not built for, and those clients feel the mismatch and start drifting. The best acquisition isn’t the one that adds the most assets. It’s the one that slides into your practice so cleanly that in a year you can barely remember which clients came from where. Seamless beats big.
You don’t own it until the clients stay
Here’s the one that costs the most. Advisors treat the closing as the finish line, and it’s really the starting gun. You haven’t bought a book of clients, you’ve bought the chance to keep them, and that’s not automatic. Handle the transition badly, rush the introductions, change everything on day one, let people hear about the sale secondhand, and a serious slice of that book walks inside the first year. The best transitions hold on to the large majority of the clients. The botched ones bleed, and you spend the next two years paying for a book that’s a third smaller than the one you bought.
So if finding a deal is easy and the price is rarely the problem, what actually decides whether an acquisition works? One thing, and you can read most of it before you ever make an offer.
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