Ask a room of Advisors how they plan to grow, and you’ll hear the same handful of answers. More referrals. More marketing. A better website. Maybe hire another Advisor and hope they ramp. All of it is real, all of it works a little, and all of it is slow. Here’s the thing almost nobody says out loud: there’s one growth strategy that beats the entire list combined, and it’s the one the biggest firms in the business quietly built themselves on. Buying other practices. Once you actually look at the math, it isn’t close.
I want to make that case plainly, because it’s easy to wave off acquisition as something only the big players do. It isn’t. And understanding why it wins is the first step to doing it yourself.
The ceiling on everything else
Start with what organic growth actually delivers. Schwab’s benchmarking pegs the median firm’s organic growth, the net new money you bring in under your own steam, at about five percent a year. The top fifth manage around twelve and a half. That’s the whole range for doing everything right, the referrals, the marketing, the networking, the long hours. A genuinely good year of hustle adds you a dozen solid households.
And every lever on that list has a governor built in. Referrals are fading as a reliable engine, with fewer people relying on them to choose an Advisor every year. Marketing is expensive and uncertain, and most firms don’t even run it with a plan. Hiring is a bet on capacity you then have to go fill. None of these are bad. They’re just incremental by nature. You are adding clients one at a time, and there’s a hard limit on how many ones you can add in a year.
Acquisition is a different category entirely
Now look at what happens when you buy a book. You don’t add a client. You add a business. Eighty households in a single move, revenue that already exists, from people who already pay for advice and don’t need convincing it’s worth it. One good acquisition can do more for your practice in a quarter than three years of the organic grind, and it does it with a known number instead of a hopeful one.
That’s the part that makes it a different category, not just a bigger version of the same thing. Organic growth is a trickle you’re always working to keep flowing. An acquisition is a step-change you can actually plan around. It’s why, in a record year for deals, the firms doing the buying pulled away from everyone else. DeVoe counted 322 RIA transactions in 2025, the most ever, and the practices behind those numbers didn’t grow by posting more on LinkedIn. They grew by buying. The single fastest way to add scale in this business is to purchase it, fully formed, from someone who built it and now needs to hand it off.
A Record Number of Advisors Are Buying Practices. Most Are About to Learn the Hard Part.
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.
So why isn’t everyone doing it
Because it’s an art, and most Advisors never learn it. That’s the honest catch, and it’s also the opportunity. Acquisition done badly is a disaster, you overpay, the clients walk, and you spend two years regretting it. Acquisition done well is the closest thing to a growth cheat code this industry has. The difference between the two is pure craft, and the craft comes down to four things: finding the right practice, judging whether its clients actually fit yours, structuring the deal so the risk is shared, and handling the handoff so the people stay.
None of those are mysterious. They’re learnable, repeatable skills. And the first of them, finding the right practice, is the one that has quietly gotten a lot easier to pull off.
This is exactly the kind of edge The Chairman’s Council exists to put in your hands before your competitors think of it. Paid members get the full playbook, and every one after it.
One acquisition run well is worth many years of membership, many times over. Upgrade and read how.
Treat it as a discipline, not a one-time event
Here’s the shift that separates the elite buyers from everyone else. They treat acquisition as a discipline, not a lucky one-off. They build a pipeline of targets the way you’d build a pipeline of prospects. They get good at the diligence. And once they’ve done one well, they do another, and the practice compounds in a way no amount of organic effort ever matches. It isn’t just the best single move. Done as a repeatable skill, it’s a growth engine the firms relying on referrals simply cannot keep up with.
