Somewhere past the ten-year mark, most advisors ask the same question: is the model I picked at the start still working for me now? The practice looks healthy from the outside, so the doubt is not about performance. It is about structure — whether the thing you built belongs to you, or to the firm whose name is on the door.
The early years answered a different question.
At the start, the model question was a survival question: could you build a book at all, and which platform gave you the best odds? By year ten you have answered it. What you may never have checked is what your client base and reputation add up to for you, rather than for the firm collecting the fee.
You are not alone in checking. Fidelity's Advisor Movement Study found that 56% of advisors had considered switching firms within a five-year window, and roughly one in four actually moved — a 2023 snapshot. The impulse to reexamine the structure is ordinary.
The asset test comes first.
The bluntest of the three tests: could you sell what you have built, or pass it on? Income and equity feel identical while you are earning them, but they separate at the finish line. Income stops the day you stop; equity can be sold, transferred, or handed to your kids. An advisor who owns their RIA holds a company a buyer can purchase. An employee advisor who "has" a book usually has only a right to service it.
The ownership test has a paper answer.
Whoever owns the client relationship owns the value of the practice. You do not have to guess; the industry wrote it down. Under the Broker Protocol — created in 2004 by Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, and UBS — a departing employee advisor may take exactly five pieces of client information, for clients they personally served: name, address, phone number, email address, and account title. Read that list as an ownership statement.
The trap is renting a well-paid job for thirty years while telling yourself the whole time that you are building.
The softer signals tell the same story. When a client needs something, do they call you or the 800 number? When they describe their advisor, do they use your name or the company's? Settle the paper question now: pull a client agreement and see whose name is on it.
The control test is a mirror, not a scorecard.
In a business you own, you set the direction — fees, service model, technology, the way you grow. In a job, those decisions get made above you and handed down. List the major choices that shape your practice and mark the ones you make versus the ones you can only request.
- An employee advisor usually marks very few of them.
- An advisor under an independent broker-dealer or an OSJ marks more, with real carve-outs.
- An RIA owner marks nearly all of them, and answers for the results.
What advisors usually discover.
Something sobering rather than dramatic: they were the engine of something valuable without owning the thing they were powering. The revenue was real, the relationships were real, and the accumulating asset sat on someone else's balance sheet. Deferred money often reinforces the arrangement — FINRA has described recruiting incentives of as much as two to three times prior-year commissions and fees, structured around an illustrative nine-year forgivable note. That is golden handcuffs by design. But the value came from you, not the logo. What you built can be rebuilt on a foundation you own. Run the three tests, then stay or go on purpose.