If one question keeps good advisors frozen in place, it's this one. Your clients are the business, and the thought of moving while some stay behind is personal as much as financial. Left unexamined, the fear does something sneaky — it makes the unknown feel like a near-certain loss, and then it makes the decision for you. The way out is to replace the worst-case story with the questions that actually predict retention, because those questions have answers, and most of them are answers about your own book you can go find today.
There is no honest single number.
Anyone who quotes you a percentage is selling something. Outcomes vary so widely by book, by channel, and by execution that a figure borrowed from someone else's transition tells you almost nothing about yours. A twenty-year advisor with deep planning relationships and mostly recurring revenue is playing a different game than a transactional book built on product sales. What can be said with sources is how common the move has become — Diamond Consultants counted more than eleven thousand experienced advisors changing firms in 2025, up about sixteen percent from the year before. If books collapsed on the way out the door as a rule, that recruiting market wouldn't exist.
Clients hire you, not the building.
Most well-tended relationships tend to follow. The years of judgment they've leaned on live with you and move with you. A client who trusts you isn't weighing your old firm against your new one. They're weighing some transfer paperwork against starting over with a stranger, and for a relationship that's genuinely working, that's not a close call.
The question was never how many clients you'll lose. It's how strong your relationships are, and how well you can execute — and both are knowable before you commit to anything.
Three things drive the outcome.
Retention comes down to three inputs, roughly in this order:
- Relationship depth — clients who feel genuinely cared for move with you; inherited accounts and households you haven't spoken to in two years are the thinner risk.
- Revenue mix — recurring advisory clients talk to you regularly and have a live reason to follow; one-off transaction clients may not notice you left until the next statement.
- Execution quality — a careful, well-communicated, legally clean move retains clients a rushed one would lose.
An honest inventory of where the trust runs deep and where it runs shallow tells you more than any industry headline.
Most of it is in your control.
You can't control whether a particular client was ever really yours. You can control nearly everything else: when you move, where, how prepared you are on day one, and how the story reaches each household. The advisors who retain well are the ones who prepared well. Notice what that does to the original question. "How many will I lose" is passive. "How well can I execute" is active. One caution keeps it honest: preparation moves the odds, it does not remove the risk.
The rules on outreach are where execution gets concrete.
Under the Broker Protocol, created in 2004, a departing advisor may take exactly five pieces of client information — name, address, phone, email, and account title — and only for clients personally served. Take more and you forfeit the protection. But the Protocol is voluntary, and both your firm and your next firm must be signatories; some of the biggest names stepped out around 2017 and 2018. If either isn't a member, your employment agreement governs instead. Most advisors don't have a securities attorney on call, and this is the moment to change that — the review belongs before your resignation, never after.