Any advisor who has thought seriously about leaving has run the same film. You resign, the phone goes silent, and the clients you have served for fifteen years shrug and stay with the logo. The film feels like foresight. It is mostly fear — and fear is a terrible analyst. It keeps capable people in place year after year because not-knowing feels safer than finding out.
No industry average answers this for you.
Nobody can promise you a number, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. Your book is not an average; a universal retention percentage describes other people's practices. What the record supports is a pattern: the fear runs darker than the outcome. When a move is prepared and communicated honestly, the core relationships generally come along. And this path is ordinary — Diamond Consultants counted 11,172 experienced advisors changing firms in 2025, up 16.2% from 2024.
Loyalty attaches to the person, not the building.
Clients follow the one who picks up the phone — the one who knew when their kid started college, who talked them off the ledge in a down market, who sat with them after a parent died. Institutions do not do any of that. People do. The relationship is the asset, and you are the relationship. The caveat: this only holds where a real relationship exists. A client who sees you as interchangeable with the platform is loyal to it.
The fear says the firm holds the relationship. The reality, more often, is that you do.
Read your own book with three lenses.
Since no industry number can answer this, read the evidence your own book already contains.
- Revenue mix: recurring advisory fees are relationships the client renews every quarter; transactional revenue is a question mark that a change of letterhead can quietly end.
- Who hired whom: a personal referral hired you; an inherited account or a branch walk-in hired the institution.
- Relationship depth: do they call you directly or the 800 number, and have you been through something real together?
Run all three across the book and you get something more useful than any percentage — a list. This cluster follows almost anywhere. That cluster is genuinely uncertain. That last cluster was never really yours. The stomach-level coin flip becomes an inventory.
Ownership has two answers, both true.
Contractually, in most employee channels, the firm owns the client relationship — your agreement says so, the account paperwork says so, the non-solicitation language you signed says so. Relationally, no contract can assign trust. The firm can own the account; it cannot own the reason the client stays. Before you rely on the relationship you are sure you own, find out what you signed about the relationship the firm says it owns.
The conversation is the last step, not the first.
The rules around client contact are real and specific about timing and method. Where the Broker Protocol applies, it lets you take five fields — name, address, phone number, email address, and account title — for clients you personally serviced, and nothing more, only after resigning in writing to local branch management. Both firms must be signatories; Morgan Stanley and UBS withdrew in late 2017, so membership has to be checked, never assumed. Treat the client conversation as the end of the sequence: read what you signed, confirm coverage, build the checklist, get a securities attorney in your corner. Then tell clients you made a change you believe serves them better, that you would be grateful to keep working together, and make the next steps easy. Clients feel the difference between an invitation and a pitch.