The Financial Advisor Practice Lifecycle

Time is your most valuable asset. Spending time addressing the hands-on management of your practice equates to time you're not helping clients and you're not making money. We wrote this guide to help minimize distractions and maximize accelerated growth and practice value as you launch, grow, sustain, and exit your financial advisory practice.

What are the four secrets to accelerating growth and enhancing value in your practice? 

Secret One: Recognize your practice’s four lifecycle stages and the transition phases that support your move from one stage to the next.

Secret Two: Use a consistent, effective process to identify opportunities for accelerating growth and enhancing practice value in each lifecycle stage and transition phase with tools like the Opportunity Evaluator, the CRO Analyzer the Three-Step Model and the Adaptation Grid featured in this guide to help you make timely and effective choices.  These tools help you make opportunities a reality.

Secret Three: Build and empower a trustworthy team that includes employees and strategic partners who actively engage in creating a vision for growing the practice and enhancing its value, and who have the drive, skills and experience to make that vision a reality.

Secret Four: Create and execute a business plan that includes tactical steps to adapt to changes within and outside the company.


A financial advisory practice will progress more quickly when opportunities and choices about how to move ahead are clear. DKE Advisor Solutions examined and explored this process in a series of interviews with independent investment advisors and thought leaders in the investment advisor community.

We also drew on our experience working with dozens of advisors, from start-ups to mature firms. The result is The Financial Advisor Practice Lifecycle™, a framework for understanding your opportunity to accelerate growth and enhance practice value.