Clients want the plan, and advisors are learning to bill for it

Cerulli Associates' newest survey of affluent investors asks why they keep an advisor, and returns appear nowhere in the top five: comfort working with a human being leads at 28 percent, followed by the ability to ask specific questions at 20 percent, a desire for a strong ongoing relationship at 19 percent, guidance in understanding a financial plan at 13 percent, and collaborating on that plan at 11 percent. Cerulli reads that as the human elements of advice doing the retention work rather than portfolio construction alone, which is why the Boston firm describes planning as the place the relationship starts, not a service added once the assets land.

The finding holds across channels: asked whether having a financial plan is important, 85 percent of all respondents agreed, and clients of private banks led at 89 percent. The arithmetic inside the reason list reinforces the point—the two planning entries sum to 24 percent, still short of the 28 percent who simply want a person across the table, and a plan is how a human being proves useful on a schedule.

On the supply side of the same survey, 24 percent of advisors say their clients receive planning aimed at a specific goal, while 48 percent describe what they deliver as comprehensive and ongoing, a share those advisors expect to reach 54 percent by 2027. That projection is the study's real content: clients have already said the plan is why they stay, roughly half of advisors describe themselves as delivering one continuously, and the field's own forecast has a bare majority arriving three years from now. Set against the 85 percent who say a plan matters, the deficit is not precise since the questions and populations differ, but the direction is hard to argue with.

Money is already moving toward that conclusion: a separate Datos Insights study of planning fees shows advisors who bill separately for planning charge an average annual retainer of nearly $6,815, up 52 percent since 2023. A price climbing that fast on an offering only about half the field claims to deliver comprehensively says the market finished deciding what a plan is worth before most practices finished building one.

The retainer is the better revenue model, and the market reached that conclusion ahead of the practitioners. A planning retainer bills for work a firm's own staff can produce, does not ride a market level the way an asset-based fee does, and arrives before the assets: the client pays to build the plan, then funds it. The counterargument has teeth—retainer revenue is labor, scaling with hiring and systems rather than with the compounding of somebody else's portfolio, and an acquirer pricing a book will discount a line that walks out the door when a planner retires. That forecast is the answer, since it is a claim about repeatability: if comprehensive planning covers a majority of clients by 2027, the deliverable has become a repeatable process, and the firm that turns the plan into that process keeps the margin the retainer already carries.

One risk travels with the model: a client who pays a separate planning fee acquires a separate yardstick, and the annual review likely becomes a defense of the work rather than a report on the market. Firms that charge an asset fee and a retainer alongside each other will probably find the retainer is the line clients question first, which is the healthy version of this arrangement—it forces the plan to keep proving itself, and the ability to ask specific questions is precisely what those affluent respondents ranked second among their reasons to stay.

Cerulli's prescription points exactly there: advisors should use the intake process to map a prospective client's whole financial picture before turning to the planning work itself to pin down short- and medium-term objectives alongside retirement. Scott Smith, a senior director at Cerulli, describes investors who want help with immediate needs while keeping longer-term goals in view. Strip the prescription to its mechanics and it is a data-capture workflow with a relationship wrapped around it, which is why the AI fight in advisory practices left model quality behind months ago; the value accrues to whoever owns the connector, the custodian or platform whose system of record the workflow runs through.

The prize is the record that workflow produces: consents, accounts, goals, dates, a governed picture of the household refreshed every year and stored beside the statement. Our September reporting on the private-markets build-out made the same point from the other end—the industry keeps pouring money into on-ramps while leaving the operating layer thin. The plan is the real asset, because the firm that writes it holds the statement, and the statement is where the next allocation and the next generation get decided.

The succession gap we covered in September put documented plans at 42 percent of advisors, the people whose job is telling families to write it down; the same intake discipline Cerulli prescribes—mapping the household, naming the dates, revisiting it annually—is what a firm needs before it can hand a book to anyone else.

From here, two numbers are worth watching. The 54 percent matters for the obvious reason: land it and the retainer becomes the unit price of advice, with asset-based fees demoted to the trailing revenue underneath, and every RIA's revenue mix gets revalued accordingly when it sells. Then the retainer itself has climbed 52 percent since 2023; a second move anywhere near that size turns planning into the product and the portfolio into the thing the plan tells clients to own.