FiComm survey finds 45% of investors chose an advisor without a referral

Referrals are the advisory industry's default growth engine, and FiComm's survey puts a number on how often they go unused: 45% of investors surveyed chose an advisor without one, according to The New Growth Equation report, and among those with $5 million or more that share climbs to 50%. Meg Carpenter, FiComm's chief executive and co-founder, made the case in a podcast conversation with host Ryan Nauman that WealthManagement.com covered, reading the split as a sign that wealthier clients treat the decision as diligence rather than introduction.

The report described in that episode rests on a survey of 1,000 high-net-worth investors, all of them holding at least $500,000 in investable assets and many above $5 million. The item's headline counts 6,230, a figure the coverage does not reconcile with the survey described inside it; the questionnaire, fielding dates and margin of error do not appear at all. Yet a large slice of affluent households arrive at a firm without a name passed along.

Under-45 investors are where the habits diverge: FiComm's findings have them discovering advisors through websites and Google, working across several touchpoints before making contact, and increasingly running artificial intelligence tools into the search. Carpenter's argument about digital presence is not that every practice needs a glossier homepage; it is that a name from a friend or an accountant now arrives alongside a search, and that the profile, the writing and the specificity of who the firm serves are what confirm the introduction. She calls the shortfall a referral gap.

Her prescription runs on a roughly one-year clock: make the practice easier to find, sharpen the message so it names the clients the firm actually wants, and track which channel produced each inquiry. None of the three is exotic or expensive to test, and a practice that cannot say where its last ten clients came from has no way to know whether the 45% figure describes its own pipeline.

The 50% at the top is the figure that matters most. If households with $5 million or more are the least likely to arrive through a personal introduction, a referral-only growth plan is weakest exactly where the economics are best—an inference the data supports in direction, though the coverage reports no age breakdown within that $5 million group. What the episode hands a firm is a concrete test: pick one client profile, rewrite the pages that describe it, and count the inquiries over the next year.