Gateway bets coaching can fix the 72% rookie failure rate

Gateway Financial Partners, the Glastonbury, Connecticut-based hybrid RIA supporting 200 affiliated advisors across 24 states, has launched Gateway Elevate for Next Gen Advisors, a structured coaching and development program built around an exclusive partnership with Joe Lukacs, founder of the Magellan Network and a coach with 32 years of methodology and more than 70,000 coaching sessions behind him. The program is the firm's answer to a Cerulli Associates figure cited by InvestmentNews: roughly 72% of rookie advisors fail or leave the profession within their first few years. The same research projects that more than 109,000 advisors — 37.5% of industry headcount overseeing 41.5% of total assets — will retire over the next decade, and pegs the cost of a single failed next-generation advisor at $646,000 to $1 million.

Elevate trades the periodic workshop and annual conference model for continuous, on-demand access: 24/7 access to an AI coaching assistant trained on Lukacs's methodology, daily early-morning strategy and mindset videos, weekly live office hours, weekly accountability coaching from a dedicated integration coach, monthly live small-group mentoring with Lukacs, and a library of more than 100 hours of masterclass content. The curriculum spans referral development, centers of influence, client review frameworks, and broader practice management — the growth levers InvestmentNews says independent advisors consistently identify as critical to scaling a sustainable practice.

Gateway founder and chief visionary officer David Wood locates the problem in the moments that make or break a young advisor, when no one is there to coach them; that absence, he says, costs the industry three out of four new advisors. Lukacs makes a related point: the advisors who make it are the ones with structure, accountability, and coaching in the moments that matter, not necessarily the most talented.

If a failed next-gen hire really costs up to $1 million, Gateway does not need Elevate to convert many trainees to justify the expense; one saved advisor covers a considerable amount of coaching infrastructure. Whether 24/7 AI access plus weekly human check-ins actually moves that failure rate remains the open question. For a firm whose growth depends on the next generation of producers, the program is a more direct response to the retirement wave than another recruiting contest — and a quieter acknowledgment that the industry's replacement pipeline is not keeping pace.