Merritt Point's Ross Bauer says bigger advisor teams are seeking supported independence

For years Tony Sirianni's fallback answer to how long the advisor recruiting cycle could run was that it had to end eventually; he called it his cop-out. On this week's AdvisorHub podcast he retired the line, and the reason he gave was about buyers rather than sellers—the funding, the financing, and the choices advisors now have among firms. His guest, Merritt Point Wealth Advisors founder and executive chairman Ross Bauer, agreed and then sharpened the point: the practices doing the moving, he said, are getting bigger.

Sirianni, AdvisorHub's chief executive, framed the comparison directly: does the billion-dollar team want something different from an advisor with $300 million or $500 million, perhaps sophisticated enough to recognize that it lacks the tool set—the management, the leases, the machinery that has to be run—and would rather concentrate on clients, or is the motive closer to a partnership mindset, given that Merritt Point has equity involved? Bauer's answer was that it is both. That is the honest reply and the more useful one, because it means two buyers with two different motives are arriving at the same table, and when that happens the offer says more about the market than the buyer does.

If the cycle keeps running for Sirianni's reason, the constraint sits with the buyers: a market where the supply of willing advisors is the bottleneck improves terms for advisors, while a market where capital is plentiful competes instead over the shape of the offer—who carries the real estate, who pays the compliance officer, who gets the equity. Each of those is both a gain in what an advisor receives and a decision the advisor no longer makes. That answer suggests the second market is the one we are in.

Peel back the layers of independence, Bauer said, and many of the models require operational and infrastructural work—oversight, compliance, real estate, technology, staffing, the platform itself—all fixed costs that have nothing to do with client work. One practice spreads a compliance department, a lease, and a technology stack across a single book of business; a platform spreads the same costs across every practice that joins, which is the arithmetic behind the model.

Advisors grow, Bauer said, by focusing on their clients, with the model questions coming after. Taken at face value, the back office is not a lesser part of a practice but the part that compounds the margin or consumes it. A team that has already built a good one holds an asset, while a team that has not holds a reason to sign.

The word carrying the weight is 'supported': independence, in this version, keeps the client relationship and the advisor's name while assigning everything underneath to someone else, and what has changed is the size of the team signing up. A billion-dollar practice now has a live choice between building its own back office and renting one, and renting is compatible with calling yourself independent. The episode's posted description lists AI and building a replicable platform within the firm's infrastructure among its topics, which is the same idea arriving from the software direction—the parts of a practice that can be standardized are the parts that can be handed over.

Neither man settled the price. Sirianni notes that Merritt Point has equity involved; the transcript excerpt does not say how much, in what entity, or on what terms, and those details decide which deal an advisor has actually done. Equity could sit in the practice the advisor still owns—a claim on an asset he built and might sell again—or in the platform that serves the practice, a claim on something else. An advisor holding a piece of the platform faces different incentives when the next offer arrives than one holding a piece of his own firm. That the equity question went by as settled fact is understandable in a conversation between friends about a model they both like; it is also the item a prospective partner would want in writing.

The adjacent argument about M&A holds that the premium has migrated from assets under management to operating capacity, and buyers now pay for the layer that makes a book of business run. Supported independence is that trade priced from the other side of the table, and the recruiting traffic points the same way. In September, PWD described Schwab's Ameriprise recruiting as a serial launch program, with the fourth billion-dollar Ameriprise team to leave in 2026 pricing the template. In August, a $1 billion Truist lift-out and a UBS team landed at Wells Fargo FiNet on the same day. In between, Sanctuary's Adam Malamed described independence as a spectrum, and this column agreed with the framing that the platforms which treat choice as the product will own the decade. Bauer's contribution is to say what the spectrum implies for the teams now shopping at the top of it.

Sirianni's account is that Merritt Point has lately been moving a lot of billion-dollar teams, and what the next one keeps—a name on the door, a share of its own economics, or neither—will say more about where the model is going than another hour of debate over whether independence can scale. Clients will notice only that the same advisor answers the phone.