&Partners' 125th practice is its second Commonwealth team in two weeks

&Partners has added Bucholtz Germo, a ten-person team in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, managing $352 million in client assets, in a hire first reported by Financial Advisor Magazine, and the addition brings the firm to 125 practices since it opened in 2023. It is the second Commonwealth practice to join the Nashville- and St. Louis-based hybrid broker-dealer and RIA in two weeks, following SBS Retirement Consultants in Fairbanks, Alaska, and &Partners put its assets at $63 billion as of September 1.

Bucholtz Germo is an old practice, in the way that matters to a firm selling continuity: David Bucholtz and Michael Germo merged their separate books in March 2003, the year Bucholtz registered with Commonwealth, after he had begun at Transamerica Financial Resources in 1995, worked through firms including A.G. Edwards & Sons, and founded Bucholtz Consulting in 2004. Germo's trail runs longer: IDS Life Insurance Company and American Express Financial Advisors in 1981, then Integrated Resources Equity Corporation, then 29 years at Royal Alliance Associates, where he started Financial Planning Resources in 2004; he registered with Commonwealth in 2019, according to BrokerCheck.

No recruiting pitch can manufacture those spans. Germo entered the business in 1981 and has since worked at five organizations, while Bucholtz has been registered for more than thirty years, twenty-three of them with Commonwealth. A team that old is choosing a platform it expects to outlast its founders, which is a different test than the one a producer with twenty years left applies, and a test a firm with no integration of its own to run is unusually well placed to pass.

The roster describes the practice more accurately than the asset total does: five advisors—Bucholtz, Germo, Isaac Bushen, James Tracz and Joe Suster—sit alongside five non-advisory roles, including Kelly Vinopal in wealth management, Gail Burdyshaw as senior client relationship manager, and Michelle Becker, Michelle Priester and Cherie Rosenberger in client service. That works out to a shade over $70 million in client assets per advisor, a density that will not headline a recruiting release, matched one-for-one with a service bench that, by the shape of the roster, carries as much of the client relationship as the producers do.

The release says the team built its practice around educating clients through the planning process and inviting their questions, which &Partners said in its own announcement fits its values closely, and the team has served families and business owners in Northeast Ohio for decades; the roster is only its current form.

&Partners was founded in 2023 by three former Wells Fargo executives, David Kowach, John Alexander and Kristi Mitchem, and 125 practices later it is the clearest window into how the independent channel is being rebuilt, with volume arriving a few hundred million dollars at a time, which is why a firm that did not exist four years ago now holds $63 billion. Better than one practice a fortnight is a rate no single block trade can match, and none tries.

Much of that arithmetic has come from Commonwealth. LPL's acquisition of the firm has run long enough that LPL raised its run-rate cash flow target for the deal by $25 million and projects advisor retention climbing to 90%, yet Commonwealth advisors keep moving anyway; in August, as this publication reported, Merit and Hightower pulled nearly $5 billion from LPL's future book in a single week. Advisors on a platform being absorbed into a larger one have more reasons than usual to take a meeting.

As this publication has argued, independents are now raiding each other, and the wirehouse exit is no longer the only door into a hybrid platform; this move is the pattern, a Commonwealth team going to a three-year-old competitor with no wirehouse on either end.

The temptation is to file the hire under the block-trade thesis this desk has been running—NewEdge's four-team, $12 billion day, custody as the real contract—and move on. The size of the team argues otherwise. It involves no custodian decision a reader would notice and no group large enough to move a weekly AUM chart, yet it is precisely the scale at which the independent channel does its volume: two Commonwealth practices in two weeks, 125 in under four years, and a client base in Northeast Ohio that predates the firms now competing for it.

LPL's retention figure will be assembled practice by practice between now and the close, and the practices that leave first never appear in it. &Partners has taken two Commonwealth teams in two weeks. The 126th, on that evidence, is likely to come from the same book.