Sanctuary staffs the benches that decide which wirehouse teams leave

Sanctuary Wealth, the Miami-based hybrid, named three senior leaders Wednesday, filling the estate-planning, M&A and marketing benches that a hybrid platform now needs before it can pitch the largest teams leaving the wirehouses. Harry Drozdowski becomes managing director of advanced estate and wealth planning, Reilly Cornell vice president of mergers and acquisitions, and Kelly LaPalio vice president of advisor growth marketing.

Cerulli projects wirehouse headcount will fall 5.7% from 2025 through 2028 while independent RIAs grow 12% and independent broker-dealers grow 4.7%; Sanctuary sits where that traffic concentrates. Its recent run, a record year recruiting elite wirehouse breakaways into the hybrid RIA model, set the bar for what the firm now has to service.

The hiring lands where that math is least forgiving: a wirehouse team weighing independence is choosing among platforms that have converged on custody, technology and compensation, and what separates them at the top of the market is whether the firm can hold a client whose affairs run through a family office, a business and a foundation. Cerulli's forecast tracks headcount, but the dollars follow the teams with the most complicated balance sheets.

Drozdowski answers the hardest question those teams ask. He spent nearly two decades in wealth planning and private legal practice serving ultra-high-net-worth families and family offices, most recently as an executive director and private wealth strategist at Wells Fargo, where he advised the bank's largest relationships on estate, tax and wealth planning. At Sanctuary he will work directly with partner firms on trust, estate and succession questions and connect advisors with specialists in tax planning, philanthropic planning and business-owner solutions.

His arrival extends a pattern this publication has tracked all summer: the independent channel treats Wells Fargo's bench as its favorite place to shop, and a strategist who spent his career on a wirehouse's largest relationships is the kind of hire a platform makes when it wants departing teams to believe their most complicated clients will be handled the way the bank handled them.

A team with a family trust, a business to sell and a charitable intent will not hand those files to a platform with nobody on staff to read them. Estate capacity is the price of admission at the top of the book, and the strategist who brings it is the hire that makes a breakaway team's succession problem look solvable.

Cornell's mandate is the more strategically loaded one: she arrives from Bluespring Wealth Partners, Kestra's fee-only RIA channel, where as a principal on the M&A team she evaluated more than 100 acquisition opportunities and executed more than 15 transactions, following earlier work in Citi's investment banking division advising energy companies on mergers, strategic transactions and capital raises. At Sanctuary she will source and execute deals alongside Josef Rogers, promoted to director of corporate development earlier this year after joining in 2024.

Sanctuary is not buying a book with that hire; it is buying the operator who has already screened a hundred of them. The premium in wealth-management consolidation has shifted from the assets to the gatekeeper — the person who sources the deal and the team that runs the integration — and a firm adding a principal-level buyer with fifteen closings behind her is building that function rather than decorating it.

LaPalio covers the half of the equation that recruiting decks tend to bury, bringing more than two decades across FocusPoint Solutions, Avantax and Hightower to design organic growth programs across the network and work with advisors on positioning, digital marketing and lead generation. The logic is unglamorous and correct: a breakaway that arrives with a substantial book and no growth engine hands the platform an asset that shrinks.

"We are building for where our partner firms are going, not simply where they are today," chief executive Adam Malamed said. The new hires, he said, bring the experience and perspective to help advisors address more complex client needs, pursue new avenues for growth and prepare their businesses for what comes next.

The breakaway market has spent a decade competing on the front door — the transition check, the comp grid, the custody arrangement — while the services that decide whether a team stays get staffed after the fact. Sanctuary is assembling those services before the pitch rather than after the close. It is a more durable recruiting weapon than a richer grid, because a grid can be matched by anyone with capital while an estate bench and a deal desk take years to build.

That build also fits the market shift from solo breakaways toward block trades that has dominated recruiting this year: the platform chasing a multi-billion-dollar team has to behave like an acquirer and an operator at once, and the org chart announced Wednesday is what that looks like in practice.

Watch whether Sanctuary's corporate development desk starts putting the firm's own name on transactions, because an M&A hire is easy to announce and harder to justify if no deals follow; the clearest evidence that this build is for buying will be the deal announcements themselves.