Wealthier advisors, unhappier jobs: the real exit is the title

Groucho Marx reportedly said that money can't buy happiness but it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery. InvestmentNews's new look at whether financial advisors are wealthier than ever, and happier, suggests the line fits a professional class built for it. Advisors in their late fifties and sixties, sitting on record practice values, are deciding whether to stay at their firms or go — and learning that the real thing for sale may be the job, not just the book.

The wealth side of the ledger is genuinely impressive, because the past ten to fifteen years delivered record stock markets and all-time-high client assets, which pushed practice valuations to records of their own. One leading independent broker-dealer and RIA, speaking privately to InvestmentNews, said advisors selling all or part of their firms have seen valuations rise at least 25% since 2020. Its average acquisition size per advisor practice reached $70 million in client assets in 2025, meaningfully larger than the practices of six years earlier. David DeVoe, whose consulting firm focuses on RIAs, puts the long run in sharper terms: a $1 billion RIA is worth twice what it was twenty years ago, with multiples that have climbed from eight times EBITDA to the high teens and occasionally the low twenties.

The money is real, and so is the silence around it. Advisors and executives are loathe to discuss their good fortune, InvestmentNews reports, because it draws attention and scrutiny and risks sounding boastful. The silence is understandable, but it means the industry's most important career question — whether the people running these firms still want the jobs — gets discussed in private and rarely priced in public.

DeVoe's sharpest observation cuts to the point: the advisors who end up happiest, he says, are the ones who stop being CIO or CEO and take on a dramatically different job. Read that against the valuation numbers and the conclusion is hard to avoid — the asset has appreciated far faster than the job.

The implication is plain: the multiple and the title are often the same asset. An RIA earning a high-teens multiple is frequently still carrying a founder's selling power, the skill that made Ron Carson a name in the business, and the thing that makes the practice valuable can be the very thing the owner most wants to stop doing.

As this publication argued earlier this month, exit plans break when value, liquidity, and succession run on separate clocks, and the InvestmentNews reporting is a case study in exactly that breakdown. A practice of $70 million in client assets, worth 25% more than it was in 2020, has solved its value question, while the succession question remains open, less about the multiple than about whether a founder in his or her late fifties wants to spend the next decade running the place.

Ron "Omani" Carson is the industry's extreme example: a former top broker with a decades-long reputation as a seller, he controlled a business that coached other advisors on how to sell. InvestmentNews reported in 2021 that Carson Group had been valued at more than $1 billion after Bain Capital invested. Then, with his firm maturing, he left wealth management entirely to promote spiritualism and retreats — the kind of tree-hugger territory he once mocked. The specifics are eccentric; the structure, less so. Carson took DeVoe's advice to its logical end: he changed the job entirely.

The M&A market is beginning to face this, though it doesn't know it yet. The RIA roll-up has become a financing event, as this publication has argued, and the exit question has replaced the succession question. But the machinery of these transactions is built for an equity exit, a transfer of ownership, and an equity exit transfers the ownership while leaving the job in place.

The next premium in advisor M&A will attach to clean role exits rather than the loftiest multiple. The sellers who negotiate the job out of the transaction, who take the proceeds and the freedom and leave the CEO title on the buyer's desk, will be the ones reporting the satisfaction that the InvestmentNews headline asks about. Buyers who insist that founders stay may be paying for the very unhappiness that turns owners into reluctant employees. The market has learned to price assets; it is just beginning to learn to price the title.

The number to watch is how many founders, in the next round of term sheets, ask what happens to the CEO title on day one. That line, more than the EBITDA, is where the industry's real exit question will be answered.