Stay, Move or Sell? An RIA M&A and Transition Playbook

Andy Burgess launched his consulting firm on the Fourth of July. He admits it is a little on the nose — starting a business on Independence Day when your whole career has been helping advisors declare their own — but the timing worked, his last role wrapped at the end of May, and the joke he had been making to clients for years finally applied to him. He called the firm Foresight.

Nearly a year in, Burgess joins Advisor Ally to talk about the question every advisor is quietly asking in 2026: stay, move, or sell? He has close to 27 years in the business, roughly nine or ten of them spent helping RIAs form as they broke away from wirehouses and captive models. That vantage point makes him less a salesman than what he calls a Sherpa — someone who has been up and down the mountain enough times to point out where to step and where not to.

A frothy market, and the demographics underneath it

Ask Burgess about the state of M&A and the word he reaches for is "frothy." There is a lot of activity, especially at the larger end, where buyers are getting excited about bigger deals. But he is careful to say what is actually driving it. This is not a story about business fundamentals suddenly improving — RIAs have been charging roughly 1% a year for the entire 27 years he has been in the industry. It is a story about age. The numbers he and host Vineet Mohan have both looked at put roughly 15,000 RIAs over $100 million in the market, and a lot of those founders are staring at the same demographic cliff at the same time.

What makes it froth rather than a healthy market is who is showing up to buy. Since going independent, Burgess has been struck by how many non-traditional players — private-equity providers who are not the classic names in the space — are calling people like him to pick their brains and learn the industry from scratch.

"The general mood of M&A is that it's very frothy right now. There's a lot of activity, especially toward the larger end, where people are getting excited about bigger deals. But really that's a reflection of demographics more than anything from a business perspective."

The question he thinks the trade press is not asking loudly enough is what all of this consolidation does to the future of the industry. When a single-owner RIA sells to a large conglomerate, what happens to the second and third generation behind that owner? Do they get the same shot at building something that the first generation had when they hung their own shingle?

The forgotten G2

That worry about the next generation is where Burgess gets most animated, and he is careful to frame it without accusing anyone of bad faith. The pattern he has watched play out many times goes like this: a first-generation founder holds out the idea of equity to a G2 advisor — help me build this, and eventually you'll participate. Nothing malicious happens. But the can gets kicked down the road, year after year, while a long bull market and incoming private equity push the firm's valuation higher and higher.

By the time a sale is on the table, the second-generation advisor who was alluded to equity — maybe never in writing — simply cannot afford to buy the founder out. Burgess does not begrudge anyone the right to sell at top dollar. What nags at him is the gap between the mindset those founders had when they launched, when everyone was making up the rules as they went, and the more corporate, scalable industry their exit is helping build.

The offset, he notes, is the talent war. There are not enough people backfilling the retiring generation, so the buyers who win are the ones building real career paths, equity, and leadership for the G2 advisors they inherit — the ones entrepreneurial enough to have almost started their own firm, but who hooked their wagon to someone else's instead. Burgess, a self-described history major, sees the whole thing as a cycle: consolidation followed eventually by deconsolidation, the way other professional-services industries have expanded and contracted before.

Three buckets, and ignoring the multiple

When Burgess sits with a prospective seller, he runs the same play an advisor runs with a client: a ton of discovery before any numbers. He calls it painting the city on the hill — strip away everything people have told you no about, describe the ideal, then back into the solution. The clearer that picture, the better the deal, because when someone inevitably gets wrapped around the axle on one word in one paragraph of a legal document, a strong vision makes the snag survivable.

For the decision itself, he breaks it into three buckets. Is the deal good for your clients — the non-negotiable a fiduciary has to answer first, and the one most buyers are genuinely good at demonstrating. Is it good for your staff, the people who helped get you here, and does it create the opportunity you never had the scale to offer, like finally moving a long-serving client service manager into an advisor seat. And only third: is it good for you.

"The third one is actually the easiest. Is the dollar amount really what helps you achieve your goal? I look at that as a binary yes or no, where the other ones are nuanced and subjective."

His other piece of advice is blunter: stop reading multiples in the press. The first question is always "a multiple of what," and he can tell where someone is by how they answer — often phrasing it as a question, "revenue?" No, he says, keep talking. Anyone who has seen these deals from the inside knows how much work goes into a P&L to arrive at an EBITDA number, which makes another firm's headline multiple close to useless. It only matters in the eye of the buyer paying it. He compares it to checking his house value on Zillow: fun, but meaningless unless he is selling today.

A different fee model, and the wall everyone hits

Foresight runs on a model Burgess concedes is not normal. In the classic transition world, the firm receiving the advisor pays the consultant, which is where the conflict lives. He would rather take a fraction of that and be paid directly by the advisor, so his conscience — and his advice — stays clean, the same way the fiduciary RIAs he has served his whole career have to disclose and avoid their conflicts. He does lower volume than the high-quantity shops because he also runs a consulting business, coaching RIA platforms on sales methodology and M&A programs.

Then Mohan steers to the topic closest to FastTrackr's own reason for existing: the wall. Whether an advisor is going independent, being tucked in, or getting integrated after M&A, almost everyone hits the same brick wall — actually moving the book. Burgess has watched custodians large and small flail at it for 27 years, and he does not soften it.

"There are just so many moving parts, and we're in a highly regulated industry. I worked at both Schwab and Fidelity, and one would tell me this is a rule and the other would tell me the opposite. It wasn't that one was right — their interpretations were just different."

Layer that regulatory nuance on top of custodian-by-custodian paperwork and then add the human element — older clients, uneven tech comfort, people on the fence — and you understand why it usually takes an army. Technology can move the paperwork, but somebody still has to project-manage the whole thing while the advisor does their day job. His genuine shock, right up until he met Mohan, was that nobody had built for it. He is quick to credit the people who do this work inside firms and custodians as the unsung heroes of the industry, with a patience he says exceeds his own.

The Baskin-Robbins problem

Coming off the recruiter conferences and Schwab Impact, Burgess reports that the hallway conversations echo his on-stage worries: the talent challenge, and a still-bullish sense that advisors will keep moving. What gives him pause is choice overload. He met an advisor recently who was weighing eleven potential landing spots and recognized only four of the players. The industry, he says, went from Baskin-Robbins' 36 flavors to something more like 3,600, and he genuinely worries about how advisors are supposed to decide.

As for Foresight itself, Burgess says he is monetizing 27 years of goodwill — most of his engagements are former clients from past lives finding him again, which he calls the most humbling part of launching. The work sprawls: core RIAs wrestling with whether they need a COO, transactional recruiting, and the occasional advisor who wants an office in Jackson Hole and needs someone to ask about the business plan behind it. It is, in his telling, exactly the constant reinvention that drew him to this industry in the first place — and the reason he thinks anyone weighing stay, move, or sell should start with the ideal, not the number.