Three things winning firms are doing to recruit advisors

The competition for experienced advisors is brutal. Autonomy, compensation, and outright acquisition is driving consolidation across the industry. This year appears to be no different.

But as the industry faces a decline in total advisors and significant competition for advisor talent, advisor retention strategies are being challenged to keep up. In this new era, firms must evolve their relationship with their advisors from fostering an ease of doing business to an ease of growing business.

The ease of doing business is straightforward – focusing on cycle times, having sales support desks for advanced sales, the right product shelf, etc. But this will be table stakes for financial advisors, if they are not already. The ease of growing business is about something else: understanding that in a market with limited talent, the key differentiator will be how strong advisors can build the practice they want with you.

To do this, firms should consider three practices from firms successfully recruiting and retaining advisors at scale.

1. Fostering independence

Experienced advisors repeatedly emphasize the need to continue to build and grow their teams and practices in their unique ways. This sounds simple, but firms often struggle to balance advisor culture with firm culture, particularly in high acquisition markets. The LPL acquisition of Commonwealth highlights that particular risk. Although some advisors have defected, LPL’s stated strategy for achieving 90% advisor retention from the acquisition is to focus on allowing Commonwealth advisors to maintain the culture and independence they are accustomed to. But as much as there is a commitment to culture, there will be a need to transition advisors to proprietary platforms and make it more costly to switch.

Different models will be able to foster various levels of independence, and firms will need to manage the tug and pull associated with providing independence. One common way to do this is for firms to determine where they can allow flexibility and where they must enforce a standard. One basic example is allowing advisors to submit all business in any way that they want to (much to the chagrin of carriers), but firms should reconsider the end-to-end advisor experience to facilitate independence within their framework.

2. Strong lead generation that promotes momentum

Lead generation has long been a standard of advisors, but one of the key differences in lead generation has been the dynamism associated with the leads.  The evolution of lead generation for advisors mirrors sales and marketing traffic categorization – moving cold leads (e.g., traditional cold calling) to warm leads (e.g., individuals in the market for insurance) to hot leads (e.g., direct in-bound lead seeking to purchase an annuity product). Technology, data models and artificial intelligence only accelerate and expand on these concepts. The differentiator is how firms capture leads and then present them to the advisor.

For example, next-best action models provide recommendations as a part of normal financial planning and advising of clients. That allows an advisor to interact and grow business naturally, as opposed to lead systems that involve unnatural interaction. This reflects that while leads are good, not all leads are created equally or can be leveraged in quite the same way. Sales recommendations as a part of regular interactions are easier to use than leads where the adviser needs to invest time and effort into a conversation blindly.

Firms should invest heavily in developing lead capabilities that not only provide sales opportunities but accelerate adviser business development and retention efforts.

3. Developing support structures

White-glove service and the relationship management aspect of the advisor role are difficult if not impossible to automate. The remainder of the work is best served through strong supporting structures.

Evidence shows that advisors in teaming relationships consistently outperform those who are solo. But support structures must go beyond teaming frameworks. To grow and scale business takes a combination of standardizing common tasks (e.g., automation of financial plans, AI client notes), platform/technology, processes and key people.

Some firms have begun using staff to provide some of these capabilities. As technology advances and agentic AI can perform more complex tasks, firms can naturally reduce costs. But a more innovative approach for firms is to leverage inexperienced recruits in an apprenticeship model to create capacity over a longer time horizon. No matter the efficiency gains AI provides, there are limits to how many clients can be serviced by a single advisor. An IXP-driven model turns a role that assists the advisor in growing their business into a future revenue role as those IXPs learn to manage relationships.

While firms are doing more in this space, this three-part strategy highlights a hypothesis about the future of recruiting and retaining talent: empowering strong advisors and providing them with the tools and support they need to grow rapidly is a recipe for success.

© Entire contents copyright 2026 by InsuranceNewsNet.com Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reprinted without the expressed written consent from InsuranceNewsNet.com.

Chris Taylor is an established leader in the insurance industry with more than a decade of experience supporting insurance strategy and performance improvement outcomes. Contact him at [email protected].