Even the most successful individual financial advisors can eventually hit a wall, where it’s simply not possible to make themselves more productive by growing a team to support them. The biggest advisory businesses bring together multiple successful advisors, who can each contribute their own unique (and hopefully, complementary) skillset to make the business bigger than what any one of them could achieve alone.

The caveat, however, is that just because two advisors are individually successful doesn’t mean that they will be a successful partnership. At best, different skillsets result in partners taking on more specialized roles in the business, and needing to learn to communicate well with people who have a very different perspective. At worst, the partners have fundamentally different long-term goals that eventually create untenable conflicts that cause the partnership to fail.  Continue reading....