Mark Hurley on the Value, or Lack Thereof, of Your Practice

Mark Hurley created a firestorm of criticism and soul-searching with a paper he co-wrote while at Undiscovered Managers in 1999. Our lead columnist at the time, Bob Veres, wrote that the report–“The Future of the Financial Advisory Business and the Delivery of Advice”–envisions a future “where 50 to 100 large planning shops dominate the marketplace, scattering the smaller one-planner competition into increasingly barren niches.”

While things have not quite worked out that way, Hurley, a West Point and Goldman, Sachs alumnus, has written a new paper with his partners at Fiduciary Network, which provides financing to wealth managers looking to sell ownership of their firm. The paper, released on June 14 and called Creating, Measuring and Unlocking Enterprise Value in a Wealth Manager, is a roadmap for those advisors who wish to do just that, though many such wealth managers will not like what they read.

For instance, the paper defines enterprise value as “the economic value that an investor captures from owning the equity of a company. Because wealth management firms have virtually no tangible assets, their only enterprise value is their future (in particular, after their current owners have departed) profits either as standalone businesses or as part of another entity.”