“You have a choice,” said Mark Tibergien on Monday afternoon to the 120 attendees of the 3d Annual Retirement Income Symposium (RIS) in Chicago. First, he said, you can choose to stay small and uncomplicated—“keeping it simple.” Second, you can decide to “transform your practice into a professionally managed business.” Third, said the CEO of Pershing Advisor Solutions, you can “muddle through, waiting for that one big client or that one big market surge.”
Tibergien, the former Moss Adams consultant and longtime Investment Advisor columnist, then detailed the steps that advisors need to take if you choose option two—building a professionally managed business.
“If you decide to grow, you’ll have to manage people,” which is not necessarily a skill-set that most advisors naturally have. “Many of you will merge with other firms,” he predicted, and then proclaimed what was still the major challenge for the advisor industry: an “acute talent shortage” at the same time that research has suggested that the industry will need at least 9,000 new RIAs in the years ahead.