Creative Planning President and CEO Peter Mallouk had a very busy 2023.
The firm he leads made six acquisitions, including its Aug. 28 purchase of the former United Capital wealth business from Goldman Sachs — which included roughly $29 billion in assets under supervision. Creative Planning had $245 billion in total assets when the deal was announced.
That big development came just a month after the RIA had set up a new custody relationship with Goldman.
Mallouk, who has led the firm for over 25 years — since he got his MBA and law degree from the University of Kansas — is also active on broadcast and social media and regularly appears on several podcast series to discuss investing and other financial issues.
In mid-December, he weighed in on Dave Ramsey’s view that retirees could withdraw 8% a year if they had a 100% stock portfolio, for instance. “While I believe he has done a lot of good for many, especially when it comes to debt management, following this advice is a path to financial destruction,” Mallouk posted on X, formerly Twitter.
Before 2023 ended, he joined ThinkAdvisor by phone to look back and ahead at his firm, the wealth management business and the markets in the following interview:
THINKADVISOR: What do you view as Creative Planning’s top accomplishment of 2023?
PETER MALLOUK: What we are proudest of is that we really got all of our different services [groups] to communicate with each other efficiently, and we really built out our leadership infrastructure. These were two big, long ongoing projects we finally completed this past year.
All the leaders have worked to really get this put together. … It was [also] a lot of technology combined with leadership, but a huge investment from the technology team and our operations team made it happen.
What was the firm Creative Planning’s top challenge of 2023?
The biggest challenge by far was that we nearly doubled the number of people with Creative Planning. And during that doubling, we also brought in over another 15,000 or so clients.
It was the velocity of activity that was a challenge for us, and we got to the other side of it in the fall, which is why we’re very proud of the team. We’re now at roughly 100,000 clients and about 2,300 employees.
What was the top issue overall for advisors and the wealth management industry in 2023? How will it influence the industry in 2024?
The biggest thing you saw in 2023 is in the value that clients receive. It’s becoming higher and higher and more widespread.
For those not delivering a lot of value, it’s getting harder and harder to hide from this reality. They’re going to have to [make it] happen at some point.
What was the top issue for the bigger players in the wealth management industry overall in 2023, and how will that influence the industry in 2024?
For the bigger firms that are aggregating, the biggest issue was the huge spike in interest rates, which changed the math completely.