How Raymond James Smashed Recruiting and Profit Goals

Raymond James, then, faces both a big opportunity and a big responsibility in supporting its 8,800 financial advisors who oversee some $1.56 trillion in total client assets.

“We are fully committed to supporting advisors by providing everything they need to be successful,” Elwyn added. “It’s not just about the culture but also about building all the necessary capabilities, resources, technology and subject matter expertise that makes us an efficient and effective partner to advisors.”

Here are some highlights from our conversation, edited for length and clarity:

THINKADVISOR: Can you reflect on what it means to you to be leading the private client group and to now be a three-decade veteran at the firm? Did you have leadership ambitions early on in your tenure, or did that develop later?

TASH ELWYN: Thanks for the question, and the simple answer is no. I began my career with Raymond James as a cold caller in 1993 and soon entered the firm’s financial advisor training program.

What you might not know is that I continue to serve a select group of clients to this day, so actually being a financial advisor and serving clients has remained a constant throughout my career. I think that gives me a certain degree of credibility, if you will, with our advisor force, because I continue to serve clients as a Raymond James advisor.

As you would imagine, I continue to have so much passion around what we do as advisors — how you get to have a positive effect and truly change people’s lives.

Eventually, I had one of those aha moments where I started to recognize that, depending on how I structured my practice, I would eventually reach a point where I was at the limit. Across any model, there’s a finite limit to the number of clients you can support.

That’s what sparked more of an interest in leadership and why I eventually moved into roles like being a branch manager and eventually a divisional director — all the way through to my role today as the head of the private client group. Not to sound too altruistic, but what really motivates me is being able to touch as many lives as I can.

How are you settling into the new role, and what are your expectations for 2025 for the private client group and Raymond James more generally? Do you think you can maintain the momentum from 2024?

I’ve been in the role since October, and in the last four or five months I’ve had the opportunity to travel around the country and meet with many financial advisors across all the different affiliation models that we offer today. For the prior 13 years, as you know, I was the president of Raymond James and Associates.

So, I would say that this latest move is really a natural progression of my time here at Raymond James, and it all gives me a great sense of confidence about the future. The advisors tell me that they feel the same way, especially given the leadership’s support of our culture and of their independence and autonomy.

My goal for this year and beyond is to ensure that we offer advisors the most unique and differentiated experience within wealth management. That means continuing to embrace multiple affiliation models for advisors and embracing their free agency — and acknowledging that it is the advisors who own the client relationship, to any extent that anyone really “owns” the client.

We also must ensure that we are providing everything they need to be successful by reinvesting in our platform, our technology and our people. So, that means everything from improving their access to private markets, to investing in our internal subject matter experts and integrating artificial intelligence capabilities that make them more efficient and effective as advisors.

We’re going to do what it takes to support our advisors, and that makes me very confident about the future of this business.

What’s the key to a successful advisor recruiting strategy in 2025? How do you balance the need to attract new advisors across channels with the importance of retaining advisors?

Our success and momentum over time has put us in the privileged position of being able to be selective about the firms and advisors that we bring into the fold, and that’s true across all the different affiliation models.

Getting the right advisors into the right models and in front of the right clients and prospects is the foundation for our growth and success. And look, it’s never been our goal to be the biggest firm. That’s important to acknowledge, as well. We strive to be the best firm and the best option for advisors who want to effectively serve their clients, and we don't compromise on that.

I often reflect on a book that I read some years ago that was written by Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. Reflecting on the most important challenge his business faced, he often said it was "making the big feel small," and I think there’s a lot of truth to that for Raymond James. We want to grow, but we also want to maintain our culture and our connection to every advisor.

We can do this by continuing to stand out in an industry that is clearly undergoing a period of change and consolidation, to the point that we are almost starting to see a barbell effect. Increasingly, advisors are having to choose between basing their business at a big wirehouse or RIA consolidator, or they are striking out on their own as a small, independent entity.

What we can do is offer a different way forward, where we are bringing advisors all the capabilities and technology they need to compete while also maintaining a real sense of intimacy and a connection. That’s how we will continue to be successful.

At Orion’s recent conference event, CEO Natalie Wolfsen said she believes that the wealth management industry can triple in size over the next two decades. Do you agree with that level of optimism?

Yeah, I really do, for a number of reasons.

To begin with, just think about all the ways that a good financial advisor backed by modern technology can have a positive impact on somebody’s life — how much added value they can create for individuals and families over time. Add to that the increasingly sophisticated and complex financial lives that people are living, and it’s a recipe for strong growth for our industry for a long time to come.

It also has to do with both the intergenerational wealth transfer and, just as important, the intra-generational wealth transfer. It’s true that we are going to see Gen Z, millennials and Gen X inherit a lot of money in the coming decades, and they are eager to work with advisors. But it’s also true that we are going to see that control of significant amounts of assets is going to pass from what I will call “financial spouses” to “non-financial” survivors as wives generally outlive their husbands.

Right now, we have a really significant opportunity to get ahead of this trend and build deeper relationships with our client families, including with the next gen and the non-financial spouse. These groups are really going to need the support of advisors as they inherit and steward significant wealth. Of course, succeeding in this future means we need advisors who are willing to talk to across generations — to talk to both spouses and to be inclusive of the interests and perspectives of younger generations.

The other fact of the matter is that the growth opportunity speaks to the evolution of the financial service industry in general. If I reflect on the start of my career three decades ago, the value of the advisor was almost to provide information about the market and to manage the portfolio. There wasn’t anywhere else to go for that information or those services, so simply managing the portfolio was enough to keep clients happy.

Fast forward to today and we are inundated with information and self-service investing opportunities. The advisor, in turn, has had to evolve and much further up the value chain and into the realm of holistic financial planning. It’s really exciting to think about all the opportunity that comes along with such a change, on top of the traditional services like investment management.

For us at Raymond James, it all boils down to ensuring we are helping advisors to serve all the complex and interconnected financial needs their clients bring to the table.