Bridgemark's Jeff Nash on how RIA sales change G2 advisors' path to ownership

Cerulli's frequently cited figure points to more than 100,000 advisors, over a third of the profession, retiring inside a decade, a number the industry repeats often enough that it now reads as a clock rather than a statistic, with demand for advice still climbing against it. That combination is why second-generation succession has become a standing item on the advisory agenda, and why Wealth Solutions Report's weekly roundup gave it two slots: a conversation between Laurie Stack and Caroline Piehl on leading a family practice through succession, and Jeff Nash's assessment of how M&A is changing what G2 advisors can actually choose.

Nash, of Bridgemark Strategies, makes the finding with the most bite for anyone inside a founder's exit: continued RIA dealmaking is reshaping the succession paths available to G2 advisors, where a sale can deliver a meaningful financial windfall and added resources while also changing the path those advisors take toward ownership and independence. The transaction that pays a successor can also close off that successor's route to running the firm.

The Ensemble Practice's annual pay study found 39% profit margins sitting beside 3.7% organic growth, a ten-year low, with equity growing scarcer even as cash compensation climbed. Succession is an equity design problem before it is a retirement conversation, and a founder who leaves share classes and buyback rights until growth is well underway pays for it in control at exit.

Ryan Halls of Hue Partners and Bryan Meegan of Kupfer make the owner-side case in the same roundup—founders should weigh timing, equity terms, diligence and specialized legal counsel alongside the economics of a transaction—and the fact that legal counsel appears on the list at all, rather than surfacing later as a closing cost, is the detail worth taking from the panel. The interview runs as part of Hue Partners' M&A Confidential video series.

Piehl's succession at Timewise Financial is the counterexample showing what an internal handoff looks like when it holds: Piehl succeeded her father as managing partner, and during her conversation with Stack she describes changing technology and investment strategy gradually while preserving the firm's integrated tax and wealth planning model. She also points to younger clients using AI to analyze portfolios and to the planning decisions that follow—buying a business, managing an inheritance—along with how firms can help more women become advisors. The version that has held so far changed tools and strategy without dismantling the planning model.

How much longer a firm can hold out as an independent is, increasingly, a question about operations, and Zack Khan of Feathery, in a conversation with Jim Roth of Ascentix Partners on the Wealth Set Go podcast, draws the line between single-user AI assistants and a redesign of workflows across an entire firm; for small and midsize RIAs, he argues, that redesign can produce greater capacity without a matching rise in headcount, potentially letting those firms stay independent longer. If that holds, it bears on the timing decision—a firm that adds capacity without adding people has one fewer argument for selling.

Conor Curtis of Practifi adds the implementation caution: AI, he argues, should be built around advisor workflows, capturing client context and cutting the translation between conversations and CRM systems, and bolting AI features onto legacy interaction patterns leaves the underlying workflow problem intact. Purpose-built systems, in his telling, should support deeper client management rather than simply speed up the tasks a firm already does.

The roundup also carries investment data from RBC and Campden Wealth's 2026 North America Family Office Report, where 84% of the 155 offices surveyed expected direct private equity investments and 74% expected private equity funds to match or beat 2025 over the next two to five years, with 85% naming AI the top investment pick for the next 12 months. Those numbers describe where family-office capital wants to go, not what an advisory practice sells for, and the two should not be run together.

The sequencing is the part the roundup leaves unresolved: for a G2 advisor inside a founder's sale, the number that will matter lands after closing, in the equity grant and its vesting schedule, and whether that grant is written down before the deal is announced is the detail worth watching in the next round of transactions.