By Nathan Place in Financial Planning, featuring Halbert Hargrove
In the world of wealth management, it seems like everyone wants to work at an RIA.
In recent years, there’s been a mass movement of financial advisors away from wirehouses and other brokerages and toward the registered investment advisor (RIA) model. Over the past six years, the number of RIA-only professionals has jumped by 51%, according to FINRA.
So an RIA must be a great place to work, right? It depends.
As in any other industry, one workplace under the “RIA” label can be vastly different from another. There are a plethora of factors to consider: work environment, benefits, leadership, communication, career mobility — or even something as simple as the location of the office.
But according to Jason Diamond, who recruits financial advisors for a living, the most important factor is also the hardest one to define.
“The number one thing that’s going to come into play is culture,” said Diamond, a vice president at the recruitment firm Diamond Consultants. “Usually when we talk to advisors about what would make one workplace more attractive than another, whether it’s a wirehouse or an RIA, it’s usually culture and economics.”
With such complex criteria, is it possible to rank RIA workplaces? Can something as amorphous as “culture” be quantified? The answer to both is yes, because we’ve done it. Working with our partner, the HR researcher Best Companies Group, Financial Planning has compiled a ranking of the nation’s best RIAs to work for.
Who was eligible? We accepted applications from any RIA registered with the SEC — whether for-profit or nonprofit — that met three conditions: Each firm must have at least 10 employees in the United States, must have a facility within the country and must have been in business for at least one year.
How did we rank them? The same way we ranked the best workplaces in money management: Working with Best Companies, we surveyed financial professionals across the country about their firms’ leadership, culture, pay and benefits, training, work environment, engagement, communications and other factors.
Separately, Best Companies evaluated each firm’s workplace policies, practices, benefit programs, philosophy, systems and demographics.
Finally, we combined our measurements from the survey and evaluation to calculate an overall score for each firm. After tallying up the scores from lowest to highest, we had our ranking.
In the end, our research brought us to 52 outstanding RIAs where employees say it’s a pleasure to come into work each day. Scroll through the cardshow below to see who made the list.
