By Ana M. Marques, Fractional COO / Founder of Alignis Global / MAA Operate To Scale Lead
There is a particular kind of firm I meet again and again.
The advice is good. The advisers are good. Clients renew, refer, and stay for decades. The founder is respected, often loved. Revenue has grown every year for a decade. And yet somewhere between twelve and twenty-five people, the whole thing starts to feel heavier than it should. Everything takes longer. The founder is back in the weeds. Good people leave quietly. Growth doesn’t stop exactly, it just costs more than it used to.
The instinct in that moment is almost always to reach for strategy. A new proposition. A new segment. A new CRM. Sometimes an acquisition. What almost nobody reaches for is the thing that is actually broken, which is the operating model underneath.
This lesson was cemented properly to me, and expensively, building a house.
The Kitchen and the Foundations
In 2020, between COVID and Brexit, I built a house from scratch. In week one I fired the project manager and took it on myself. I ordered every material, from screws to roof tiles. I signed off every design, attended every site meeting, painted, sanded, and managed every trade on site.
The builder wanted to talk about drainage and foundations. I wanted to talk about kitchens and tiles.
That tension became the most useful lesson of my career. Get the foundations wrong and everything beautiful you build on top eventually cracks. Not immediately. That is the cruel part. It cracks two years later, when the weight goes on.
I have watched advisory firm owners make exactly the same mistake. They chase the visible wins, the rebrand, the new office, the acquisition, the tech stack, and build them on foundations that were never properly poured. The bill always arrives. It just arrives late, and it arrives in the form of adviser burnout, client attrition, a failed integration, or a regulator asking a question nobody can evidence the answer to.
The expensive fixes are always the ones you buried early and ignored.
The Evidence is Not Subtle
This is not a feeling. The data across three continents says the same thing in three different accents.
Start in the UK. The FCA’s 2025 survey of financial advice firms, published in April 2026 and drawn from responses from more than 4,100 firms, records a 15% fall in authorised advice firm numbers since 2021, while adviser numbers hold steady at around 31,000 [1]. Firms are disappearing; advisers are not. The market is consolidating into fewer, larger, more operationally complex businesses.
The regulator’s own language on that shift is worth reading twice. Where groups grow quickly through acquisition, the FCA says, resourcing has to keep pace with the increasing scale and complexity of the group, and where integration has been badly managed and resourcing hasn’t kept up, it has seen harm to the businesses themselves and to their clients [1].
That is a regulator describing an operations problem, not a strategy problem.
Its multi-firm review of consolidation, published on 31 October 2025, landed in the same place. Six themes, one of which is governance and resourcing: scaling systems and controls to match growth and complexity. Another is acquisition and integration discipline [2]. The FCA was explicit that it was not writing new rules. It was pointing at the gap between what firms had bought and what they had actually built.
Now look at the same problem through the ongoing-advice lens. In February 2025, the FCA reported that suitability reviews were delivered in around 83% of cases at 22 of the largest advice firms, with a further 15% of clients declining or not responding, and fewer than 2% never contacted at all. The headline read as reassurance. The detail did not. The poor practices the FCA listed were ineffective processes, controls and monitoring; management information too thin for senior oversight; and record-keeping inadequate to evidence that the service had been delivered [3].
Read that list again. Not one item is about the quality of advice. Every item is about workflow, handoffs and evidence. Firms were doing the work and failing to prove it, or losing it in the seams between adviser, paraplanner and administrator.
Consumer Duty didn’t create that problem. It just switched the lights on.
Across the Atlantic, the picture rhymes. Kitces Research has spent years documenting that the typical financial adviser spends only about 20% of their working time actually in client meetings, with the bulk of the week consumed by preparation, analysis and back-office work [4]. Its later work on what improves adviser productivity found that the most productive advisers were not working longer hours; by leveraging back-office support they added roughly four hours a week in front of clients, around 200 hours a year [5]. Capacity was never about working harder. It was about who does what, and what happens between them.
Schwab’s 2025 RIA Benchmarking Study, covering 1,288 firms and over $2.4 trillion in assets, found capacity constraints rising up the agenda even in a strong growth year. The number that stopped me: 45% of firms pursuing acquisitions said one of the reasons was to solve operational issues [6].
That is buying a second house because the first one has damp.
Which brings us to the last data point. NextWealth’s Consolidation of Advice Report 2026, built on interviews with 30 leading acquirers and transaction data from Q1 2021 to Q1 2026, found that failure to integrate was the most commonly cited cause of deal failure [7]. That is in a market where private equity was involved in around 72% of UK advice transactions in the first half of 2025. [8] As NextWealth puts it, the era of buying advice firms simply for scale is over; acquirers now have to prove they can integrate and govern what they have bought [7].
Deals don’t fail in the spreadsheet. They fail in the seams.
The Four Places Growth Actually Breaks
Having run these diagnostics across the USA, Asia-Pacific and Europe, I see the same four fractures.
- The founder is the operating system. In a ten-person firm, the founder being the final arbiter of everything is a feature. At twenty-five, it’s the bottleneck. Nothing is documented because nothing needed to be. The firm cannot outgrow one person’s calendar.
- The handoffs are undesigned. Nobody sits down and designs the moment work passes from adviser to paraplanner to administrator to compliance. It just evolved. Every leak I have ever found, the missed review, the client chased twice, the case that sat for eleven days, lives in a handoff nobody owns. Work does not fall down inside roles. It falls down between them [9].
- Tools get bought instead of decisions being made. A new CRM will faithfully automate a broken process and make it broken faster. I have never once opened an engagement by recommending new software, and I have rarely needed to.
- Geography multiplies friction. I have worked with firms with offices in two countries and watched the friction go up fourfold, not twofold. Different rhythms, different rules, until nobody is sure which way is right. Having grown up across four continents before primary school, I hold a bias I’d defend: there is rarely one correct way to do anything, only many ways that make sense once you understand the culture that built them. But a firm still needs one agreed way to work. Cultural fluency is not the absence of standards. It is knowing which standards must be universal and which must flex.
COMPASS: Finding the Pillar Where the Ceiling Sits
Most advisory firms don’t stop scaling because they lack ambition. They stop because one or more parts of the business hasn’t kept pace with the rest.
That is what our COMPASS framework is built to find. Seven pillars:
- C – Clarity of purpose. Does everyone know what we’re building, for whom, and do decisions actually follow it?
- O – Operating plan. Is there a plan that connects strategy to who does what by when, or a set of intentions?
- M – Members. People and stakeholders: roles, capacity, accountability, succession, key-person risk.
- P – Protection. Compliance, risk, governance, evidence — built into the workflow rather than bolted on afterwards.
- A – Attractive proposition and pricing. What we sell, to whom, at what value, and whether the delivery cost is understood.
- S – Story. The pitch. Whether the firm can articulate its value consistently, by anyone, not only the founder.
- S – Systems. The platform and the processes running on it, including the handoffs between them.
Seven pillars, one question: where is the growth ceiling actually sitting?
Firms rarely fail across all seven. They usually score well on four or five and have one pillar quietly capping everything else. Beautiful Story, no Operating plan. Strong Protection, no Members bench. The fix is almost never a transformation programme. It is targeted work on the one or two pillars holding the rest down.
Take the COMPASS Growth Assessment
What the Audit Actually Looks At
The COMPASS Audit is a deeper version of the scorecard, and its discipline is simple: evidence over opinion.
Each of the seven pillars is assessed through an extended question set, then scored against a five-level maturity scale, Founder-Dependent, Emerging, Defined, Managed, Built to Scale. Scores come from document review, management information, process walkthroughs and structured leadership interviews, not from a self-assessment form. The expanded version adds staff interviews below leadership level, client-experience sampling, deeper data and financial analysis, and time on site, because leadership’s view of a firm and the firm’s actual behaviour are two different data sets, and the gap between them is usually the finding.
The output is a maturity report with scores, findings and a prioritised 90-day roadmap. Prioritised is the operative word. Every firm I audit could fix twenty things. The value is in knowing which three, in what order.
And a constraint I hold to: no new tools, no rip-and-replace. Executive-level operations guidance should align strategy, processes and people without disrupting what is already working. Most firms do not need more capability. They need the capability they already own to connect.
The Part People Expect Me to Leave Out
I have burned out. I ran too hard for too long, and I am direct with clients about it, because the alternative is dishonest.
Rest is part of the system, not a reward for surviving it. A firm that only functions when its founder is running at full capacity has a single point of failure wearing a nice suit. That is not a wellbeing observation. It is a risk finding, and I write it up as one.
This is also why I don’t accept the trade-off people assume exists between high-performing and deeply human. The most human firms I work with are frequently the highest-performing ones, and Consumer Duty made that measurable rather than sentimental. Firms that genuinely understand their clients evidence suitability more easily. Firms that treat their people as a designed system rather than an expandable resource have lower turnover, better handoffs and cleaner records. Culture shows up in the audit trail.
I sacrificed two bedrooms in that house for a double gallery landing and a curved staircase. Nobody on site agreed with the vision. I didn’t need agreement. I needed every trade aligned on exactly what they had to deliver for their part.
That is the whole job, and it is why good firms stop scaling. Not because the vision was wrong. Because nobody aligned the trades.
Measure twice. Cut once. Pour the foundations before you argue about the tiles.
Sources
[1] Financial Conduct Authority, Understanding the advice market: financial advice firms survey 2025, published 23 April 2026. www.fca.org.uk/data/understanding-financial-advice-market
[2] Financial Conduct Authority, Review of consolidation in the financial advice and wealth management sector, multi-firm review, 31 October 2025. www.fca.org.uk/news/news-stories/review-consolidation-financial-advice-and-wealth-management-sector
[3] Financial Conduct Authority, Ongoing financial advice services, multi-firm review, 24 February 2025. www.fca.org.uk/publications/multi-firm-reviews/ongoing-financial-advice-services
[4] Kitces Research, How Do Financial Advisors Actually Spend Their Time? (Kitces Research on Advisor Productivity, 2018 to 2025 studies). www.kitces.com/blog/how-do-financial-advisors-spend-time-research-study-productivity-capacity-efficiency
[5] Kitces Research, New Kitces Research On What Improves Advisor Productivity. www.kitces.com/blog/financial-advisor-productivity-revenue-per-advisor-experience-expertise-team-leverage
[6] Charles Schwab, 2025 RIA Benchmarking Study, fielded January to March 2025, 1,288 firms representing over $2.4 trillion in assets under management. https://advisorservices.schwab.com/insights-hub/perspectives/ria-benchmarking-study-2025
[7] NextWealth, Consolidation of Advice Report 2026, April 2026. https://nextwealth.co.uk/research/consolidation-of-advice-report-2026/
[8] NextWealth, Consolidator and Aggregator Report 2025, May 2025. https://nextwealth.co.uk/research/consolidator-and-aggregator-report-2025/
[9] Kitces Research, How 3-Member “Triangle Teams” Maximize Per-Advisor Productivity, August 2025. www.kitces.com/blog/advisor-productivity-triangle-teams-3-member-delegation-research-coordination-challenges
About Ana M. Marques
Ana M. Marques is a fractional COO and founder of Alignis Global, working with advisory firms to build the operational foundations needed to grow and scale. Her work spans operating strategy, leadership, governance, systems and the structures that allow firms to grow without adding unnecessary complexity.
Through Operate to Scale, Ana helps advisory firm leaders identify where growth is being constrained and what needs to change next.
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Why Good Advisory Firms Stop Scaling first appeared in Issue 3 of Modern American Advisor. Discover more perspectives, ideas and conversations shaping the future of financial advice, with insights across markets, technology, advisor growth, leadership, client engagement and the forces reshaping wealth management.
