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Organic growth is considered by many to be the holy grail for registered investment advisors, whether RIAs are seeking to build lifelong firms or bolster valuations for an eventual sale.
But new clients and expanded wallet share can be hard to come by. According to a year-end survey released Monday by DeVoe & Company, more than half of RIA executive respondents (53%) said organic growth is the most common issue keeping them up at night. (The next most common stress-inducer was AI’s impact on their firm, followed by the overall economy and stock market performance at 31%.)
At least one RIA executive, however, referred to organic growth as the firm’s most compelling achievement in 2025.
Marty Bicknell, the founder and CEO of Mariner Wealth Advisors, an Overland Park, Kan.-based firm, has had a lead generation team in place since the company launched in 2006. In 2025, the effectiveness of that strategy became evident when the firm surpassed its typical year-over-year organic growth rate of approximately 15%, with a more than 30% increase in 2025 when compared to 2024.
Mariner, which has minority investments from private equity firms Leonard Green & Partners and Neuberger Berman, is also known as one of the more active RIA acquirers in the space. Bicknell also addressed that area of the business, stating that he expects another active deal market in 2026, with a potential shift in the type of deals Mariner is booking.
The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
WealthManagement.com: What was a key trend for Mariner in 2025?
Marty Bicknell: We will get really close to hitting $14 billion in organic assets.
I joked with the team yesterday during a call that, in 2006, when we started the firm, I didn’t even have a goal to reach $14 billion, let alone achieve it in one year from an organic perspective. The year was fantastic from that perspective.
It was also our best recruiting year ever, with just over 200 recruited advisors. Marry that with doing 10 acquisitions. At the same time, advisor and client retention rates remain at industry standards.
I really feel like the model is getting more and more understood, and more and more appreciated by more advisors.
WM: The organic growth figure is striking, particularly since we know even growth-focused RIAs struggle in that area. What would you say drove those results?
MB: I think the main thing is that it is its own business unit for us. Instead of relying on our advisors to fill their own funnels, we put that on the enterprise level and view it as our responsibility to fill the funnel.
If you think about an advisor’s day, typically about 50% of it is client-facing. A little north of 25% of that is business development. We’ve eliminated that. That gives you 25% more time to spend with the client. It doesn’t mean our advisors aren’t involved in business development. It just means their point of sale to explain the value proposition and how they’re going to help is all set up by the business development team.
WM: How long have you had that team, and how many people are in it?
MB: We’ve had that strategy since day one, but now, we have 85 dedicated business development professionals in multiple channels. They’re paid on variable [compensation] and they’re paid first. Then the net goes on our advisor variable comp. payout.
We also have the custodian referral programs at both Fidelity and Schwab. We have a CPA alliance with almost 70 regional CPA firms, with us acting as their in-house wealth management solution. We’re also rolling out a program right now for community banks. We have one partner today and are having really good success out of the gate.
We’re always thinking about where we can find partnerships that have access to clients who need our service. One of the things we did last year was buy a boutique investment bank that does 40-plus transactions a year of $20 million to $25 million in average valuation. The majority of those people haven’t thought about estate planning, tax planning or what they will do with those assets. That has been a great channel for us to get our advisors in front of more people.
WM: On the inorganic side, you are obviously very active in M&A. We often hear that the competition has heated up on the buyer side—have you noticed this, and how are you competing for the firms you want?
MB: The competition has definitely heated up, and there are new names all the time. From 2023 to 2024, almost all of our acquisitions were banker-led, responding to a process. Back in 2010, six of our 10 deals were self-sourced, and four of them were banker deals.
Because of that competitive banker-led market, we decided to bulk up our corporate development team and really make the effort and energy to go find our own opportunities and reduce that competitiveness a little bit. We wanted to make it more of a relationship sell, versus just a bid. It takes longer to develop, but it ends up with a faster start.
WM: You mentioned doing 10 acquisitions in 2025. How do you expect 2026 to compare?
MB: We absolutely expect a similar number. I think the makeup of them will be slightly different.
Two of our really large assets under advisement deals were institutional offerings. It kind of skews the reality of things when you know somebody’s got $300 billion, but the revenue is the same size as one of my normal offices. There’ll be more traditional RIA firms than this past year. Not to say that we won’t do the other categories, because I think it strengthens our offering in a way when our advisors go into a situation to have that access—whether it’s a tax firm, estate planning expertise, the institutional offering, the investment bank, the value proposition just goes up.
WM: Next year, you’re saying there will be a greater mix of wealth-focused RIAs?
MB: I think the supply of those is significantly greater, and it’s a fragmented space.
On the institutional side of the house, we have, let’s call it, about $450 billion in AUA and 2 million participants. We need to continue to figure out how to serve them.
The retirement to wealth challenge is not something we have figured out yet, but we’re spending a lot of time and energy on trying to figure it out. There’s a figure that about 10% of plan participants leave the plan on an annual basis. If we have 2 million participants, that’s a lot of participants leaving the plan—so we need to figure that out, and I think a lot of it goes to awareness. Just awareness that they have the opportunity to work with us.
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