This week I drove into Lincoln, Nebraska for homecoming. I had a few work meetings, there’s a game today, and I get to see my oldest son, who's a sophomore there now.

When I was young, I didn't understand homecoming at all. Coming back to a place and seeing people from an era that already ended? It felt like a thing other people cared about.

But, I was wrong.

The people, the game, the parade they’re just the excuse. The real gift is standing somewhere you used to stand and noticing how differently you see it now. What you value. What you took for granted. How far you've actually come, which is hard to measure from inside your own life.

Sometimes the further you get from home, the more home means.

That's true of sports. It took moving away from Nebraska a couple of times to make me love Nebraska sports the way I do now. Good years and rough ones. Mostly rough ones in past years for football (We almost always, almost win). Mostly great ones for volleyball. Still my favorite hobby, and I'll say that out loud.

You have a home in this business.

Maybe it was an internship. A first job at Morgan Stanley or Goldman or a branch somewhere. That's where you saw something that made you want in. Some of you stayed and built a whole career there. A lot of you read this as independent operators, because at some point you looked around and thought, I want to do this my way.

Either way, that first place shaped how you think about clients, about money, about what good work looks like.

Here's the part I keep turning over.

We're building homes for other people now.

Kitces research found that advisors spending seven or more hours a week on administrative work are more than twice as likely to be thinking about leaving their firm. More than four times as likely to be thinking about leaving the industry altogether.

Meanwhile the average advisory firm retains ninety-five percent of its clients. Strong firms, ninety-seven or ninety-eight.

We keep clients for life. We keep people for a few years.

That gap is the whole thing.

So what is year one at your firm actually like, past the onboarding checklist? What does someone learn in their first twelve months that they'll carry for the next thirty? How do you teach service and empathy for investors in a way that outlasts the role, the title, the company?

When you hire an alum of one of the big shops, you get someone with real depth. A shared vocabulary. A way of seeing the work. That came from somewhere. Somebody built it.

On the independent side, that's our job now.

Some people will stay a long time. Some will pass through. Both are fine. The question is what they take with them.

And if your own first home was a bad one, that counts too. You learned exactly what not to build. That's worth something.

Homecoming is really home building.

My team plays Maryland Saturday at three. Go Big Red.

Have a great week, and I hope you get a homecoming of your own.

If you’re curious about the research behind the numbers I mentioned above, I’ve included the two Kitces pieces here:

Advisor Wellbeing, Hiring, Efficiency & Automation

Managing Advisor Turnover and the Transferability of Trust

Jud

Episode 164: This week on Next Mile, Kyle Van Pelt is joined by Kristina Baron, Co-Managing Partner and Managing Director at Oxford Financial Group. Kristina started in the industry as a high school intern in a financial advisor's office and later worked at Goldman Sachs before joining Oxford. Today she helps lead a team that serves roughly 700 families across the country.

Kyle and Kristina explore what it takes to coordinate advice for families whose needs span investments, estate planning, taxes, trusts, outside advisors, and multiple generations. Kristina shares why understanding a family’s values should precede any solution, how Oxford structures teams and communication to make complexity manageable, and why continuity depends on giving younger generations a voice. They also discuss data integrity, connected technology, practical AI applications, and Kristina’s concerns about how consolidation and pressure for new revenue streams could reshape the RIA landscape.

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(01:31) - Kristina's money moment

(04:56) - Why understanding has to come before expertise

(07:10) - Coordinating estate planning across jurisdictions

(10:05) - Standing out when every firm says it serves families like yours

(15:38) - Working alongside a family's other advisors

(18:12) - Making a complex service model feel simple

(19:46) - Planning for every generation of the family

(23:23) - Why communication breaks down between generations

(27:14) - Building the data foundation before layering on technology

(30:08) - Where AI fits in serving ultra-high-net-worth families

(33:33) - Kristina's outlook on the future of the wealth management industry

(36:43) - Kristina's Milemarker Minute

Milemarker has announced a new integration with Betterment Advisor Solutions, giving RIAs a way to bring Betterment account data into the same data environment as the rest of their technology stack.

Accounts, positions, transactions, and balances can now be normalized alongside data from other custodians and systems—helping firms build unified reporting, analytics, and automation across their entire book.

Read more →

If you would like to arrange a meeting time, please reply to this email, and we’ll schedule something on the calendar.

Jud Mackrill