Since LPL Financial announced plans last March to acquire Commonwealth Financial Network, the boutique firm’s defining narrative has centered on one word: departures.
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Over the past 12 months, Commonwealth has lost hundreds of advisors to competitors big and small. And the motivations among those advisors are as diverse as the firms they’ve joined — or started — since leaving.
Generous retention packages have helped LPL hold on to many of Commonwealth’s advisors. But for some, even a “huge check” hasn’t been enough to keep them after the announcement.
Adam Spiegelman, who left Commonwealth ahead of its sale to LPL to launch his own RIA, said LPL’s internal recruiters extended a generous retention offer. He also fielded recruiting pitches from several rival firms, though he declined to disclose the terms.
“There was no convincing me. I was on this path, and I wanted to be on my own,” Spiegelman said. “I really wanted to stay boutique, service-oriented. … And I didn’t want someone else’s agenda to get between me and my clients.”
Spiegelman is betting that clients share his sentiment.
“I’m like the little coffee shop on the corner, and all of a sudden, Starbucks comes in and undercuts everything,” he said. “But there’s still people that want to go to the small, little coffee shop, because it’s not big corporate America.”
For advisors like Chris Richey, exiting Commonwealth Financial Network had little to do with its acquisition by the much-larger LPL.
His decision to move his firm, Nautilus Wealth Management in New Bern, North Carolina, to Raymond James last year had a much more practical origin. The crucial influence, he said in a recent interview, was his recognition that an assistant he had relied on for years was on the verge of retiring.
The prospect left him dreading a future move without her support. Rather than risk navigating a transition alone, and spending a year or two at LPL unsure it would suit him, he decided it was better to switch sooner rather than later.
Richey and his assistant, a paraplanner named Pamela Weber, joined Raymond James on Aug. 1, the same day Commonwealth’s sale to LPL became final.
“We gave some real significant thought to: Let’s wait this thing out and see how it goes,” Richey said. “And I just bluntly didn’t have a comfort level with that, knowing that she may not be here to assist with that.”
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Where Commonwealth advisors went
Exactly a year has passed since LPL announced on March 31, 2025, that it would buy Commonwealth in a deal valued at $2.7 billion. In that time, 654 former Commonwealth advisors have made the same decision as Richey and chosen to join firms other than LPL, according to data from industry data tracker AdvizorPro.
That amounts to roughly 22% of the nearly 3,000 advisors Commonwealth had when the purchase plans were made public.
Raymond James, which has picked up 145 former Commonwealth advisors in the past year, has been the most common destination. But other independent broker-dealers like Kestra and Cambridge Investment Research have also done well, picking up 78 and 40 former Commonwealth advisors, respectively.
Of these firms, only Kestra, with its roughly 1,700 advisors, offers the same sort of small setting that Commonwealth had. Commonwealth had roughly $305 billion in assets and 3,000 advisors at the time of its purchase by LPL.
Raymond James, meanwhile, belongs to the opposite end of the size spectrum. Its roughly 9,000 advisors and $1.7 trillion in client assets look small only stacked against comparable figures for a true behemoth like LPL, which has more than 32,000 advisors and $2.4 trillion in assets.
Raymond James executives have said 2025 was a record year for recruiting, owing in large part to advisors and teams pulled from Commonwealth. The firm’s Private Client Group — the name for its U.S. wealth management business — saw its advisor headcount rise by 2% to hit 8,943 at the end of the third quarter last year.
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Raymond James’ record recruiting year, and LPL’s retention goals
In an interview last month, Private Client Group President Tash Elwyn said big mergers and acquisitions always present an opportunity to recruit. But smaller events — like internal reorganizations and changes to compensation plans — can also have advisors looking toward the exits.
“We hear time and time again from advisors about how frustrating and destabilizing it is that they’re now on to their third branch manager in five years,” Elwyn said. “And they know that that manager is just going to be a renter of the branch, not an owner. And it’s going to make short-term, quantitative decisions over long-term, qualitative decisions.”
LPL executives, for their part, have committed to changing as little at Commonwealth as possible. LPL CEO Rich Steinmeier has said, “We are keeping the brand. We are keeping the service associates to deliver their experience today. We are keeping the culture, the community, the trips, study groups, the practice consultants, power and practice consultants that help them grow.”
In pledging to leave Commonwealth largely untouched, LPL executives have tried to avoid the sort of disruption that might derail their target of retaining 90% of the acquired firm’s assets. In an earnings call in January, LPL Chief Financial Officer Matthew Audette said recent departures have not hindered progress toward that goal. That’s in large part because the Commonwealth teams that have decided to stay at LPL are generally among those with the largest asset tallies.
“So I think when you get some noise, when you look at those headcount departures, when you look at the advisors that have committed to stay with LPL, with Commonwealth, it is an impressive group,” Audette said.
Still, moves to firms like Kestra and Raymond James weren’t limited to junior advisors. Across the six firms that attracted the most Commonwealth advisors, those who left accounted for nearly 6,800 combined years of industry experience, according to AdvizorPro data.
Kestra led the pack. Among the 78 Commonwealth advisors who joined the firm, the typical advisor had more than 23 years of experience.
Raymond James, which brought on 145 Commonwealth advisors after the announcement, saw the typical recruit arrive with about 19 years in the industry.
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Skepticism about LPL’s pledge to maintain the status quo
Despite LPL executives’ assurances, there are plenty who doubt LPL’s ability to ensure Commonwealth remains recognizable to its longtime advisors. Count Richey among them.
Richey, who works with roughly 185 households and $250 million in client assets through Nautilus Wealth Management, said one of the defining attributes of Commonwealth was its low staff-to-advisor ratio. That meant that anytime advisors had a question, they could usually call someone in the firm’s central office. Oftentimes, the chat would meander onto topics like “your kids, the weather and other stuff,” he said.
Those sorts of personal connections just aren’t possible at larger firms with fewer staff members per advisor. Assistants in the central office are much more likely to have a tone of “we need to act a little bit quicker and let’s hustle this up and get off this phone call, because I’ve got five more waiting.”
That’s not to say that Richey hasn’t found Raymond James helpful. That’s especially been true as he’s going through the difficult task of learning how to use his new firm’s technology and comply with its internal procedures.
At the same time, he thinks the services offered by large independent broker-dealers have largely become “commoditized” — meaning they differ little from one firm to another. “And if we carry ourselves truly as independent financial advisors, the impact that the back office has should be pretty measured at best,” he said.
Realizing that he was unlikely to find a Commonwealth-level of service at any firm, Richey said the only real choice he had to make was which large firm he had the best chance of being happy at.
Although LPL offered him a generous retention offer, he couldn’t overcome the feeling that he would want to move in a year or two. And if he had to go through that arduous process, he at least wanted to have his longtime assistant by his side.
“I decided if we’re not going to enjoy this thing as much as we have in the past, then I need to go ahead and pull the trigger, because I need to have real high-quality help to get us through this kind of tumultuous time,” Richey said. “Because I just am of the opinion that a transition can’t not be tumultuous.”
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