In the past, annual benchmarking studies offered advisors insights into the inner workings of similar firms, but did so in an aggregated fashion. This meant that while the data might be somewhat useful for short while, it was quickly outdated.
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What wasn’t available was real-time data and personalized metrics.
Seeking to address this concern, industry leader Michael Kitces has co-founded a new benchmarking platform for advisory firms, AdvisorEconomics.
Co-founded with Abdennour Aissaoui, the business intelligence service currently works with owners who have at least one year of QuickBooks data and generate between $300,000 and $5 million in annual revenue. Current pricing is $29 per month.
How the AdvisorEconomics platform works
Kitces told Financial Planning that though advisors have had various forms of benchmarking surveys for years, historically, they were mostly exercises in filling out lengthy spreadsheets.
“You’re trying to translate your financial information into a standard format to try to get some understanding of how your firm is doing compared to others like you, which itself is a little bit challenging,” he said.
Kitces said the opportunity he saw was to do this with more modern technology.
“We don’t have to do this with spreadsheets,” he said. “We can do it with software.”
Using key performance indicators (KPIs), the goal of the platform, Kitces said, is to use a large sample size of advisors to help firms answer questions, including: if it’s the right time to hire, if they’re spending too much or too little on technology and what other similarly-sized firms spend on marketing, among others.
“We’ll be able to answer all those questions as we build and scale the platform,” he said.
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Kitces said core metrics that crop up commonly for advisory firms around hiring and productivity include revenue per employee, revenue per staff member and clients per advisor.
“These are all metrics where you find advisors often have some familiarity,” he said. “But they don’t necessarily know what a normal number is.”
Aissaoui said that since they began piloting the software in September 2025, the company has over 44 firms using the service.
“We’re seeing a pattern here where the owner of the firm already knows what is the best thing to do with their business, to move the needle,” he said. “And when they come and see us, it’s like, ‘You’re just giving me confidence to go on with this decision without a doubt.'”
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Competitors in the market
In terms of competition, Aissaoui said Vitals AI occupies a similar space in the market, but not exactly.
“They go more on, ‘Let’s make sense of your CRM and your portfolio management system data,’ and we’re more looking at accounting data,” he said.
William Trout, director of securities and investments at technology data firm Datos Insights, said AdvisorEconomics appears to address a genuine gap in the RIA market. While custodians like Schwab and Fidelity offer comprehensive benchmarking studies, these typically require participation in annual surveys and provide aggregate reports rather than real-time, personalized dashboards, he said.
“Most RIA owners rely on QuickBooks reports or custom spreadsheets that lack standardized definitions and peer comparisons,” he said. “This is exactly the problem AdvisorEconomics solves by automating KPI calculation with built-in benchmarks.”
The competitive landscape is very thin for this specific niche, said Trout. Practice management consultants offer custom analysis, but at significantly higher price points, he said.
“This positions AdvisorEconomics more as a complement to, rather than replacement for, existing tools,” he said.
The risk with any KPI dashboard is focusing on metrics that are easy to measure rather than meaningful, said Trout.
“But Kitces’ methodology, refined over years of RIA research and writing, likely addresses this concern,” he said. “The real value proposition seems to be standardization: ensuring RIA owners compare apples to apples when benchmarking against peers, since definitions of basic metrics like ‘profit’ can vary wildly across firms.”
