The advice industry is booming. Demand for quality advice is rising while supply remains tight, creating massive opportunities for firms ready to scale. Yet for many, growth is stalled not by the market, but by themselves.
Outgrowing the Founder Model
Scaling up changes the game. The leadership that got a practice off the ground isn’t always the leadership that can take it to the next level. Some founders thrive as CEOs, evolving with new skills in strategy, operations, and people leadership. Others prefer to stay close to clients. Neither path is wrong, but pretending you can do both at scale is a recipe for stalled growth and declining margins.
The Peter Principle in Action
The biggest obstacle isn’t the market, it’s the “small business mindset.” Too many firms lean on founders to do everything or promote based on loyalty rather than capability. This is how the Peter principle shows up: leaders excel until they hit their ceiling. Without reinvention or the right support, competence plateaus and risk rises.
Cybersecurity is a clear example. Too many advice businesses still rely on paper attestations, leaving them exposed to breaches that could cripple operations, damage reputations, and attract regulatory scrutiny.
Building Resilient Businesses
Corporatising isn’t about stripping away personality; it’s about creating formal, repeatable systems that protect the business and its people. The most successful firms reduce principal dependency by making advice relationships transferable across advisers and staff. This not only boosts efficiency, it drives up capital value.
Documented processes for client engagement, pricing, and advice delivery are the bedrock of scalability. They transform tacit knowledge locked in a founder’s head into a system that can train, empower, and grow the next generation of advisers.
Make Yourself Replaceable
Right now, favourable demographics, regulatory tailwinds, and an undersupplied market have created the perfect storm for scaling. But disruption is inevitable, and principal-dependent firms will be the most vulnerable.
The courageous choice for today’s advice leaders is to make themselves replaceable. By corporatising, standardising, and investing in systems, they future-proof their businesses and unlock the full value of the growth opportunity ahead.
At VBP, we’ve seen it time and again: when firms break free from the small business mindset, they don’t just scale, they thrive.
This article originally appeared in Professional Planner
https://www.professionalplanner.com.au/
