WSR CEO Larry Roth Shares What He Loved About This Year’s MarketCounsel Summit, Plus Key Takeaways From The Event’s Speakers
I attended my first MarketCounsel Summit back in 2014. It was my first time interviewing the heads of billion-dollar wealth management firms, my first time in Las Vegas and my first time winning at roulette. This time, our own Wealth Solutions Report CEO Larry Roth attended the annual RIA-focused event.
Brian Hamburger – Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of the business and regulatory compliance consultancy MarketCounsel – gave opening remarks and participated in sessions. Presenters delved into everything from technological innovations, to improving the client experience while scaling up, to succession planning and M&A. And, of course, social media was abuzz with posts about the conference.
“The quality of the participants and speakers was as strong as any conference I have ever attended,” Roth said. “Our host Brian Hamburger provided an excellent overview of the conference and how the themes and sessions fit together.”
Indeed, the more than 50 speakers at the Dec. 5 to Dec. 8 event was a veritable “Who’s Who” of the industry. They included Eric Clarke, CEO of Orion Advisor Solutions; Shirl Penney, President and CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners; and David DeVoe, Managing Director of DeVoe & Company. The MarketCounsel Twitter page has videos with them sharing ideas from their panel sessions.
Bits of news also broke at the conference. Jeremy Eisenstein, Co-Head of RIA Custody Sales and Head of Strategic Relationship Management at Goldman Sachs Advisor Solutions, said during a panel about growth that Goldman now custodies over $1 trillion of private wealth. As WSR reported in October, Goldman recruited the custody assets of Beverly Hills Private Wealth, an RIA whose advisors previously managed approximately $1 billion at Merrill Lynch.
On the M&A front, the consultancy Advisor Growth Strategies revealed during the conference that 65% of the firms it has been surveying received more seller inquiries in 2022 than in 2021 and that buyers were acting on approximately 40% of the deals they received this year.
“In additional to Brian’s framing of the event, a key to the conference’s success is that nearly all sessions included the entire audience,” Roth said. “This provided everyone the opportunity to absorb a lot of the knowledge shared. It also was great that each presenter included personal as well as professional insights in a fashion that helped the audience understand what motivated them and why they have been successful.”
Chris Latham, Deputy Managing Editor at Wealth Solutions Report, can be reached at clatham@wealthsolutionsreport.com
