Amplify Platform

There's a new Trojan horse at your door.

Quarter-end. You report one organic growth number to the board, the partners, maybe a lender. It went up. Everyone moves on. A buyer doesn't move on. In diligence, that one line gets split into four: referrals, share of wallet, next-gen access, and new-client conversion, with client retention as the foundation under all four. DeVoe's research puts the average firm's organic growth around 3% once markets and acquisitions are stripped out. It was roughly 9% a few years ago. At 3%, the mix is the story: two firms with the same headline number can be worth very different amounts depending on which lanes are doing the work, and which lane is quietly leaking. On October 20, Adam Levy of DeVoe & Company breaks the growth number down the way a valuation advisor does, and Amplify’s Adam Scully-Power shows where a $12B firm found growth hiding in its own four lanes. The Growth Equation · Tuesday, October 20 · 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT

Quarter-end. You report one organic growth number to the board, the partners, maybe a lender. It went up. Everyone moves on. A buyer doesn't move on. In diligence, that one line gets split into four: referrals, share of wallet, next-gen access, and new-client conversion, with client retention as the foundation under all four. DeVoe's research puts the average firm's organic growth around 3% once markets and acquisitions are stripped out. It was roughly 9% a few years ago. At 3%, the mix is the story: two firms with the same headline number can be worth very different amounts depending on which lanes are doing the work, and which lane is quietly leaking. On October 20, Adam Levy of DeVoe & Company breaks the growth number down the way a valuation advisor does, and Amplify’s Adam Scully-Power shows where a $12B firm found growth hiding in its own four lanes. The Growth Equation · Tuesday, October 20 · 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT

I didn’t choose to leave TD Ameritrade. Neither did all the firms that got Fidelity’s letter this week. Schwab bought TD Ameritrade, and the move came to us. That move impacted our workflows, forms, reports and triggered client conversations about what's next. That’s when I learned how much of our firm really belonged to the custodian. Fidelity is giving firms with under $100M on its platform until June 30, 2027 to grow or leave, and only assets held at Fidelity count. A $2B firm with a $60M sleeve would be in the same spot. Most mid-market firms already run two or three custodians. So here’s the test. If one of them changed tomorrow, how much of your firm would change with it? If each custodian brings its own onboarding, paperwork and reporting, the firm is running three dependencies and calling it choice. The fix is one household record that sits above custody, so your onboarding, investment and reporting workflows stay yours wherever the assets sit. That’s what we built at Amplify. Those workflows run automated on one record that papers every custodian on the platform, so moving an existing client segment runs on data the firm already owns. Custody is becoming infrastructure. Vanguard is buying Altruist, State Street is back, Savvy is building on Fidelity’s rails. Build the firm so the custodian is a choice. That’s what independence means now.

Your growth number went up last year. That used to be enough to feel pretty good about where your firm was headed. DeVoe & Company just asked the people who decide what that growth is worth. Behind a record 167 deals in the first half of 2026, 82% of consolidators expect RIA valuations to hold flat over the next six months. 18% expect declines. Zero expect increases. For a decade, the market did part of the work of building enterprise value. That subsidy just ended. What a firm is worth now increasingly comes from inside the firm: how it grows, how it retains clients, and how much capacity sits on the bench. On October 20, we're hosting DeVoe’s Adam Levy and Amplify’s Adam Scully-Power to dig into exactly that: what buyers value now and how RIA leaders can build stronger organic growth and enterprise value from the inside out. Live Webinar: The Growth Equation Tuesday, October 20 | 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT 45 minutes + live Q&A Register below.

I ran an RIA. When capacity got tight, I hired. It was rational. It was also the expensive kind of rational: headcount grew faster than assets, and I was buying growth instead of compounding it. Nobody told me the ceiling on growth was never the market. It was my own operating model. And unlike the market, that ceiling can be raised. Eventually we figured that out and learned how to scale better. That's what Amplify platform does for growing firms Today we are publishing the first issue of our newsletter: The curve nobody puts in the growth deck. It’s the arithmetic I wish someone had shown me early on when I ran my firm. Why RIA multiples are a bet on exactly one number. Why that number gets harder every year you grow. And what actually sets the ceiling on it, because it isn’t what most growth decks assume. If you’re running a mid-market firm, this one was written for you. Issue one is below. Subscribe and the next one finds you. https://shorturl.at/MLdCe