The Six Ways to Fuel Organic Growth

Organic growth is a critical indicator of health for every successful advisory business—regardless of size, assets, revenue, or number of clients. It reflects your ability to deepen relationships and bring in new ones. Growth isn’t just a metric; it enables you to expand capability, increase capacity, and reinvest in delivering even greater value to your clients over time.

In the wealth management industry, growth can signify various things. For some firms, it's about increasing wallet share. For others, it’s driven by a strong market when rising AUM is the focus. However, one of the clearest indicators of a firm’s true growth health is its ability to consistently attract and onboard new client relationships.

Acquiring new clients creates a repeatable, scalable growth cycle. According to industry benchmarks, firms that consistently attract new households outperform their peers in revenue, enterprise value, and advisor productivity. Despite this, most firms allocate less than 2% of revenue for client acquisition, and many advisors spend less than 10% of their time prospecting for new clients.

If you want to drive your firm’s next growth chapter, here are six steps to boost your organic growth:

1. Assess Your Current Client Roster

• Focus on Loyal Client Advocates (LCAs).These are your most vocal supporters and connectors. Deepen these relationships, encourage collaboration, and show them how they can help others benefit from your services.
• Know the Total Relationship Value (TRV) of those clients who have sent the most referrals. Here’s how to calculate the TRV: Add their current annual revenue and the annual revenue of those whom they have sent your team over the last three years to identify their TRV. Firms that keep track of TRV have a significantly higher probability of focusing on the right referral sources.
• Plan for generational continuity. Understand what your clients and their heirs value. Expand beyond investment advice into areas such as family dynamics, charitable planning, and impact investing. Use technology to stay connected and hire diverse, next-generation advisors to reflect the evolving face of wealth.

2. Develop Expertise in Business Development

• Not all advisors are natural rainmakers. Identify who best hunts in the jungle (external networking), who best hunts in the zoo (internal referrals, wallet share expansion), and who thrives at closing and onboarding new prospective clients. It takes an entire team to succeed at organic growth. Let go of the, “eat what you kill” model of growth. It’s outdated. The best teams “hunt in packs” and divide the responsibilities related to organic growth.
• Structure your team accordingly—dedicate roles for lead generation, lead nurturing, and relationship management.
• Solve the most important mystery of all: How to institutionalize lead generation so you can provide qualified leads to the advisors in your firm who know how to close and win new clients and serve existing clients more effectively. We will continue to write more about this in future blog articles.
• Train your team on the fundamentals of business development. If acquiring new clients is a goal, then dedicate time and energy to it—it won’t just happen magically.

3. Create a More Focused Marketing Plan

• Redefine your value proposition as a team. Align your messaging with the real and emerging needs of your ideal client.
• Emphasize your distinctive specialties and areas of differentiation—clients are looking for greater value, not just a portfolio manager.
• Present this positioning consistently across your digital presence, content strategy, and event participation. Ensure that every professional on your team is “singing from the same hymnbook” and using consistent language.

4. Utilize Your CRM for Identifying Opportunities

• Use your CRM to track new opportunities with current clients and their heirs.
• Create a report of these outstanding opportunities and review them bi-weekly, at the very least. Most teams rely on each advisor to individually track their opportunities. While this sometimes works, you don’t want opportunities slipping through the cracks.
• Add services like estate planning or liquidity event preparation to deepen household wallet share.
• Contact future inheritors directly to understand their values and engage them with technology-enabled, episodic advice.

5. Set Intentional Goals for New Client Growth

• Understand how many new clients your team has onboarded over the last twelve months.Analyze what’s working—and what’s not—to refine your acquisition approach.
• Build a five-year forecast for new clients and revenue per client, grounded in your ideal client profile.Use this to model future capacity and team structure needs.
• Create a set of new client growth goals and a formal acquisition plan—written, shared, and co-created by all team members.

6. Reframe Your Culture Around Growth

• Make client acquisition part of your team culture—not just a hope, but an expectation.
• Celebrate successes, share effective strategies, and evaluate what is important.
• Encourage all team members, regardless of their roles, to view themselves as ambassadors for the firm’s growth.

The Bottom Line

If your firm’s future depends on continued growth—and it does—then the ability to attract new clients isn’t optional; it’s essential. Firms that seriously take these six steps are the ones creating a self-sustaining, scalable growth cycle. The opportunity is there, the strategy is clear, and the time to act is now.

Coaching Questions to Consider as a Team

1. Which step in our client acquisition process requires the most attention right now—and why?
2. Who on our team consistently contributes to growth, and how can we better align roles with their strengths?
3. What is one change we could implement in our marketing or messaging that would resonate more with next-generation clients?
4. How might we better define and measure organic growth in ways that reflect the future we want to build for the firm?

About ClientWise LLC

ClientWise is the premier business and executive coaching firm working exclusively with financial professionals. We specialize in helping clients optimize growth and maximize revenue by engaging as a knowledgeable partner in accomplishing specific and significant business results. Our full-service coaching program empowers financial advisors, wholesalers, managers and executives to enhance performance through customized, action-oriented solutions based on each client’s specific vision and situation.

Our certified coaches are members of the International Coach Federation (ICF). They adhere to ICF’s strict code of ethics and have the experience and insight to work with you on the unique challenges and opportunities you face each day.

Drawing from an in-depth knowledge of the financial industry, ClientWise’s mission is to professionally develop industry leaders and consistently raise the bar for industry service, commitment and integrity. Simply put, our singular focus is to help you get clear, get focused, and get results.