RJ and Makay

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Financial Advisors

RJ & Makay is the premier firm in the US and Canada placing entry-level and experienced Financial Advisors. Please select your experience level to learn more.

Our financial advisor recruiting team of over 50 dedicated professionals makes RJ & Makay the biggest in the business. Our clients tell us our scale, expertise and professionalism also makes us the premier firm to work with.

For more information about the services we provide to both financial advisors and financial services firms select:

For financial advisors

Financial Advisors (career options)
Acquisitions (buying other practices)
Succession Planning (exit strategy)

For broker dealers

Recruiting financial advisors
Employee channel & Independent channel

For independent and RIA business owners

Recruiting financial advisors
Expansion challenges and solutions

For financial advisors

Overview
As the leading financial advisor recruiting firm in the nation, we can help you evaluate your options and compare your opportunities like no other. Even if you don't consider yourself actively looking to change firms right now, we'll gladly share our insights and expertise about the current recruiting environment, the types of transition packages other firms are offering, and how you can take your financial advisor career to the next level.

We can handle transitions for registered reps and advisors in any setting including wirehouse, independents, regionals, banks, insurance, RIAs, hybrid firms, and investment management companies.

RJ & Makay can help if you're a relatively new registered financial advisor looking to take that next step, if you're near your peak, or if you're starting to think about retirement and exit strategies. Of course, anything you discuss with us is completely confidential. So whether you've already committed to making a change or are just looking to get the lay of the land, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at any time.

Career options for experienced FAs
There are more options available now than ever to FAs with a transferrable book of business. It’s a “seller’s market” and firms from all channels are aggressively recruiting financial advisors. Below are highlights of the options we represent. Contact Jason Kirkland, our Managing Partner and head of our financial advisor recruiting division, to have a candid and confidential conversation.

Wirehouse
Wirehouses (Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Wells Fargo) offer the most competitive transition packages and most extensive platforms. Deals have evolved drastically over the last several years but most transition packages come with upfront and backend financial incentives. Wirehouses get more than their fair share of negative press but the fact remains that, by a wide margin, most of the top producing financial advisors are at a wirehouse. RJ & Makay is one of a handful of the biggest players in wirehouse financial advisor recruiting.

Independent
If you are already in the independent channel or considering “going indie” we can provide invaluable assistance. As one of the leading IBD financial advisor recruiting firms, we serve financial advisors with comprehensive insight and opportunities. There are many options in the independent world and we have a myriad of choices for a financial advisor to consider. RJ & Makay can help you evaluate, consult and facilitate these independent paths:

Start your own independent business
Join an existing independent business
Moving from one IBD to another
Start your own fee-only or dually registered RIA
Join an existing RIA business

Regional
The regional broker-dealer channel has consolidated (and continues to do so) and the landscape has vastly changed in recent years. In 2004 there were about 150 regional broker dealers. Now, there are only about 50 and just a few with over 1,000 advisors. RJ & Makay can share the current regional B-D scenarios and demonstrate how regionals compare to other financial advisor business channels.

Investment management sales
There are many investment management firms looking to hire financial advisors as investment management sales pros. We represent multiple investment firms who are hiring financial advisors as regional salespeople while providing a qualified warm lead environment. In many cases, these firms will schedule your screened client prospecting meetings for the financial advisor. This might be an option to consider if 1) You have a book of less than $30MM; 2) You don’t want to be all things to all people; and 3) You want to work with qualified warm leads and receive ongoing residual trails. RJ & Makay can help you examine this and other “out of the box” opportunities.

Bank broker dealer
The bank broker career can be the ideal opportunity for the right financial advisor. Becoming a financial advisor at a bank branch(s) has benefits and drawbacks like other channels. RJ & Makay can help you evaluate bank options pertaining to warm lead opportunities, payouts, platform, culture and client ownership.

Partner and equity opportunities
We have more than 600 independent financial advisor business owners looking to partner or bring quality financial advisors into their business. There are hundreds of unique opportunities nationwide for financial advisors looking for individual, independent successful practices to partner with and share equity. If you’re looking to join forces and resources with another financial advisor (or are looking for financial advisors to join your practice), then we encourage you to call RJ & Makay to hear about the opportunities we have available in your area.

Acquisitions
If you’re a financial advisor looking to fast-track the growth of your business through acquiring another practice, we can help. We have relationships with financial advisors across the country looking to sell now, transition out over time, or partner with another financial advisor for the right situation. In addition, our client firms are willing and motivated to loan financial advisors the necessary capital to acquire another advisor’s book and business.

Succession planning – exit strategies
There are several ways to achieve successful succession planning and RJ & Makay can help financial advisors ascertain and evaluate their options. Succession planning requires pinpoint resolution to issues particular to your unique situation.

We take special care in helping financial advisors sell their businesses because we know how much investment of a financial advisor’s time, resources, and effort goes into establishing, building and growing this kind of business. RJ & Makay brings expert knowledge to succession scenarios and we apply our expertise to the benefit of the exiting advisor.

We can help you understand what your practice is worth based upon our industry knowledge, client interest and third party consultants we partner with. RJ & Makay can help provide transition planning, resources and support.

Call RJ & Makay to discuss the valuation parameters of your business and determine how to best position and maximize your exit strategy including:

Selling a practice outright
Transitioning out over time
Scaling back to just work with selected clients
Selling to a firm or another financial advisor
Joining a rollup firm
Sunset plans
Preparing your business for a future sale

For broker dealers

Recruiting financial advisors
Recruiting quality financial advisors in needed quantities is a critical challenge for any broker dealer. The recruiting landscape has never been more competitive and broker dealers face a host of challenges in meeting their annual net new hiring goals.

Even with a recruiting budget that allows for third party recruiting vendors, it’s difficult to generate enough quality flow from most recruiting firms to make a significant difference in advisors recruited.

The financial advisor recruiting firm industry is fragmented and dominated by mom and pop shops. The vast majority of these have less than 10 employees. This makes it difficult if not impossible for many firms to make a significant quantity/quality impact for new clients as most firms struggle to provide quantity of quality for their existing clients.

RJ & Makay is the financial advisor recruiting solution for broker dealers that don’t have the luxury of rolling the dice and hoping for the best. If your firm needs guaranteed quantity of quality financial advisors, then RJ & Makay is uniquely positioned to deliver.

Our scale and capacity enables us to facilitate our proprietary financial advisor recruiting solutions. We’re not the cheapest firm for hire and we don’t work for free. But, if you have the budget and demand for hiring though are struggling to find a recruiting partner that can actually make it happen, then contact us.

RJ & Makay facts:

Largest financial advisor recruiting firm
50+ recruiting professionals in our FA recruiting division
We maintain a national broker call list that is updated regularly
Proprietary national financial advisor recruiting system
We speak to 1,500 to 2,500 financial advisors every week
We typically facilitate 350 to 500 financial advisor introductions to our client firms each month

Employee and Independent channels
RJ & Makay actively recruits out of both employee and independent channels:

Wirehouses
Independent BDs
Bank BDs
Regional BDs
Insurance BDs
RIAs

We are equally skilled in presenting employee and independent career options. RJ & Makay has the experience and expertise to recruit and consult with financial advisors regardless of the channel they are coming from or being recruited to.

For independent and RIA business owners

Recruiting financial advisors There are thousands of individual independent and RIA practices looking to hire a quality financial advisor(s). If you’re an owner looking to expand through hiring a financial advisor (or more) we can help in ways that few firms can match.

RJ & Makay maps out the current recruiting landscape and shows how your offering matches the big and small firms that you are competing with. We can help you with a realistic assessment of the recruiting potential based upon your individual situation, offering and location.

Our scale and capacity enables us to facilitate our proprietary financial advisor recruiting solutions. We’re not the cheapest firm for hire and we don’t work for free. But, if you have the budget and demand for hiring, though are struggling to find a recruiting partner that can actually make it happen, then contact us.

RJ & Makay facts:

Largest financial advisor recruiting firm
50+ recruiting professionals in our FA recruiting division
We maintain a national broker call list that is updated regularly
Proprietary national financial advisor recruiting system
We speak to 1,500 to 2,500 financial advisors every week
We typically facilitate 350 to 500 financial advisor introductions to our client firms each month

Expansion challenges and solutions
We get calls every week from owners of independent practices and RIA firms who are looking to grow through recruiting. We hear a version of the same story over and over. It goes something like this:

A principal decides he or she is ready to take the next step in growth and wants to hire a quality financial advisor to join their practice (usually with a book to bring with them). They buy an advertisement but get few quality responses or no replies. Next, they hire anywhere from one to a handful of financial advisor recruiting firms to assist. Then they wait for flow that never comes.

Most financial advisors (with books) don’t have resumes posted on job boards nor look to job boards for career options. Most recruiting firms aren’t interested in aggressively recruiting for “one off” situations. Your opportunity may be 3rd or 4th on their list for mentioning to a financial advisor and most recruiting firms won’t proactively call financial advisors with your firm as the primary representation.

Recruiting financial advisors is extremely challenging for even large firms with big budgets and extensive recruiting experience. It can seem daunting for an individual practice principal who is busy running their business and cannot afford to make many mistakes in the financial advisors they hire.

RJ & Makay helps provide principals with a recruiting partner that has been through this process hundreds of times with owners just like you. Our proprietary recruiting system combined with our sheer scale provides the necessary capacity to help individual principal owners in successful recruiting.

RJ & Makay offers RIA and independent practice owners: