The check is a recruiting tool designed to make you stop asking questions. The platform that leads with the biggest number is telling you something — they need to buy your attention because the platform itself cannot hold it on its own merits.

Net economics over five years is the only number that matters. The check is year one. What happens in years two through five — after the note’s covenants kick in, after the platform fee compounds, after the earn-back provisions become real — that’s where the deal actually lives.

Payout rate is the headline, not the story. Subtract the platform fee, the admin assessment, E&O, affiliation fees, and whatever technology costs are buried in the service agreement. Most advisors discover their 90% payout is closer to 78% once the math is done honestly.

We call this your Effective Net Payout. Run it before you sign anything. The calculator below does it in 60 seconds.

A 10 bps platform fee on $52M AUM is $52,000 a year. A $36,000 flat fee on the same AUM is $16,000 cheaper — regardless of which number sounds lower in a conversation. Percentages are a distraction from arithmetic.

Model the actual dollar cost at your actual AUM across a five-year projection. Then model it at the AUM you expect to have in year five. The deal you sign today is priced for the practice you have now, not the one you’re building.

AUM matters. So does revenue, practice complexity, and how urgently a platform needs to hit a recruiting number this quarter. A $40M advisor moving in a slow recruiting quarter sometimes negotiates better terms than a $90M advisor moving when every platform is chasing the same names.

Growth velocity matters too. A $45M practice growing at 20% annually is a more attractive recruiting target than a $90M practice that has been flat for five years. Platforms price for the future as much as the present. Know that — and use it.

The threshold depends entirely on your cost structure, your service model, and what you’re currently paying your BD. Some advisors build highly viable independent RIAs at $40M. Others at $200M still haven’t modeled whether it makes economic sense.

The number isn’t $100M. The number is whatever your specific economics produce after custody, compliance, and technology — compared to what you’re paying now. The RIA Viability calculator in Part Three runs that model.

The transition team works for the platform. They are skilled, often genuinely helpful, and entirely motivated by a clean landing — meaning your book arrives intact, your clients are processed, and the platform looks good on the other side.

Your interests and their interests overlap most of the time. They diverge at exactly the moments that matter most: when repapering creates friction, when a client hesitates, when the timeline is tighter than it should be. The transition team disappears when the assets are in the door. Ask any advisor who has moved.

Most will follow. Some won’t. The ones who won’t are rarely the ones you’d predict. High-net-worth clients with complex holdings, trust accounts, or long-standing custody relationships carry more transition friction than a standard brokerage account. Repapering for those clients isn’t a form — it’s a conversation, and sometimes several.

Know your actual repapering exposure before you sign. Revenue at risk during transition is a real number. The calculator below models it.

This narrative stops more transitions than any other on this list. The assumption underneath it is that the status quo is stable. It often isn’t. A platform that constrains your growth, limits your service model, or quietly erodes your economics is disrupting your clients every day — you just can’t see it because it takes the form of things that don’t happen.

The question isn’t whether to disrupt. It’s whether the disruption is yours to control or theirs to impose.

You can negotiate more than most advisors realize. But leverage is highest before you show your hand. Once a platform knows you’re ready to move — and they’re the only option on your list — the conversation changes. The best terms get negotiated when you have genuine alternatives in play, not after you’ve mentally committed and are cleaning up the details.

Negotiation is a function of alternatives. Build your alternatives before you need them.

Legally, it may be. Practically, portability depends on your custody structure, your client agreements, your current platform’s protocols, and your clients’ willingness to re-authorize accounts. Some books move cleanly. Others have structural friction that no amount of transition support fully eliminates.

Know what you’re actually moving before you commit to moving it. Model your transfer rate honestly — including the accounts most likely to stay behind — and build that number into your transition economics before you sign.

The recruiter’s job is to get you to the table. Most recruiters are decent people doing a sales job. The platform’s actual service model, back-office responsiveness, and what happens six months post-transition — those are things the recruiter cannot control and often hasn’t personally experienced on the advisor side.

Evaluate the platform. Find advisors who’ve been on it for three years and call them independently — not the references the platform provides. Those are curated. The reference you find yourself is the one that tells the real story.

“Supporting” a custodian and being optimized for it are different things. Schwab, Fidelity, and Pershing differ meaningfully in technology integration, service model, alternative investment access, account minimums, and advisor-facing tools. The differences that matter most vary by practice type.

Your custodian is the foundation your practice runs on. It deserves the same forensic evaluation you’d give the platform itself — especially if a move requires your clients to re-custody.

The OSJ supervises on behalf of the BD. When there’s a conflict between your interest and the firm’s interest, the supervision structure serves the firm. This isn’t a criticism of the model — it’s the design. It was built to protect the BD’s regulatory standing, not your business interests.

Know whose interest the structure was built to protect before you decide how much protection it actually provides you personally. Those are two different questions with two different answers.

This is the narrative that keeps more advisors in place than any economic argument. The 10% commission book, the old variable annuities, the clients who’ve been on a particular product for fifteen years — those feel like walls. They are usually doors.

Hybrid models exist specifically for this. A properly structured hybrid RIA allows you to maintain commission-based business through a BD relationship while housing your advisory assets in your own RIA. It is not a binary choice. It is an architecture decision — and the architecture has more options than most advisors are shown.

You built the relationships. You built the expertise. You built the reputation. The platform provided infrastructure. You provided everything that made clients stay and assets grow.

Independence means moving what you built onto infrastructure you control. That’s not starting over. That’s arriving.