A Chief Growth Officer for your firm, without the full‑time hire.
Senior growth leadership embedded with your leadership team for six months or more. I build the recruiting engine, run it alongside you, and leave systems that keep working after the engagement ends.
What a fractional Chief Growth Officer actually does.
A fractional Chief Growth Officer is a senior executive who owns growth for a firm part‑time, on a retainer, instead of as a full‑time hire. In wealth management that means one person accountable for where new revenue comes from: advisor recruiting, organic growth, acquisitions, next‑generation talent and retention.
Most advisory firms don’t have this role. Growth sits with the founder, in between client meetings, compliance and everything else. It gets attention when the calendar allows. That’s why firms with real capability still grow by accident.
A full‑time Chief Growth Officer in this industry is a significant annual commitment before a single advisor joins. Most firms between $200M and $2B can’t justify that, and don’t need it full‑time. They need the thinking, the system and the discipline. That’s what a fractional engagement delivers.
Three situations where this works.
You want to be a destination
You believe advisors should want to join you, and so far they haven’t. Usually the issue isn’t the payout. It’s that the firm has never defined what it’s recruiting people to.
Growth runs through the founder
Every new relationship traces back to one person. Growth stops whenever that person is busy, and the valuation reflects it.
You have a plan but no engine
The strategy exists on paper. What’s missing is the weekly cadence, the pipeline, the CRM discipline and someone accountable for the number.
Most firms grow by accident.
A referral here, a lucky hire there, a wave of advisors leaving a competitor at the right moment. That works until it doesn’t, and a firm that grew by accident can’t repeat it on purpose.
I build growth as a system.
- Start with the owner.Growth should serve your objectives, not the other way around.
- Name every engine.Recruiting, organic growth, next‑generation talent, M&A and retention.
- Price each one.What each engine costs, what it returns, and how long it takes.
- Make the math reconcile.Most growth targets don’t add up once you break them down. Find that out before you invest.
- Install the cadence.Daily, weekly and quarterly rhythms that keep the work running.
- State what must be true.Name the conditions for success before you commit capital.
Strategy is easy to copy. A running system is not.
What gets installed.
- A recruiting engine. Target advisor profile, sourcing, outreach sequences, candidate experience and pipeline, through to close.
- An advisor value proposition. The specific, honest answer to why an advisor should move their business to you rather than to the platform down the road.
- CRM and operating cadence. Properties, stages and reporting, plus the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythm that keeps the engine running when nobody is watching.
- Growth engine economics. Recruiting, organic growth, M&A, next‑generation talent and retention ranked by impact, cost and time to results, with the math reconciled to your actual goal.
- The specialist bench. Lenders, valuation, M&A counsel and transition support, introduced and managed rather than handed off.
- Leadership in the room. I lead recruiting conversations, tuck‑ins and partnership discussions alongside your team, not from a deck.
The shape of the engagement.
Six‑month minimum
Shorter than that and you get a plan rather than a system. Recruiting cycles in this industry run long enough that anything briefer cannot be judged.
Monthly retainer
A fixed monthly fee for the engagement, with scope and term agreed before the work starts. You know the cost going in. No equity, no surprise invoices.
Diagnostic first
Most engagements begin with a two to three week Growth Strategy engagement. Installing an engine before the firm knows what it’s recruiting people to is how a year gets burned.
What this is not.
- Not a recruiter. A recruiter sells your story to candidates. This work is about having a story worth selling, and the system that tells it every week whether or not anyone is paying attention.
- Not a fractional CMO. Marketing leadership builds demand and brand. Growth leadership owns where revenue comes from, which in this industry is mostly advisors and acquisitions.
- Not a consulting report. The deliverable is a running system and the people who know how to run it, not a binder.
- Not a broker‑dealer or registered investment adviser. Proso Capital provides strategic consulting. Securities‑related and transaction services go through appropriately licensed partners.
What owners ask first.
How is a fractional Chief Growth Officer different from hiring one full‑time?
You get the same accountability for growth without carrying a senior salary, equity and benefits before the engine produces anything. A firm that has proven the model can always hire into it later. Several should.
What size firm is this for?
There’s no fixed AUM band. The common thread is a firm with real capability whose growth still depends on one person. In practice that tends to be independent RIAs and wealth‑management platforms between roughly $200M and $2B.
How quickly do advisors actually join?
Advisor transitions are slow. A first conversation to a signed deal commonly runs six to eighteen months. What you should expect inside six months is a working pipeline, a defined value proposition and real conversations, not closed deals. Anyone promising faster is selling something else.
Do you take equity instead of a fee?
No. I work on a fixed fee or a monthly retainer, agreed before the work starts. Equity in a firm with no third‑party valuation is a handshake, not an arrangement, and it compromises the independence that makes the advice worth having.
Who is doing the work?
I do, directly. Twenty‑five years in wealth management distribution, recruiting and business development, most recently as a Regional Branch Director with LPL Financial’s Independent Advisor Network. There’s no bench of juniors behind this.
Read the white paper, From Practice to Enterprise, or see the research behind it.
Bring me the problem.
Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether growth, recruiting or succession is actually stuck, and whether it is worth solving together.
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