Practice Longevity in the Social Era, or The Death of the Implied Growth Rate

Advisors have a bad habit of being shoeless cobblers. We spend so much time ensuring the longevity of cash flow and asset growth for our clients, that we too often neglect the asset our own retirement rests on.

The best part of building an asset management business is the implied growth rate. Without touching a single thing, a firm can reasonably expand by 4-5% a year on asset growth alone. It makes for lazy advisors. A few referrals here and there, a good year for equities, and you post a growth rate other industries would be raving about.

For an industry that says, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results,” at the end of every sentence, we have a myopically bullish stance on our own status quo.

I’m Nate Hoskin, the co-founder and CEO of SageContent. I built my own RIA to over 170 clients before exiting in early 2026. Of those clients, over 80% of them moved their money and trust over from another RIA. I don’t have to bore you by telling you how much the world is changing, how much AI is shifting the landscape, how the trust economy is picking different markets, because I was the problem.

I was the thorn in the side of the old guard advisor for 5 years. I moved tens of millions of dollars out of a single RIA that had seemingly forgotten their clients had other options. I was the variable they hadn’t accounted for when they calculated their implied growth rate.

In an ironic twist of fate, one of the firms I took clients from is now a member of SageContent. I doubt they connected the dots, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they knew the method I used: social media.

I was a fresh CFP® practitioner stuck inside on a warm COVID summer day in California, with a burgeoning practice that had exactly two clients: my mom and my grandmother. In my last job, I’d spent years running live seminars, knocking on doors, making house calls, and fielding in-office meetings. None of the methods I’d been trained for worked with a mask on, and they certainly didn’t work from my bedroom/office.

Luckily, this little app called TikTok was coming on the scene. In December of 2020 I set the goal to post a video a day from January to June. If I had 1,000 followers by June, I’d keep doing it.

Fast forward to February… and I had over 50,000 followers. I expanded my domain to include Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and even Pinterest, amassing over 250,000 followers in 3 years.

I shared the type of basic financial knowledge that you might consider banal. What a backdoor Roth is, or how to save your receipts to create a tax-free windfall out of an HSA for an early retirement. I was adding new clients faster than I could hire good people to serve them.

One of my clients sold his firm for $200m, another scaled a company from $40k a year to $400k a month in under 6 months. 23-year-olds with $5m revenue agencies to retirees with $5m+, they were coming to social media for answers and only finding me.

Of course that’s not the case any more. You probably know about Root Financial now that they’ve almost cracked $3 billion, and you’ll be hearing names like Foundry Financial and MDRN Capital if you haven’t already. YouTube was the core growth mechanism for 3 of the top 5 fastest growing RIAs on the Altruist platform in 2025. Even Josh Brown from Ritholtz Wealth Management weighed in:

“If you're not a substantial presence on YouTube, you may as well not exist. Many firms in the investment advisory space will attempt video but creativity does not come second nature to an industry that self-selects for left-brained people (logical, risk-averse linear thinkers).

If I'm a firm CEO, I am treating YouTube as a front burner issue in terms of gaining (or even maintaining) my brand's visibility. There is literally no substitute.”

Video marketing as a whole has become a maintenance effort, not just a growth effort. In shorter words: it’s something wealth management firms need to do if they don’t want to die.

What has been will not always be, and the firms that will survive the next decade, to say nothing of thriving, will be the ones who move their marketing to where attention lives.

So I guess I may inadvertently bore you with one take: the trust economy is choosing different markets.

When we think of trust as an asset, we naturally assume there is a market for that asset. It started with inter-family relationships, grew to communal bargaining, and expanded (just like every other asset) along global, digitized trade routes. The same way you can buy blueberries from Guatemala, you can now build trust with an advisor on the other side of the nation.

The trust market you used to find on main street has moved to social media, and advisors on the sidewalk are wondering why their stalls lack patrons.

I’ll tell you why: your clients have more tech in their portfolio than you do. Meta and Google accounted for a sizable portion of their returns and you only caught the basis point drip, while other advisors went straight to the source and used the trillion-dollar algorithms of our age to connect directly with their future clients.

There’s never been a better time to start an RIA, but the industry incumbents have a headache on their hands. They need to, somehow, enter these new trust markets faster and more aggressively than the nimble firms biting at their toes. Luckily, they have the resources and firepower to make it happen, the moment they get their big ships turned in the right direction.

About Sage Content

Sage Content is an all-in-one, AI-powered video marketing platform built specifically for financial advisors, RIAs, and wealth management firms. By streamlining the entire content creation lifecycle—from topic ideation and compliance-ready scripting to automated editing and multi-platform posting—Sage Content empowers advisors to consistently create high-quality short- and long-form video content, build authentic client trust, and scale their digital reach without taking time away from client relationships. Learn more at sagecontent.ai.