Two upcoming elite industry summits promise elbow rubbing and brainstorming par excellence
Brian Hamburger is gaining momentum with his MarketCounsel events in the wake of Chip Roame's long-term success
7 min read- Advisory conferences are trending toward smaller, more intimate events for better networking.
- Tiburon CEO Summit and MarketCounsel conference anticipate record attendance this fall.
- Speakers include Fidelity's Durbin and Envestnet's Crager, offering insights on industry trends.
Brooke’s Note: In recent months I have written about various intimate, elite national advisor conferences held by Barron’s, Fidelity, Schwab and TD Ameritrade. Over the years I have also attended several Tiburon CEO Summits. All these select [but wide-drawing] events seem to share a common denominator — gushing enthusiasm from the participants. Small local events hazard feeling like a gathering of the Rotary Club. And big, national extravaganzas sometimes deliver more sensory overload and bewilderment than they are worth. The rise of national-but-intimate events appears to be a gathering trend and this article is about two upcoming conventions: the long-established Tiburon CEO Summit, and a more nascent one produced by MarketCounsel that is rapidly growing in size and prominence.
Two small advisory conferences are expecting to hit attendance records this fall, helping to confirm a trend toward smaller conferences in the industry. Organizers of both a MarketCounsel conference, scheduled for Las Vegas Nov. 17-19 at the RedRock Resort and Casino, and a Tiburon [Calif.] Strategic Advisors conference, scheduled the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco on Oct. 6-7, say they are likely to have 150 attendees.
Among the speakers on tap for the Tiburon CEO Summit are: Judy Barber, CEO of Family Money Consultants, Ron Carson, LPL’s top producer and Dale Brown, CEO of of the Financial Services Institute.
Barber of San Francisco
Barber is San Francisco-based consultant who mediates on matters of sudden and diminished wealth and mediates among family members regarding shared wealth. For more on Carson’s businesses, see: The top LPL producer has a second RIA-related company that could eclipse the stature of the first one For more on Brown’s views, Debate continues: Fiduciary standard no panacea.
Those lined up for the MarketCounsel conference include Michael Durbin, president of Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services, and Bill Crager, president of Envestnet. MarketCounsel is based in Englewood, N.J.
Durbin is expected to speak about the state of the advisory industry. Considering that his company has is trying to reinvent itself on a big scale on three parallel tracks, Durbin is likely to bring good perspective. Fidelity is radically revamping its service from a silo-ed call-center approach to one of clusters. See: Fidelity plows ahead in the RIA business with overhauls of service, technology and management
Fidelity also continues to work on WealthCentral, a technology platform that Fidelity has spent heavily on, and, though it has abandoned its HybridOne brand, it is still working hard to compete with Pershing’s NetX360, a hybrid platform. See: Fidelity wins converts to WealthCentral, but most of its advisors have yet to make the switch
Crager’s speaking topic isn’t set yet but Envestnet sits at the intersection of much that is interesting about the advisory industry.
The company not only completed an IPO this summer [showing what investment bankers think of the RIA business] but it’s shifting its growth emphasis from IBD reps to RIAs. With concerns for both efficiency and fiduciary care on the rise, this company’s scale, capitalization and ability to simplify and advisors life makes what Crager has to say potentially very interesting. See: 10 reasons why the Envestnet IPO filing is for real
Full disclosure: I will be attending the MarketCounsel event and may help to moderate a panel.
The MarketCounsel Member Summit hums in the Nevada desert
Smaller events seem to be booming because of advisors’ Goldilocks-style need to find an event that is not too large and not too small to network with their geographically fragmented peer group. Of course, both the MarketCounsel and Tiburon events are evolving in the shadow of the industry’s biggest show, Schwab IMPACT 2010, which will be held at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center Oct. 26-29. It will feature an appearance by Henry M. Paulson Jr, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, who will give an insider’s account of the 2008 financial crisis.
Neither the Tiburon nor the MarketCounsel conference is, on its own, a money-maker for the respective firms. Tiburon has no admission fee but attendees must be active clients and receive an invitation.
“I think of the CEO Summits more as our reward to our clients, a way to keep them up to date on Tiburon research findings, and frankly to help them network amongst themselves, as they are a unique high-end cross-silo group,” Roame says.
He adds: “Selfishly for me, it allows me to see many clients in an efficient way, which saves me from later traveling to many client sites when we are doing client projects. In other words, the phone later becomes the medium because the relationships are built over the years already.”
There’s another benefit to organizing a conference, adds Brian Hamburger, founder and managing director of MarketCounsel.
“We can literally set the agenda,” he says.
MarketCounsel is also by invitation only but this year it’s opening the registration to non-clients at a higher attendance fee. MarketCounsel did not disclose the fee.
Brian Hamburger: We can literally set
the agenda.
Story Timeline
Set the agenda
In each case, the conferences are being run by consultants with followings in the industry. Roame, a former McKinsey consultant, has corporate strategy as a core competency. Hamburger, also proprietor of The Hamburger Law Firm, leverages his knowledge of legal and compliance issues.
Heading into its 10th year, Tiburon’s 19th semi-annual conference continues to grow in size and firepower. It had 133 attendees confirmed on Friday with final numbers predicted to swell to about 150. Last year, Charles “Chuck” Schwab attended to receive an award.
Roame’s mission is to bring together the CEOs from different, related industries – banks, insurance companies, IBDs, wirehouses and RIA custodians – and have them learn from each other. The idea is that they’re all delivering financial advice and there should be cross-pollination across the divides of their industry channels, Roame has said at previous conferences.
10 things I learned at the fall 2010 Tiburon CEO Summit
The Tiburon CEO Summit rotates each six months between the Ritz-Carlton near Wall Street in New York and the Ritz in San Francisco.
MarketCounsel
This is the third year of MarketCounsel’s event. The firm expects to triple the size [about 50 people] of its first event in 2008. Along with Durbin and Crager, other speakers will include: Scott Welch, co-founder and senior managing director of Fortigent, David Tittsworth, executive director of the Investment Adviser Associationm and Marilyn Mohrmann-Gillis, the CFP Board’s managing director of public policy.
Hamburger’s aim is to bring together disparate elements from the independent advisory realm.
In its narrowest sense, MarketCounsel is a compliance consultancy, but its practice and its conference are rapidly changing to meet new demands that the industry is placing on it.
“Compliance is not a module of these companies; it’s woven into all the applications of the company,” Hamburger says.
Reflecting that change at the MarketCounsel event, Paul Lally, president of Gladstone Associate LLC will speak about succession planning; David G. DeVoe, director of mergers and acquisitions in the strategic client group, will talk about what a firm is worth, and John Furey, principal of Advisor Growth Strategies, will moderate a panel related to bringing new advisors aboard a practice.
Avoiding repetition
Last year’s emphasis on rollups will deliberately not be repeated this year. Avoiding the repetition helps to keep things fresh, according to Hamburger.
This is the third year of MarketCounsel’s event and the 150 attendees triples the size of its inaugural 2008 event. It was held in Princeton, N.J. last year in, ironically, a former training facility for Merrill Lynch brokers. Merger and breakaway experts convene near Princeton at old Merrill Lynch lair This year it’s in Las Vegas. Hamburgers said he chose the casino capital precisely because so few financial conferences have been held there in recent years.
“It’s a shift of the pendulum bringing the conference out there,” he says.
Articles about other 'elite’ conferences:
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