How to Scale Your RIA Without Losing Your Culture
On Episode 87 of the COO Roundtable podcast, I sat down with Vince Nauheimer of OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners and Grace Balestrieri of Brighton Jones, two operators who have led their firms through tremendous growth, and asked them a question I felt they were uniquely qualified to answer: “How do you keep your culture intact as your firm scales?” Vince, to his credit, corrected my phrasing of the question. Keeping your culture exactly the same isn’t the point, he explained. The goal is to grow into something you’re still proud of. That’s a key distinction from how I phrased the question, and more important than most firms realize.
Many firm leaders approach culture as something to preserve, like it’s fragile and will shatter if you don’t protect it. Vince reframed it in a way that stuck with me: “We’re not so much trying to freeze culture in place, but to keep it fluid, and have our non-negotiables on what the critical components are.” There are things that should be non-negotiable: your values, how you treat clients, the standard you hold people to. But the texture of your culture will naturally change as you add offices, acquire firms, and bring on new people. Fighting the natural evolution of your firm’s culture is a losing battle. Embracing it, while holding firm to the core tenets, is where the most successful RIAs live.
Vince also pointed out that culture needs to be operationalized. It can’t just be a poster on the wall or a line in your employee handbook. It has to show up in how you hire, how you onboard, how you evaluate performance. And crucial for inorganically growing RIAs: how you approach M&A.
Vince made a point that I think gets lost in a lot of acquisition conversations: “Cultural fit is truly a filter, not just a checkbox.” His firm has walked away from deals when the cultural fit wasn’t there. It takes conviction to give up on that additional AUM that everyone is clamoring for. But as Vince put it, “It doesn’t take a lot to poison a culture.” Anyone who’s been through a bad acquisition knows exactly what he means.
The first 90 days after bringing on a new hire or a new team are critically important, he noted. That new person or that acquired team is watching closely. Are you doing what you said you’d do? Did you deliver what you promised during the employee interview or the M&A courting process? That’s where trust gets built or broken, and trust is the foundation of culture.
Grace brought a phrase to the conversation that perfectly captured the challenge: “Scale with soul. ”At Brighton Jones, they’ve embedded this into their 10-year vision. The idea is that you can grow aggressively and still protect the essence of who you are. But this will require focused intentionality. It doesn’t just happen on its own.
A few things Grace and her team have built to make that happen stood out to me. First is ownership. The firm is 100% employee-owned, and over half of all teammates hold equity in some form. When people have a real stake in the firm’s success, they’re invested in how it grows and how it changes. True owners of the business will protect culture at all costs and not stand back and watch it erode.
Second is shared language. Every Brighton Jones employee goes through what Grace described as their “MESI” training framework, short for Mindful, Emotional and Social Intelligence. The goal is to give everyone the same vocabulary for navigating hard conversations, leadership challenges and the inevitable friction that comes with growth. As Grace explained, it means that when things get tough, “we’re speaking the same language and can use those skills to get through those things.” You can’t underestimate how powerful that is across a multi-office firm.
Third, and this is where it gets especially relevant for operations professionals, they’ve built a model for rolling out best practices that balances consistency with flexibility. Grace described it as thinking through “what’s required, what’s flexible and what’s personal.” You need consistency to deliver a remarkable client experience across every office. But that remarkable client experience also comes from individual relationships, local service teams and the human element that can’t be fully systemized. Getting that balance between standardization and customization is genuinely hard, and it’s an operations problem as much as a people and cultural problem.
This conversation surfaced some ideas worth exploring at your firm. Ask yourself whether your culture is operationalized or just aspirational. If it’s mostly words on a wall, you have work to do. Culture shows up in your hiring criteria, your onboarding process, your performance reviews and your M&A due diligence. If it’s not embedded in those things, it’s not really your culture yet. It’s just your intention.
Be willing to walk away from the wrong fit. That applies to hires and acquisitions alike. One bad cultural fit can do more damage than most people realize, until it’s too late.
And finally, stop trying to freeze your culture in place. The best firms I’ve seen aren’t the ones that looked the same at 250 employees as they did at 50. They’re the ones that grew deliberately, protected their non-negotiables and built something their people are still proud to be part of. The culture didn’t stay the same. It got better.
