RIA Edge 100: How Wescott’s Obsession with Planning Paid Off
Wescott Financial Advisory, an employee-owned registered investment advisor based in Philadelphia, started in the late 1980s. Amid an industry stuffed with Brooks Brothers-wearing brokers dialing for dollars with cold-calling scripts, Wescott took a different tack.
At the time, founder Grant Rawdin worked at a law firm, focusing on taxes. He liked his clients but found the work too transactional. One day, a client asked him to “turn off the clock” so they could discuss family issues.
“That became a moment where I realized that I’d love to change the dynamic,” Rawdin said.
Rawdin saw an opportunity to shift into financial planning, bringing more value to clients by helping them think through their financial situations, goals and constraints. At the time, the idea of “holistic” planning was new; most financial advice came from brokerages and insurance agencies.
“People said, ‘You’ll starve,’” Rawdin recalled. “I said, ‘I’m going to go for it.’ I told the law firm I was going to leave and sort of pursue this dream. And remarkably, because they knew me and I had a good reputation there, they said, ‘You know, that sounds really interesting.”
The law firm ended up staking Rawdin a “small amount of money.” From there, he said many of his first clients were referred to him by brokerages that didn’t want to, or were not set up to, offer their clients the financial planning services he felt he could provide.
“It really gave me a great opportunity, and I built a client base,” he said.
The Psychology of Finance
Slowly, Rawdin began to grow the team and hire planning-focused advisors. The firm adopted a practice grounded in psychological principles that informed not just the client relationships but internal operations as well, using tools such as psychological assessments and a gamified accountability system called “Perfect Score” to deepen advisor engagement and drive client action.
“When you get into somebody’s needs, you get into their minds,” Rawdin said. “But when you can relate to them, understand them better, and then they can understand you on a little bit of a different level, you can form a relationship.”
Over two decades since making the leap, the business was large enough to tap the M&A markets to accelerate growth and scale. In 2021, Wescott bought Asset Planning Service, an $800 million RIA with a niche focus on pharmaceutical executives at Merck and other companies.
The firm’s approach has led it to more than $4.4 billion in assets under management. It has also put it among Wealth Management’s RIA Edge 100, a list that rewards metrics such as AUM growth alongside data like the ratio of employees to clients, AUM per advisor, and the percentage of employees with CFP certification, all meant to indicate a firm’s commitment to clients and sustainable business development.
Alex Rawdin
Most recently, Wescott has brought on an assistant financial advisor, Kojo Colecraft-Addison, a CFP who previously worked at Certior Financial Group, and an associate financial advisor, Matthew Lafferty, who had been at Vanguard.
One of the drivers of Wescott’s growth was Rawdin’s son, Alex. He left a career in music and radio marketing to join the firm, eventually becoming director of client development and growth strategy.
“He couldn’t have put me through a more rigorous interview process,” Alex Rawdin said. “He told me to go through the interview process and talk to everyone at the firm. In retrospect, I was thankful for that, because I got to speak with everyone at the firm and learn the firm’s principles.”
Alex Rawdin said the firm’s financial planning approach plays a large role in his job, bringing on both new advisors and clients.
“The holistic nature is so much of what we end up actually, ‘selling,’ and it’s built into our process and is really in our DNA,” he said. “We have a branded term that we refer to often called Life Minded Wealth, and that does have tentacles into what we do in the prospective client phase.”
Self-Aware
Founder Grant Rawdin said the firm began using psychological assessment tools in the late 1990s for hiring and internal corporate development.
During the 2007 financial crisis, he brought in a consultant to conduct 360-degree assessments of the staff with the goal of reorganizing the firm using organizational psychology principles and reducing stress by realigning employees to their strengths.
The RIA later extended these tools to clients and developed the “Perfect Score” system to track clients’ planning progress across multiple areas on a scale of 1 to 100.
“Through the psychological process of gamification, just like when they were in school, everybody wants 100,” Grant Rawdin said. “You meet with a client at the beginning of a meeting, and you tell them they have an 84—they are not 84 people.”
The approach creates sticky client relationships through deep knowledge and continuous engagement, he said.
“You know them deeply, and they understand where you’re coming from,” he said. “You ask them questions and approach things in a way that makes them scratch their heads and say, ‘That’s really smart. Yeah, I’ll answer that question,’ and you just deepen the relationship.”
Growth Director Alex Rawdin shared an example of a law firm partner prospect who had “seen all the reporting before” from financial advisors and was skeptical that Wescott would be any different. The team still went ahead and took him through the process of evaluating his financial situation, discussing opportunities, and walking through his own goals to create a tailored plan.
“The prospect looked at us, and said, ‘I stand corrected,’” he said.
That type of response is common, Grant Rawdin said, as prospects typically come to Westcott when they’ve either outgrown doing it themselves or outgrown their current advisor’s capabilities.
“It’s understanding what the financial right answer is and applying that to what the real situation is on the ground and having empathy for what our clients want,” he said. “If you hate debt, or if it’s so important to you to retire earlier, to give to your children, or whatever it may be, and that’s not included in your plan because the financial right answer might be different—what are we doing? Are we really serving our clients?”
