Daily Upside Founder Launches RIA with Former Mercer Advisor
Patrick Trousdale, founder of financial news company The Daily Upside, has launched an RIA called Briardale Wealth, partnering with veteran financial planner John Freemire to target professionals with $1 million to $7 million in investable assets.
Trousdale, whose Daily Upside includes coverage of financial advisors through its Advisor Upside, began his career as an investment banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Guggenheim Securities. Although he has never worked as an advisor himself, he saw an opportunity to open a wealth shop with an ethos of “long-term thinking” for busy people juggling their “professional and personal finance lives.”
“Every day some crazy new esoteric ETF is being launched, betting on NHL teams or prediction market commercials in the Super Bowl,” Trousdale said. “We want to help people walk through that and sift through the good and the bad.”
Trousdale had the capital and notion for the firm but needed a skilled advisor with planning chops to launch it. Eventually, he was connected to Freemire, a wealth advisor at Mercer who had also been with The Motley Fool, which owns a stake in The Daily Upside.
“We had a bunch of mutual contacts, and I was able to hear about his expertise and background through my network,” Trousdale said. “He is also just such a planning nerd. One of the philosophies we have with the firm is: where would we want to put our own family’s money, our own grandma’s money?”
Trousdale stepped down as CEO of the newsletter-based Daily Upside in July, naming Chief Operating Officer McKay Murphy to the position while he took the role of president.
Drawing on his media background, Trousdale said Briardale will invest in content marketing, including newsletters and campaigns across platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. He is not a believer in client acquisition databases or referral software.
“I don’t think you’re going to find innovation on some unknown platform,” he said. “It’s going to come down to the campaign you are running and the way you are communicating to the customer.”
Freemire, who joins as managing director and founding advisor, said the firm’s communications will follow a structured planning calendar—covering portfolio reviews early in the year, insurance and estate planning in the summer, and tax planning toward year-end—designed to educate both clients and prospects rather than commenting on market performance.
“A client doesn’t care that you know all those things if they don’t know how that gets distilled to their particular financial plan,” he said.
The advisor said his decision to leave Mercer, one of the largest RIAs in the sector, stemmed partly from an entrepreneurial itch, having grown up in a family that ran several small businesses in Iowa, including landscaping and irrigation.
He also pointed to a structural challenge common at larger firms: as successful advisors take on more clients, those clients often receive less personal attention over time.
“We’re trying to take a lot of the things that a family office does provide, but then also make the appropriate handoff,” Freemire said, citing estate planning as an example where they would go through the process with a client alongside an estate attorney.
Briardale’s ADV will list investable assets of $400,000 to $500,000, though the firm expects most clients to fall between $1 million and $7 million. Freemire identified two primary client groups within that pool: mid-career professionals with equity-based compensation who often carry more concentration risk than they realize and retirees seeking to convert savings into sustainable income while navigating Medicare, taxes and legacy planning.
The firm will launch without any existing clients, as Freemire is bound by non-solicitation agreements from his prior role.
Trousdale acknowledged the inherent risk of building a firm from scratch, contrasting it with the low financial risk of starting The Daily Upside.
“Starting an RIA from scratch, zero momentum—it’s much more investment,” he said. “But I’ve learned to not really care about money so much … you can’t really create anything of value without absorbing risk.”
The firm will use Charles Schwab for custody and has consolidated its technology around a single all-in-one platform, with a standard assets-under-management fee schedule for clients with more than $1 million, and a flat fee for smaller clients who may be better served staying in employer retirement plans. It also has a proprietary investing and planning system the duo dubbed Via Ferrata, referring to a mountain-climbing system that uses steel cables, iron rungs and suspension bridges to assist with steep climbs.
The firm name Briardale and the image of a “thorny” environment reflect the firm’s view of today’s investment landscape, Trousdale said.
“We really wanted to signal something authoritative and kind of in keeping with my background, perhaps, and John’s background, and something that kind of gave off a legacy feel,” he said.
