Affiliated Advisors' Advance conference has grown from a modest meeting into a signature event on the independent advisor calendar.
The fifth annual gathering, which brought over 100 financial professionals to the historic Perry Lane Hotel in Savannah, Georgia, centered on creativity. This theme, according to Trisha Qualy, a managing partner, represented not a soft concept but the defining professional skill of the moment.
"Creativity is designing what does not yet exist," she said. "That ties directly into financial services. Independence enables you to make your own approach, to adapt and innovate, to design with intention, to solve problems differently. "The setting reinforced that point. Savannah's blend of antebellum architecture, Spanish-moss-draped squares and art-world energy was anything but accidental.
"Savannah feels different," Qualy said. "We wanted to match the theme as our approach is not standard conferencing."
Celebrating five years of Advance also meant taking stock of how far the firm has come. Affiliated Advisors includes 132 advisors serving more than 24,000 clients with nearly $10 billion in assets, after several record recruiting years. A platform update delivered by Claire McCarthy, Osaic's senior vice president of advisor engagement, put that figure in context.
"Osaic's enterprise network now spans 28 strategic firms," she said, "with more than 2,100 advisors, 500,000 clients and over $157 billion in assets, with our parent organization supporting approximately $740 billion in total assets across 11,000-plus advisors."
Inside Practice Management
The practice management sessions set the analytical tone for the conference. Leah Ryan, a practice management consultant at Capital Group, presented findings from the firm's 2026 Advisor Benchmark Study. About 8,000 advisors were surveyed to identify what the top 20% — the highest-growth quintile in assets, revenue and client count — are doing differently from their peers.
The answer, she argued, has less to do with investment management than many advisors assume. The gaps that matter most are in client acquisition, client experience and strategic scale.
On the acquisition front, Ryan cited a data point that advisors with a defined referral strategy receive 2.8 times more referrals and convert 39% more of those referrals into clients. Yet referral generation scored among the lowest skill sets across the survey population, a widespread vulnerability that Ryan called "the biggest opportunity" in the industry.
High-growth advisors are also far more likely to treat digital marketing as a priority. Sixty-nine percent of top-quintile firms make digital a focus, and 84% actively use social media and digital channels to attract prospective clients. The session also highlighted the growing importance of tax planning as a differentiator, a meaningful point of distinction in a landscape where investment management and financial planning have largely become commoditized.
Nick Safi, director of practice management at Affiliated, brought a more pointed message.
"Your biggest competition doesn't have a business card, " he said.
Safi walked through the emerging landscape of artificial intelligence-powered practice tools, from AI note-takers, which he identified as having the highest adoption rate among advisors, to wealth-signal identification tools like Finny, Catchlight and Aidentified that help advisors surface new prospecting opportunities from existing data.
He drew the distinction that advisors using technology to go deeper into client relationships are outperforming those using it simply to move faster.
"You don't have to be a tech specialist," Safi said. "You just have to be creative."
Psychology of Top Advisors
Among the conference's most personal moments came from Rita Robbins, Affiliated's president, whose "A Lesson from a Cake" session drew on behavioral neuroscience and the psychology of achievement to address a near-universal experience among high-performing advisors. The feeling, she said, is of falling short despite evidence of real success.
Robbins framed it around what psychologists call "the gap," a mental state of pursuing an ideal that keeps moving.
"You can be succeeding and still feel like you're failing," she told attendees. "Measuring against moving targets leads to burnout. Confidence comes from evidence. We should strive for progress, not perfection, and if you don't capture progress, you don't experience it."
The antidote, she argued, is what she called "the gain," a practice of measuring progress from the starting point. The session resonated with advisors who, by definition, are accustomed to measuring success in market terms, and who may apply far less rigorous tracking to their own professional development.
Looking Ahead
The conference's closing sessions circled back to the future of the practice and the choices that advisors make now that will define it.
Tom Rippberger, an Affiliated managing partner, detailed the firm's resources for succession planning, such as continuity agreements, business valuation tools and template contracts. He also discussed the personal dimensions that make transitions difficult and addressed the ongoing shift toward advisory models.
Rippberger noted that the move from brokerage to fee-based advisory meaningfully increases practice value and that Affiliated is incentivizing that transition through its net new asset program.
"What will you create next?" he asked in his concluding remarks. "Be specific about what you are looking for, and that's how you will find the help you need."