Jack Sharry: Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck.
On our podcast, we spend a lot of time talking about where wealth management is headed, how firms grow, how they scale without losing their soul, and how better technology, operating models, and leadership can improve outcomes for clients, advisors, and firms.
We have focused on this as a critical, enduring challenge and opportunity. As the industry grapples with growth challenges, we are exploring this through a podcast series on intentionally creating and sustaining growth.
Today’s conversation is about what happens after a big strategic move.
About a year ago, we spoke with Summit Wealth Group CEO Randy Morris about that move. Randy and the Summit leadership team selected SEI as Summit transitioned to an independent RIA model, aiming for greater flexibility, a better client experience, and stronger growth, especially organic growth.
At the time, Summit said SEI was not just a custodian choice, but a strategic partner to help power what Randy called Summit 2.0. Summit has been publicly described as a planning-first firm headquartered in Colorado Springs. It operates across multiple offices and states and pairs integrated custody, technology, investment management, and advanced planning capabilities to support its next chapter of growth.
So we thought it would be a good time to catch up with Randy and see how things are going.
Joining Randy today is Seamus O’Brien, Summit’s Head of Advisor Success. Seamus joined Summit after leading business development work with RIAs at SEI. In his role at Summit, he is focused on advisor growth, transitions, partnerships, recruiting, and organic growth initiatives.
Today, we are going to look at what worked, what is still evolving, and what Randy and Seamus have learned about organic growth, broader firm growth, advisor success, and building a scalable business without losing culture.
Randy and Seamus, welcome to WealthTech on Deck.
Randy Morris: Thank you, Jack. It’s great to be here.
Seamus O’Brien: Thank you, Jack. Great to be here. We’ve known each other for a few years now, and it’s exciting to finally be part of the cool crowd. Thanks for having me.
Jack Sharry: You are all that, as is Randy. I’m looking forward to this conversation.
Let’s start with the big picture. A year ago, Summit made a major move, launching as an independent RIA and selecting SEI as a strategic partner. That was a bold step and clearly tied to growth, control, and long-term direction.
Now that you’ve had time to live with it, Randy, let’s start with you. How has that first year gone?
Randy Morris: It’s been incredible.
I would say we have learned a lot in the process. Our team went through an awful lot to move to this RIA model, and the opportunities we are finding are enormous.
It is encouraging to be a year removed from that period because, as you can imagine, things were very hectic last year.
Jack Sharry: You moved a ton of accounts and joined a whole new operating system. A lot goes on there.
Seamus, you were on the receiving end, if I understand correctly. You were part of the recruiting effort to bring Summit over, and now here you are at Summit. Tell us about that.
Seamus O’Brien: It has been a great trip.
I met Randy and the Summit team about a year and a half ago, which is hard to believe. We took the opportunity to learn what Summit 2.0 was going to look and feel like.
At SEI, we were very confident that we could help support that initiative. As time progressed and I got to know the team at Summit, it felt like a natural progression for my career to be part of what they were putting together.
Jack Sharry: A little background on Seamus: he was a top producer and leader on the sales board at SEI, which is no surprise. Randy, who I’ve come to know a bit, has a sharp eye for talent. The two of you are doing great things, and we’ll get into what that looks like as Summit 2.0 continues.
When Summit announced the move, Randy, you said you were looking for cultural alignment, consultative partnership, operational efficiency, and a differentiated ecosystem that could help power growth.
A year in, where has the SEI partnership delivered the most value, and where has the most learning taken place?
Randy Morris: A year ago, as you said, we had more than 3,000 clients, close to 3,500, and over 8,000 accounts to move quickly.
SEI was fantastic at helping us accomplish that. We didn’t lose any team members in the process, which says a lot. We put them through an awful lot because they were focused on making sure all client accounts moved over correctly and the assets were in the right place.
Looking back, SEI did a great job helping us with the transition and setting up billing. We made the move on May 1, and by the end of May, 98% of the accounts had moved over.
From a billing standpoint, we had a small hiccup in May, but with SEI’s help, we were back on track by June and fully functional by the end of the quarter. That was amazing.
SEI also provided us the opportunity to do performance tracking for all the SEI assets our clients had, which was a huge help. They provided help on the tech stack and helped us make decisions there.
I would say the tech stack area is probably where the most learning has taken place — not only our tech stack, but also SEI’s. Most of the learning opportunities have happened on that front.
Jack Sharry: Seamus, you were on the SEI team helping bring Summit over. Talk about when you switched to the Summit team, how that transition went, and what you learned in the process. You have now seen the world from both sides.
Seamus O’Brien: From the transition standpoint, working with the Summit team during such an important part of their business transition — and at such a vulnerable time — said a lot about the culture of Summit.
The fact that they were willing and able to trust SEI, and trust me as part of that team, spoke volumes. The cultural alignment between Summit and SEI, including the people, relationships, culture, service model, and support for RIA clients, was among the best in the business.
From that standpoint, it was an easy transition in mindset. The cultural alignment and client-first mentality remained the same.
Now, being on the RIA side, there is a lot more work to be done to continue growing the business going forward. I love being part of it, and I love having a seat at the table.
Jack Sharry: Let’s talk about that. I raised the topic of organic growth early on, so let’s get into it.
It is a priority across the industry and clearly a priority for Summit. Summit has framed the move to independence as a way to improve the client experience and help drive organic growth.
In another recent interview, you talked about digital marketing, SEO, Google, expanded services, and technology as pieces of Summit’s next phase.
How do you define organic growth at Summit today, and what have you learned in the past year about what truly drives it?
Seamus O’Brien: Organic growth — I like to call it the OG — is really the hardest kind of growth, in my opinion. I think a lot of people agree with that.
For us, it can be defined in many ways, even at the branch and advisor levels. But organic growth is the number one driver of valuation and success once you get past the cultural alignment conversation.
It’s the first question advisors ask us: “How are you going to help me grow?”
We are exploring lead generation programs and partner growth programs, but we also have an internal marketing team that focuses on helping advisors grow organically every day, in their communities, in ways that make the most sense for them.
Old-school seminar marketing is back in full force, and we have had a lot of success with that. The various social media channels are not going away. Podcasts such as this will help us.
It is about helping our advisors create the right value proposition for their niche markets and ultimately leverage their unique ability, one of Randy’s favorite terms, to better serve existing clients and source new ones.
Jack Sharry: Talk about that unique ability. I’d love to learn more about it. What is your secret sauce?
Randy Morris: For most of us, a lot of our secret sauce has been stolen from other secret sauces.
Unique ability is a Dan Sullivan and Strategic Coach concept. It is basically about how we free up an advisor so they can spend 80% of their time doing what they do best, and how we bring people around them who are also spending 80% of their time doing what they do best.
That has really been the structure of Summit from day one over the last 23 years. When you do that, the ultimate winner is the client because the client is being served by individuals who are operating in their unique ability.
Jack Sharry: That’s great.
Growth is obviously bigger than new client acquisition. That is fundamentally important, but there is also advisor recruiting, M&A, partnerships, integration, and creating an environment where new advisors can thrive once they arrive.
Seamus, your role is especially interesting because it sits across the full advisor lifecycle, from recruitment and partnership development to onboarding, integration, and long-term scale.
How are you thinking about growth in the broader sense, and what does a real advisor success platform look like in practice?
Seamus O’Brien: In short, we are thinking about it very strategically and thoughtfully.
Mark Tibergien often said that growth for the sake of growth never ends well. There are 16,000 SEC-registered RIAs, 17,000 state-registered firms, and 95,000 hybrid advisors. We won’t be a fit for all of them, and not everyone will be a fit for Summit.
First and foremost, we are trying to enhance and build on the culture Summit has created over the past 20-plus years, including our amazing community of advisors, operational teams, and support teams, to strengthen the service model for our clients and advisors.
It is about giving time back to advisors so they can do what they do best and help clients live their lives to the fullest.
Jack Sharry: For both of you, what are advisors looking for now, and what are you looking for in an advisor?
Seamus O’Brien: I can talk about some of that.
Advisors are looking for professionally managed investment platforms, advisor marketing, and support. Again, one of the first questions we get is, “How are you going to help us grow?”
Our two-to-three-to-one support-to-advisor ratio shows that we put the client first. We are also spending a lot of time on the technology piece of the advisor experience.
We are building our data foundation — our golden record of the client file, if you will — which will help us capitalize on trends in the AI world and the agentic solutions that are coming fast and furious.
The idea is that Summit leadership, working with our advisors, can do a lot of the heavy lifting up front. We will be able to remove friction from the advisors’ day-to-day so they have more time to spend in their communities and build their businesses.
Jack Sharry: Randy, what would you add?
Randy Morris: One of the things we do when we look at prospective advisor teams is evaluate the organic growth piece closely.
As Seamus mentioned, it is the biggest driver of valuation. The great thing for us is that when we find the right team that is growing the right way, they dovetail right into our culture.
We provide a lot of resources to help them grow. Part of the priority for our marketing team is to sit down with each office, listen to its marketing plan for the upcoming year, understand the markets and niches it wants to target, and develop a local marketing plan that supplements what we are doing nationally from a branding perspective.
Jack Sharry: One of the themes in Summit’s story is that you wanted to improve flexibility and control while enhancing capabilities and solutions for clients.
Randy, in our earlier conversations, you emphasized a planning-first model and a desire to better serve high-net-worth households.
How has the client experience changed over the past year, and where are clients feeling the difference?
Randy Morris: I would say we are able to go much deeper in client conversations.
AI efficiencies are helping us, as are the tax efficiencies of our strategies. Risk-adjusted performance has improved. In fact, I was on a client review call a few minutes ago, and it is great to see how far we have come in the investment arena.
We have been able to bring in Chelsea Ganey as our Chief Investment Officer, and she and her team are doing a great job with our models and strategies at Summit.
Our reduced internal cost structures also make for very happy clients. Performance, cost structure, and efficiencies are all adding to and improving the experience our clients are having at Summit.
Jack Sharry: That’s great. Seamus, anything to add?
Seamus O’Brien: I think it is helping provide the tools advisors need to help clients keep more of what they make.
Whether that is direct indexing, LifeYield technology, overlay technology, or other tools, we are looking at ways to help clients more holistically.
From an M&A perspective, we are also looking to add services such as tax prep or teams that already offer tax prep and have CFPs on staff who can help with deeper planning needs. That allows us to serve clients more holistically in-house.
Jack Sharry: Talk a little more about tax efficiency and tax-smart investing. That is an emerging area. It has been around forever, and tax-loss harvesting has been around forever, but I am assuming you have plans to go further in that direction.
Seamus O’Brien: That is really Chelsea’s wheelhouse.
One of the beautiful things about the team we are putting together — Chief Investment Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, Randy, our Chief Operating Officer, and others — is that everyone has a focused role.
Chelsea is focused solely on building a state-of-the-art investment platform with her team. Whether that is direct indexing strategies, Summit models with a tax overlay, or something else, that is her focus day in and day out.
Jack Sharry: Another theme that came through loud and clear last time, Randy, was culture.
The phrase “intentional community” stood out in our earlier conversation, along with the idea that growth only works if people feel they belong and can do their best work.
How are you preserving and deepening that culture while also growing, integrating new advisors, and building a larger platform?
Randy Morris: That is the biggest challenge in a growing company like Summit: how do we preserve this unique culture and, in many ways, enhance it?
We have focused on community at Summit. We have an event coming up called our Summer Summit, which will be held in Colorado in early August. There will be over 100 of us gathering for three days.
Even the structure of Summer Summit speaks to the culture at Summit.
The first day is a celebration day. We look back over the previous year, celebrate all we have accomplished, recognize our team members, and hand out our Spirit of Summit Award.
That night, we have a shareholder dinner. We have 38 shareholders at Summit, so a large part of our group will attend that dinner.
On Wednesday, we focus on education, with breakout sessions and continuing education sessions.
On Thursday, we have an opportunity for each of us to give back. We launched a program a few years ago called Peak Impact. Peak Impact allows us to touch communities not only locally, but across the world.
Over the last couple of years, we have partnered with World Vision, an international organization that provides solutions to the most vulnerable people in the world. In this case, we have partnered with them to adopt a region in Guatemala.
We are sponsoring children, Summit is providing matching funds for employees to sponsor children in that community, and we are helping provide water resources, education through schools, medical supplies and clinics, and economic empowerment.
It gives everyone who is part of Summit a chance to have an impact that goes beyond our team members and clients and extends into the global community. In many ways, it also allows our clients to indirectly be part of that global impact.
That, to us, is part of the intentional community we have at Summit and that we want others to be part of.
Jack Sharry: That’s great.
Seamus O’Brien: Jack, can I add something to Randy’s comments?
I attended the Summer Summit last year, and this idea of intentional community is non-negotiable across Summit. It is who they are. It is who we are.
The attitude starts from the top. The gratitude and the grace start with the leadership, and it is continually fostered and built upon.
Seeing that through the transition — during a challenging time — the faith, trust, and clear communication from the leadership were the guides.
Seeing all of that in action at Summer Summit was really what sparked my mind, on the long flight home, to look seriously at the opportunity to work with Summit and help build out Summit 2.0.
Jack Sharry: Congratulations to you both. That only happens with a high degree of intention.
Randy, I know you have been leading that for a long time. Seamus, it sounds like you wound up in a great spot to help foster that further.
You are both in a great position to observe the marketplace. Randy, you have led the firm through a major strategic reinvention. Seamus, you have sat on both sides of the table, first helping RIAs from SEI’s vantage point and now building advisor success inside Summit.
When you look at the industry today, what do you think firms still misunderstand about growth? Randy, let’s start with you.
Randy Morris: I would say what firms do not always understand about growth is that it takes a lot of intentionality.
It goes back to the basics for us: the team we are pulling together, the team that already exists, and the future team members who are coming to join us. It takes a lot of work to make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction.
In a growing company, if you are not intentional about pulling people together, and we do this in many ways throughout the company and year, you can end up with silos.
You might have growth happening in various offices individually, but eventually those silos create fractures in the organization’s health.
The intentional pulling together of advisors, their teams, and our local communities is paramount to accomplishing the company’s growth objectives.
But it is more than the numbers. Healthy growth adds to the culture and the feeling of community at the company.
A lot of people do not understand the work required to intentionally bring people together. It is costly. Summer Summit will cost about $150,000, and many companies our size might not make that investment. We see it as essential to carrying forward the culture built over the years.
Jack Sharry: Seamus, what say you?
Seamus O’Brien: I think the biggest misconception about growth is that it is easy or that it just happens.
It is hard, and it takes time. It takes time to build a niche client base. It takes time to build a network, craft your story, create the processes, and be willing to take some chances and make some mistakes.
Jack, I hope you are okay with me sharing this story, but when we were preparing for this, I was thinking back to the first time we met. I was at Lockwood Advisors around 2008, and you were helping to roll out Lockwood Investment Strategies’ longevity income solutions, which was the first of its kind — a managed account product with an annuity wrapper.
It sounded like an awesome product, and then the 2008 crash came and stopped everything in its tracks.
But the willingness to take chances is the only way to really grow and evolve. Lockwood was taking chances, and you were taking chances.
There is no silver bullet for growth. What works for some may not work for others. We have to be adaptable, take calculated risks, and be willing to make mistakes.
That is the biggest misconception about growth: that it is easy and comes naturally. It does for some people, but you have to work at it and take calculated risks.
Jack Sharry: I appreciate you sharing that story because that was the only mistake I ever made in my 40-year career.
For our listening audience, we came up with an idea when I was working with an asset management and insurance company. It sounded great. It was far more complicated than any of us understood as we embarked on it.
The idea was to put a guarantee on a separately managed account and provide downside protection for the client. It was complicated, and the lawyers had fun making an exceedingly long prospectus and an almost impossible story to tell.
But as Seamus points out, sometimes you just have to take a shot and see what works. The idea was: what would clients want and need, and how might we provide it?
Thanks for reminding me of that, Seamus.
Let’s talk about what’s next for Summit.
In the earlier chapters of Summit’s story, there was a lot of discussion around independence, intentional growth, and building for the future. More recently, the public framing has included digital marketing, acquisitions, expanded services, and technology as part of the next phase.
What do the next 12 to 24 months look like?
Randy Morris: We are definitely going to have more teams join us.
There are so many teams looking for the community we have at Summit. Seamus and I are involved in multiple conversations.
We will also have more support personnel. We currently have three positions we are actively hiring for, and we are excited about bringing more people on to support our Summit 2.0 efforts.
There will also be more AI integration. That is going to show us a lot over the next 12 to 24 months in terms of how we can deliver services more efficiently and go deeper with our clients.
Jack Sharry: Seamus?
Seamus O’Brien: We are looking at new partners and continuing to grow and evolve as a business, and most importantly, as a community.
We will see some new partners. We are looking to deepen our estate planning capabilities and potentially add 401(k) and benefits solutions, which are hard to scale without the right expertise. So we are asking how we can access some of those through M&A.
We will see new leaders, new clients, and new assets.
More tactically, as Randy mentioned, we are evolving the advisor experience by reinforcing the foundation, including our data strategy, AI strategy, and readiness for what comes next, while filtering out the noise so we do not jeopardize what we have built.
There is a lot more strategically and tactically that we are putting together as we speak.
Jack Sharry: This has been a great conversation, gentlemen.
Randy, I really appreciate having a look back and a look ahead one year later. Congratulations on the success. It sounds like you are fulfilling the opportunity you saw then and are making it happen now.
Seamus, congratulations on your continued success. This has been a lot of fun catching up with you. I have always been a fan, notwithstanding your criticism of the one mistake I made.
So, a personal question as we close. You both spend a lot of time thinking about the future of Summit and wealth management. When you step back, what do you do outside of work for fun, enjoyment, and recharge?
Seamus O’Brien: My favorite place to recharge is the beach. That is an easy one.
But when I am not thinking about the future of Summit, I spend most of my time with my wife and three kids: being outside, on the sidelines of their games, watching Eagles games, Villanova games, and maybe hacking up a golf course now and then.
I have a little saying that my kids read before games, tests, or big events. I have it on my wall here:
“You are stronger than you think you are. Believe in yourself. Be confident. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. Mistakes make you better. Be better every day. Don’t be afraid to be the best.”
That is the mindset I try to instill in my family and in the people we work with. I think it translates into every aspect of our personal and professional lives, and it is fun to see my kids live that message.
Jack Sharry: That’s great. Congratulations. Randy, how about you?
Randy Morris: I noticed Seamus threw in the Villanova games. I’m sure he had to do that, especially with the Knicks and the Villanova teammates who were part of the Knicks’ success. It has been a good week for him.
For me, while Seamus enjoys the beach, I enjoy the mountains.
We are in Scottsdale part of the year, and this time of year, mid-June, is not the best time to be there. So we are up in the mountains of southwestern Colorado.
I love to hike, get outdoors, and take walks. My wife and I have a blended family with six kids and 12, almost 13, grandkids. Our life is full to the brim.
When I am not working on what we can do to help make Summit even more successful, the mountains are where I like to recharge.
Jack Sharry: Good for you.
Randy and Seamus, thank you both. This has been a fun and fascinating conversation.
What stands out is that growth is not just an ambition. It is about building the right model, the right partnerships, the right culture, and the right infrastructure to support clients and advisors over time.
For our audience, thank you for tuning in today. If you enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, and share what we are doing here at WealthTech on Deck.
We are available wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find all our episodes on our website, wealthtechondeck.com.
I really enjoyed this conversation, Randy and Seamus. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
Seamus O’Brien: Thanks, Jack.
Randy Morris: Thanks, Jack. Appreciate you.
