I've BeenEverywhere

By John H. Robinson, Founder/Financial Planner (February 2026)

Now that the dust has settled from our RIA transition, one of our long-time, 30+ year clients half-jokingly asked, “So what’s the next move after this one?” I replied, “There’s nowhere else to go.” And that answer is 100% true. As the table below succinctly illustrates, I have worked in pretty much every advisor channel.        

My Financial Planning Odyssey

Looking back, I feel like Johnny Cash in his iconic ode to wanderlust - “I’ve Been Everywhere.” In fact one of the off-the-beaten path towns he mentions is Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I got my start with A.G. Edwards & Sons. He doesn’t mention Honolulu, but if your main mode of transportation is hitchhiking, we are a tough destination to reach.

PLAY SONG:  I’VE BEEN EVERYWHERE

The Great Exodus from Wirehouses

My goal in sharing this history is less about nostalgia and more about explaining long-term trends in the financial advice business.

When I started in the late 1980s, the idealized career path—glamorized in the movie Wall Street—was to be a stockbroker at a big wirehouse brokerage firm. Those firms gave retail investors access to stocks, mutual funds, and municipal bonds. It was very much a sales culture, rather than a financial planning or advice culture.

“Financial planning” as we know it today wasn’t yet mainstream. The only CFPs I knew in the 1990s were insurance agents who earned the designation to compete with brokerage reps. As no-load mutual fund companies and discount brokerages like Vanguard, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab expanded, financial advisors had to deepen their knowledge to add value beyond product selection.

Growing price competition forced the wirehouses to cut commissions and reduce payouts. Advisors saw that product access was becoming a commodity and that their own knowledge and judgment mattered more than the name on the business card. By the late 1990s, advisors were leaving the wirehouses in droves. I left Citigroup/Smith Barney in 2003.

This exodus led to significant consolidation. When I began, there were more than 20 well-known brokerage brands. Today, many names—Paine Webber, Smith Barney, Kidder Peabody, Shearson, Dean Witter, DLJ, A.G. Edwards, adn Wachovia—exist only in ancient yellowing statements and business cards. The remaining wirehouse-style brands, such as Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America), Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and UBS, operate in a very different landscape.

The Rise of the Independent Financial Planner

The big winners from wirehouse defections were independent firms, such as JW Cole. These firms offered little consumer name recognition but provided advisors with greater autonomy, higher payouts, and the chance to build their own brands.

By the 2010s, the number of independent “hybrid” financial advisors exceeded the number of wirehouse reps. Hybrid firms typically housed both a FINRA broker-dealer and an SEC-registered RIA under one roof. This structure allowed advisors like me to keep our brokerage licenses while transitioning toward fee-based advisory and financial planning under the RIA model.

Some advisors in the independent channel focused primarily on portfolio management for a fee. Others—myself included—saw comprehensive financial planning as a way to differentiate ourselves. This philosophy shaped both Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii and aligned more closely with long-term client relationships than pure investment product sales.

Why the Hybrid RIA/Broker-Dealer Model Is Struggling

Two major developments in the 2020s pushed many advisors, including me, to rethink the hybrid RIA/broker-dealer model: Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI) and the rise of private equity in wealth management.

Reg BI, introduced by the SEC in 2020, was designed to bring brokerage standards closer to the fiduciary standard that applies to registered investment advisers (including financial planners). The intent was good, but the rule itself—more than a thousand pages long—has proven complex even for compliance professionals. For dual-registered advisors, Reg BI added layers of documentation, gray areas, and potential liability. Many decided it was easier to drop their brokerage registration and operate solely as investment adviser representatives of RIAs. Does that ring familiar?

An unintended consequence of Reg BI was a reduction in the number of FINRA-regulated broker-dealers and a steady migration of advisors from hybrid platforms to fully independent RIAs. Setting up and operating a standalone RIA is now much more feasible than it was 20 or 30 years ago, especially for experienced advisers.

At roughly the same time, private equity firms became highly active buyers of RIA businesses. RIAs appealed to private equity sponsors for two reasons: high recurring fee revenue and strong profit margins, and an aging advisor population with many owners looking for succession or an exit strategy. The typical RIA founder in their late 50s or early 60s often finds private equity packages more attractive than selling to another individual advisor, and most deals allow the founder to stay on as an employee to continue serving long-time clients.

Industry data from trade publications and custodians shows that:

• Broker-dealers, wirehouses, and hybrid firms are seeing net outflows of advisors each year.

• Independent RIAs are gaining thousands of advisors annually, many of them former hybrids.

• Advisor headcount is shrinking slightly as retirements outpace new entrants, reflecting an older advisor population overall.

Although not all of these trends are driven by private equity, it has clearly become an important part of how many advisors retire from the business.

Why I Chose a Standalone SEC RIA

In that context, my own path is neither random nor unusual.  It largely reflects the evolution of the industry itself—from commission-based product sales to asset-based and fee-only planning, and from brand-centric wirehouses to client-centric RIAs.

I often say our industry lives in a constant state of disruption and that the law of the jungle is “adapt or perish.” Over several decades, I have tried to adapt without losing sight of what is best for the people who entrust us with their life savings and financial plans.

After exploring private equity options, I concluded that selling to a PE-backed platform was not the best outcome for me or for my clients. Instead, the better long-term decision was to leave JW Cole’s hybrid broker-dealer/RIA structure and create a standalone, independent SEC-registered RIA under the Financial Planning Hawaii brand.

That move allows us to:

• Operate under a single, clear fiduciary standard.

• Eliminate the conflicts and complexity that come with a dual-registered, hybrid model.

• Have the structural flexibility and entrepreneurial freedom to adapt quickly to the AI paradigm

• Build Financial Planning Hawaii as a multigenerational family business that can serve clients and their families for decades to come.

We never know exactly what the future holds, but after 37 years across boiler rooms, wirehouses, regionals, hybrids, and RIAs, I can honestly say I really have been everywhere. Now, there truly is nowhere else I want—or need—to go.

John H. Robinson is the founder of Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii and a co-founder of retirement simulation software-maker, Nest Egg Guru.

ADDENDUM – AI is the next big trend that will require planners to “Adapt or Perish”

With each passing day it is increasingly clear that the AI revolution is in full swing and that it will be ever bit as impactful on the economy and society as the Internet.  AI represents and existential threat to many, many industries including financial planning. Financial advisors who fail to adapt will likely perish. 

As an independent RIA, Financial Planning has exactly the right structure to have the flexibility to adapt. In my opinion, AI offers remarkable opportunities to improve productivity, scale, and stand apart from competitors.  Our first baby step into the AI pool was to subscribe to JumpAI’s note taking software.  It has significantly improved productivity and streamlined the information gathering stage of the financial planning process.   I have also been using the paid version of Perplexity AI to assist with drafting articles for the FPH blog. I am also beginning to use generative AI to help produce video content for social media.

Those were the necessary baby steps.  Now we are ready to swim. I am in the process of training and AI agent on all of the financial plans I have prepared and all of the content I have published to assist in developing the findings and recommendations sections of financial planning reviews. I am also creating an agent to constantly scour the Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii websites to optimize our content for AI search.  After these agents are trained, plan to train another to serve as  a 24-7 “Mini-Me” to field  questions from visitors to our websites.  There are no plans at this time to create an avatar twin of Alicia, though there is certainly demand for her to be available 24-7 as well.