Currently at $12 million, I started my business a year ago this month with zero dollars; my first-year goal was $9 million and my three-year target is $30 million, at which point I will likely stop taking new clients. I want to run a boutique practice where every client gets the proper amount of attention and personalized service. Over my 30 years of experience I’ve seen advisors with more than 100 clients neglect their clientele, fail to provide meaningful planning, and still charge fees above 1%, which I believe is unfair to the client.

Why? – Only 7% of large-cap active managers have outperformed their passive peers (index funds) over the past decade. Likewise, just 7.3% of the stocks in the Russell 3000 drove the majority of the index’s return. Put another way, if I were to actively select the “right” investment manager, I would have only about a 7% chance of being correct and a 93% chance of being wrong and underperforming the market. The same challenge applies to stock-picking: the odds of identifying the roughly 7.3% of stocks that will drive most of the return are low. That is why using indexes often works better — because we cannot reliably know in advance which managers or stocks will outperform, holding the index gives us the diversified benefit of exposure to all of them.