For decades, our industry competed on performance, investment process, access to products, and planning deliverables. I believe that today we compete on one thing: client experience. Our business has become so commoditized that the experience we deliver is often the only thing that separates us from the firm down the street.

The team you build is the client experience. Your people and your culture are the client experience, because it is your team who delivers it every single day. That is why we have treated culture as a core part of our strategy from the very beginning of Carnegie.

There is an irony in all the noise about AI making advisors obsolete. In my view, people are becoming more important in this business, not less. AI handles defined questions well, like how much to put in a 401(k), what the tax rules are, or what allocation fits a moderate risk tolerance, and it will keep getting better at them. But the questions that matter most to clients, like what an estate plan should look like amid difficult family dynamics, whether a spending plan holds up against a health crisis, or what to do when life does not go according to plan, require a human who can listen, read the room, and ask the next question. Meanwhile, our industry is losing people to retirement faster than it is replacing them. Qualified people are going to be at a premium, and finding the right ones, investing in them, and keeping them happy is paramount.

So “how do we keep our people?” is only part of the question. The better questions are: which people do we want, how do we make sure only those people get in, and how do we help them do their best work? It starts with selection, and it runs through three things we want every team member to feel: valued, invested, and connected.

It Starts With Who You Hire

Almost everyone who has ever hired has hired an impressive résumé that turned out to be the wrong fit. It is an expensive lesson, and an avoidable one. A strong résumé or a great track record at another firm does not make someone right for your firm or the role. The best résumé does not guarantee the best hire.

For us, everything starts with our six core values: Integrity, Accountability, Teamwork, Growth, Positive Energy, and Ownership Mindset. We did not pull those from a management book. We sat in a conference room and thought hard about our people, what separated our best from our average, and what qualities we would want if we could clone the best. Those six are the answer.

We weave those values into our interview questions, probing far more for fit than for acumen. Recently we took it a step further by partnering with Culture Index to make our hiring more analytical and data-driven. Most people know DISC or the Enneagram; Culture Index works by letting us define the personality profiles that thrive in each role, then screen for them objectively before we hire. When we opened our 2027 summer intern class, we had more than 70 résumés for four spots. Because we had defined what we were looking for up front, we could set aside about half of them immediately and focus our team’s time on the candidates who fit, before drilling down on values in the final interviews.

Culture Index informs our judgment and helps us put the right person in the right seat more efficiently. We use it with our existing team too, in coaching and career conversations. You do not want to push someone toward an advisor role that requires developing their own book if their profile tells you that will be a constant uphill fight; that is setting them up to fail, and we want to set people up to succeed.

You do not need our specific tool to do this. But you do need to define your values and the traits each role requires, and then screen for them on purpose. Get less focused on the résumé and more focused on the qualities. Get selection right consistently, and culture becomes a growth engine.

That echoes something our business strategist at LPL Financial has written: talent has become the ultimate competitive advantage, and culture functions as a growth strategy rather than a perk. The chain runs from culture to engagement to client experience to growth. While big firms invest heavily in digital and AI commoditizes everything except service and relationships, independent firms like ours can win on identity and culture. So we have been intentional about it from day one. This is how we think about the three feelings we seek to foster in every team member.

Valued

There is no getting around the fact that compensation tells people how much you value their work, and you also cannot pay above industry ranges and expect a healthy business. To balance these two truths, we benchmark every role against Cerulli data and share it, so people can see they are in the top quartile or better. It also reframes the “I want to make more” conversation: if there is only so far a role can go, the real question becomes how we move someone into a role where they can add more value, which leads to some of our best career conversations.

Beyond base salary, we instituted a firm-wide incentive plan built on two ideas: when the firm does well, everyone should benefit; and top performers should earn more than average ones. We came from a world of production overrides, which we wanted to leave behind because they rewarded a good market month rather than genuine contribution and could not tell the difference between our best and our average. So we built a plan with a funding mechanism driven by firm performance and an allocation mechanism driven by individual performance. On funding, 80% comes from profitability above a target and 20% from net new assets, so that a flat-market year in which the team worked hard to bring in assets still rewards them. Roughly 30% to 40% of profit above target flows into the bonus pool, which starts around 12% of salary and is stratified by role. On allocation, awards are driven by comprehensive, objective feedback twice a year; everyone is reviewed by the people they most closely support and stack-ranked.

The differentiator is that we publish the math. It is one thing to say we reward great performance; it is another to hand people a calculator that shows exactly how their bonus is built, with the leverage curve and role-based targets. Transparency is the part most firms skip, and it is the part that builds trust.

Benefits are the quieter, constant signal of how much we value our team members. When we left Wells, we decided no one would be downgraded on the quality of their benefits or what they paid for them. We cover 80% of medical, 70% of dental and vision, and 100% of disability, plus $250,000 of group term life on every employee, and a 401(k) with a 4% match. It is an expensive investment, and we have been told we may be too generous. We are fine with that, and it tells our people, and their families, that they matter to us.

Invested

Investing in someone’s development pays off twice: it tells them you care about their potential, and it makes them more valuable to the firm and to clients. We encourage and fund the CFP for anyone who wants it (it is a requirement to move onto the advisor track), splitting the upfront cost 50/50 and reimbursing their half when they pass, plus covering a review course. Two team members have earned it this way, with three more in progress. We fund other designations like the CEPA, CDFA, and CIMA, and cover conference CE. We also run monthly internal training led by our experienced advisors (essentially “how to be an advisor 101”), which we record and turn into AI-generated reference guides, and we are launching a parallel practice-management series for our lead advisors. Capability rises, and people feel the firm betting on them.

The clearest expression of that belief is building our own talent. We had always had interns, but we had not gone all in on an internship program with a purpose until a hiring experience forced the issue. As we built out a group of associate advisors to support our leads and prepare for eventual retirements, we kept hitting the same problem: nearly all of our applicants were men, and we care about maintaining a balanced team. Then it clicked. We had met terrific female interns over the years, and the way to build balance was to start at the intern stage, move the best fits into full-time roles, and give them a path to grow. Beyond that, an internship is simply the best selection tool there is: a ten-week look at someone’s work and fit, with a defined end and no long-term commitment. No hiring process beats a ten-week free look. That is why we have hired four interns for next summer on purpose, and we do not expect to keep all four, but we will feel very good about the two we do, because we will know them. The goal is to hire people who already know our standards, our processes, and above all our culture before they walk in the door.

Once they are in, people need to see where they can go. At Carnegie there are many paths: the financial-planning track that leads to associate and then lead advisor, and very different paths in operations, trading, administration, and marketing. Not everyone is cut out to be an advisor, and not everyone wants to be. Our job is to figure out first whether someone is an ideal team player, and then what their highest and best use is, where they will feel fulfilled and add the most value. The key, whatever the path, is that every team member has a personalized development and progression plan, clearly communicated and reviewed regularly: a roadmap with timelines and milestones so nothing is a mystery. In the absence of clarity, people invent narratives, and you lose good people simply because they did not know where they stood. Today we have three client-service associates studying for the CFP so they can move onto the planning track; for other roles the path looks different, but everyone knows where their role leads and what it takes to advance.

And our most valuable people know that ownership is on the table. There are three ways to become an owner at Carnegie: advisors can contribute their books and become equity partners; non-advisor team members can earn phantom equity tied to their role and performance; and for a select few, that phantom equity can convert to real equity over time as legacy partners retire. More than the mechanics, though, ownership is a mindset (it is one of our core values), and we want people thinking like owners long before they become one. As with comp, we do not make equity a mystery. We explain exactly how it works, which makes the opportunity more meaningful.

Connected

We build connection five ways: trust, flexibility, recognition, belonging, and a higher purpose.

It starts with trust and flexibility, which is why we offer unlimited PTO. The idea is simple: we hire professionals and we trust them. We trust our people to be reasonable, get their work done, communicate, take care of clients, and never leave a teammate or an advisor in a bad spot. We had our doubts, but our fears have not materialized; it has worked well, and the team values it, especially in the years when someone gets married or takes a big trip. We also run rotating work-from-home Fridays. Ours is very much an in-office culture, which we think matters for camaraderie and learning, so we struck a balance by letting two people work from home each Friday on a rotating basis. Everyone gets a turn every five or six weeks, and we are never short more than a couple of people. And anyone can work from home when there is a good reason like a sick child or waiting for an appointment at home.

Recognition is the most underused retention tool there is, and it is nearly free. Our most important practice here came from a team member’s suggestion: an Employee of the Quarter program. The whole team votes, and we recognize the winner at a weekly team meeting, reading aloud the kind things people wrote and giving a gift card. Small, consistent gestures are what people remember.

Belonging we build in many ways. We open each year with an all-day, off-site firm retreat where we celebrate the prior year, set priorities, and break into small groups to brainstorm process improvements. Since our earliest days we have held a Monday team lunch; most of it is just people connecting, and then we share firm financials and progress on the incentive plan and celebrate new-business wins. It has become the anchor of everyone’s week. We also hold a monthly advisor meeting for discussion and feedback (another team suggestion), monthly happy hours kept deliberately easy and low-pressure, and a couple of bigger team-building events a year: whitewater rafting, a game-show battle, escape rooms, office Olympics, even a family barbecue at my house. This year I also started having a one-on-one lunch with every team member twice a year. I have learned that if I do not put it on the calendar, it will not happen, so I have these lunches calendared for the whole year. It has become something I look forward to. Belonging even starts before day one, when new hires receive a box of branded Carnegie gear to welcome them to the family.

Finally, we connect people to a purpose beyond revenue by giving back. We make giving back to our community a fundamental characteristic of our firm, giving more than $200,000 to local non-profits last year, and we invite team members to nominate organizations that they think are worthy of support. We also run two firm-wide service days a year; this year the whole team packed food at our local pantry, NourishUp, and this fall we are building a home with Habitat for Humanity, something we have done several times. A mission beyond revenue is exactly what top talent is looking for.

Does It Work?

I would measure it two ways. First, we have had zero voluntary departures since we founded the firm. Our team is happy and productive, and when great people stay, relationships deepen, knowledge compounds, and the firm’s reputation does the recruiting for you. Stability is an asset that compounds over time. We all know how expensive the alternative is: a wrong hire or a good person leaving can cost six figures and years to rebuild.

Second, growth. We have gone from $1 billion to $2.5 billion in three years, and revenue from $6 million to $15 million, with almost no client turnover. We brought in $426 million of net new assets in 2025, not counting recruiting, and we are on pace to add another $150 million organically in 2026. That is the flywheel: culture drives engagement, engagement drives a great client experience, and client experience drives growth.

Where to Start

The encouraging part is that most of this does not cost much. Some of it is free and immediate: a standing team lunch, a recognition habit, a team event, regular one-on-ones. Some of it takes time but little money: documenting your values, defining the ideal team member for each role and hiring to it, writing a development plan for each person, holding an off-site to align the team (our first ones were in my partner’s basement). And some of it is a real investment worth making: transparent incentive comp, funding professional development, an intern for next summer, a genuine path to equity.

You do not have to out-spend anyone. You have to be intentional. Decide, on purpose, to be a firm where people want to build their careers, and you will never regret it, because in the process of building their careers, they will build your business into something better than it could ever have been otherwise. A firm that hires the right people with intention, and makes them feel valued, invested, and connected, is a firm that becomes the best version of itself.