Executive Summary
Over the past few years, the advisory industry has become increasingly focused on what it takes to grow and scale an advisory firm. From whether it's necessary to merge into a larger firm to gain economies of scale (or not), to the best ways to drive growth (organically or inorganically), to optimal team support structures and the emerging role of what AI will (or will not) automate, the reality is that scaling up a business is challenging and takes very real investments into systems, process, and infrastructure to make it happen.
Here at Kitces.com, we've been making similar reinvestments into both growth and infrastructure to scale our own reach and impact in our mission to Make Financial Advicers Better and More Successful. In 2025, we completely rebuilt the Members Section in a new standalone React app (which will allow us to better customize and scale going forward), and in 2026 we'll be not only building on that foundation with new Members Section capabilities (including rolling out a highly-requested "CE Center" to centralize all of your CE reporting status and CE completion certificates), but we'll also be engaging in a full re-design and 'facelift' of the front end of the Nerd's Eye View to modernize the look and experience of our content.
Along the way, we'll continue to offer our full line-up of live virtual events, including our two practice management Summits (on Marketing and Financial Planning Value), our two CE Intensives which are already open for 2026 registration (one on Tax and the other on Ethics/Compliance, to fulfill all your IAR CE obligations, along with getting CE credit for CFP and other designations), and our twice-monthly webinars. While we also continue to expand our Directors of Financial Planning (DFP) community and their once-per-month community events for networking with other DFPs on best practices to manage financial planning within growing advisory firms!
We also have a few new content offerings launching or going into pilot phase in 2026, including a new Advisor Services Map (to complement our existing AdvisorTech Map), a "Level Up" training program that will allow newer advisors to go through bi-weekly Client Case Studies with a live instructor to learn how to really do financial planning with real-world client scenarios, and a new CE-eligible podcast (that we're tentatively titling "Financial Advisor Technician") for advicers who would rather consume our Wednesday technical articles by listening to an audio interview with the expert instead of reading the content (and then still be able to take the CE quiz for continuing education credit).
In the meantime, our own Team of Nerds continues to expand. We recently hired several new team members, including Senior Technical Editor Zach Bennedsen, Director of Live Events and Community Lisa Allen, and Research Associate Jaweriah Hazrana! If you’re wondering how you can get more involved with the Kitces team, you can also sign up for our separate Career Opportunities mailing list (via our Career Opportunities page) to be notified when new positions open up, including upcoming openings we anticipate later in 2026, including a new Director of Member Success, Director of Sales & Marketing, and a Director of People Operations!
And for those who don’t want to join the team full-time but would simply like to 'Nerd Out' with us for a bit and share what they do or know with their fellow advicers, remember to check out our "How To Contribute" page to see how you can engage with the Kitces platform as a guest writer, presenter, or podcast guest!
Throughout it all, though, we remain focused on advancing our core mission – to "Make Financial Advicers Better, And More Successful" – through our four strategic pillars of supporting 'Nnovation of AdvisorTech tools, delivering insightful Education, conducting original advicer Research, and facilitating the Development of financial advicer skills across the spectrum of experience and firm sizes (and yes… our organizational strategy does spell N-E-R-D ☺ ). We look forward to continuing the journey with you in 2026 and beyond!
Full 2026 Events Calendar For Kitces: CE Intensives, Summits, Webinars, And Expanding DFP Community!
Over the past several years, a significant part of our growth at Kitces has been a shift from what historically was a platform of solely 'on-demand' CE content (articles and recorded webinars that advicers could access whenever they wished), into a growing number of 'live' real-time virtual events. Because as we heard from all of you, our Members, it's nice to have all the content available on demand, but sometimes things that are always available turn out to be the things we can never find time for. While, ironically, live programs only available once at a particular time and date can actually be easier to schedule onto our own calendars!
Calendar Of 2026 Live Virtual Events
After expanding our live events offerings for the past few years, we're now entering a new 'steady state' of our committed lineup of virtual programs, which includes:
- Two Practice Management Summits (one on Marketing, one on Value)
- Two CE Intensives (one on Tax/Retirement, one on Ethics/Compliance)
- Semi-monthly (two per month) webinars on various CE topics
Which collectively are meant to provide enough CE credits to fulfill annual CE obligations for most major advisor designations and licenses. (These are made available in addition to the on-demand CE quizzes we still provide for our on-demand written articles and recorded webinars!)
To help keep track of it all, the Kitces Team has created a new Master Calendar of Kitces Live Events where you can see the dates, and as registration opens, you can outright register for any/all of the full lineup of Kitces programs for the year. (Though notably, details of speakers and agendas will typically only be announced approximately 2-3 months before each event.)
So now is your opportunity to "Save The Date" for your programs of interest! Or just outright register now, if you prefer, through our Live Events calendar, or the specific Program page for each of the upcoming events! In fact, advance Registration for our CE Intensives (Tax and Ethics) is already open now!
Our new Master Calendar of Kitces Live Events shows the dates for all of our webinars, practice management Summits, and CE Intensives for the full year of 2026. And, our two CE Intensives – one on Ethics, including CFP and IAR Ethics, and a second on taxes – are now open for registration!
Expanding Our DFP Community
In addition to our standalone live events noted above, we continue to host our Directors of Financial Planning (DFP) Community, which has its own live (virtual) gatherings for 1 hour every month on topics of interest that are surfaced by the community itself (in recent months, including everything from incorporating tax preparation into your advisory firm to crafting annual service calendars).
The DFP community is specifically for people with the Director of Finanical Planning (or substantively similar) position and title, who are typically responsible for implementing a firm-wide financial planning process and client experience, selecting the firm's financial planning technology, training new advisors and being an expert resource to existing/experienced advisors, and typically managing a centralized team of paraplanners and associate advisors.
This unique 'middle management' position typically emerges in advisory firms once they exceed $3M of revenue, and face unique challenges from getting leadership resources to showing their return-on-investment as an 'expense' while building and scaling centralized departments within growing firms.
So last year, we piloted and then fully launched a community to support the unique role of DFPs, with dedicated private forums and regular virtual gatherings to help DFPs compare notes and share best practices with one another.
And in 2026, we remain committed to continuing to support and grow the DFP community, as a way to advance financial planning within mid-to-large-sized advisory firms. The community is now open for general registration (with an application and review process just to ensure that everyone really is in a DFP-or-similar position to keep the community focused), and a nominal cost only to help us cover the setup and facilitation of the community.
Our new Directors of Financial Planning (DFP) Community remains open for sign-ups… but only for those in a DFP (or substantively similar) role who are responsible for firm-wide financial planning decisions at the leadership level, and in search of best-practices conversations with peers about how to do it! If you're a DFP, register here to join nearly 200 other DFPs and become part of the community!
Kitces Members Section 2.0 And Redesigning The Nerd's Eye View Blog
Starting last year, we began an ambitious 2-year cycle to completely rebuild the technology foundation of Kitces.com to support our next stage of growth, as we crossed 20,000 (and now crossing 25,000) advicers in our paid Members Section. Our primary focus in our technology rebuild is to create a more scalable infrastructure internally, and a better experience for Readers and Members (or at least a foundation on which we can build better experiences as we iterate over time).
Members Section 2.0 Enhancements
In 2025, our technology infrastructure project meant executing a full from-the-ground-up rebuild of our Members Section area, moving away from what originally was a series of plug-ins built off the back end of WordPress (which often had limited customization and weren't necessarily built for our size and scale), into a standalone React application that our Kitces team developers can build and customize to the exact needs of our Members (with infrastructure that scales to our volume without having site performance issues).
Rebuilding our Members Section in React allowed us to not only completely redesign the Members Section dashboard itself, but also gave us the means to rebuild our CE Programs catalogue with more filters (by CE-type, content topic, and learning format) to make it easier to find the CE content you want, streamline access to our webinars and CE quizzes, and roll out new tools for Group and Enterprise administrators to manage all the advisors across their advisory firm using Kitces.
In 2026, we'll continue expanding the capabilities of the new Members Section into what we're calling "Members Section 2.0", with a particular focus on making it easier to manage and know the status of all of your CE credits earned through Kitces. The coming "CE Center" will provide one central place to see all the programs you've attended/completed, the real-time status of their reporting to the various CE organizations, downloadable CE certificates for completed programs to support self-reporting, and an expedited process to request support from our Member Services team if there's a reporting issue.
In 2026, the Kitces Team is creating a new "CE Center" in the Members Section, providing one centralized location to see all the Kitces programs you have attended/completed, the real-time status of your reporting to the various CE organizations, and downloadable CE certificates for completed programs to support self-reporting!
We'll also be migrating to a new Learning Management System (Docebo) for our Training Courses, which should be more user-friendly for Members, allowing our team more ways to customize how the content is delivered, to fit the preferences of Members to consume on desktop or mobile, via video or transcripts, etc. And a new unified shopping cart experience will make it easier to bundle together your Kitces purchases for discounts, and simplify and expedite what we realize is still a sometimes-cumbersome checkout process!
As we roll out the new Members Section, you'll also see a small increase in dues to $199/year to reflect the value we expect these improvements to deliver. Along the way, you may also be prompted within the new Members Section to provide us feedback. We hope you will leave us feedback (good or bad!), as we really do read and review all the Member feedback, Reader Surveys, and Article Ratings that come in, and use it to help roadmap and design which Members Section and blog improvements we'll be working on next (every month, throughout 2026!).
Redesigning The Nerd's Eye View Blog
Notwithstanding our ongoing Members Section 2.0 improvements, though, the big technology project for Kitces in 2026 is not simply to continue reinvesting into enhancing our Members Section capabilities... it's to redesign this Nerd's Eye View blog itself!
As the reality is that the current website theme was first built in 2015... and what at the time was a design we were incredibly proud of for its 'sleek and modern' look, now admittedly feels very dated. So in 2026, we'll be doing a substantive "facelift" of the entire visual design of Nerd's Eye View!
Notably, our blog re-design project has is no intention to change the content itself, which will continue as it has always been. Instead, we'll be changing the design elements - from updating fonts and font sizes, to the colors and navigation - to be more consistent with modern design standards. In practice, we hope this simply makes it a little easier to read and navigate the Nerd's Eye View content you already engage with!
New Content Offerings From Kitces: Advisor Services Map, "Level Up" Case Studies Training, And A CE-Eligible Podcast Pilot
While the core of our Nerd's Eye View editorial calendar and our Live Events programs has now been set, it doesn't mean we're 'done' and not still innovating new ways to help move the financial advicer community forward through our content! As a result, we do still have a few new Content Offerings up our sleeve for 2026!
Advisor Services Map
First up for 2026, we're excited to announce a new Advisor Services Map, which has just gone live.
Built in the spirit of our popular Kitces AdvisorTech Map – which catalogues all the available technology vendors for financial advisors across a wide range of categories – Kitces team member Ben Henry-Moreland (who also spearheads the AdvisorTech Map) has developed a new Advisor Services Map to do the same for all the B2B service providers and outsourcing solutions for financial advisors.
At launch, the Advisor Services Map already has nearly 300 providers across categories from marketing and business development, to financial planning and investment management and operations support, compliance and legal, and a large number of coaches and consultants focused on helping financial advisors.
Going forward, the Advisor Services Map will be updated monthly (similar to the AdvisorTech Map). Advisors who know a service provider that should be added to the list (or service providers who want to be considered) can submit their information for the Services Map here!
"Level Up" Case Studies Training
Over the past five years, we have built a series of Training Courses, intended primarily for newer financial advisors in their first few years, where often they've obtained some "book knowledge" (from completing their CFP educational requirements), but have very limited experience in applying the knowledge with 'real-world' clients.
To that end, our Training Courses were intended to provide a practice environment to gain more of that 'real-world' experience, where advisors could navigate through realistic client scenarios and learn how the knowledge is applied. Accordingly, our Training Courses don't teach Tax Planning or Estate Planning; they teach "How To Review A Client's Tax Return" or "How To Review A Client's Estate Documents", or "Facilitate A (More) Effective Discovery Meeting" or "Deliver A (More) Productive Plan Presentation Meeting".
In our ongoing efforts to gather feedback, though, what we've heard from the advicer community is a desire for even more case-study-based approaches to learning how to really do financial planning. Recognizing that most of us experienced advisors learned that way as well... either by simply doing it with clients one case at a time (and learning through the school of hard knocks), or by sitting alongside a more senior advisor and being taught working alongside them on each client case (or at least trying to learn by osmosis, for those who may have been skilled advisors but not the best teachers).
To that end, in 2026, we're going to take a renewed focus on how to even more deeply weave Case Studies into our Training programs.
Starting with a revamp to our most popular Training Course (on Reviewing Tax Returns), which will not only be updated for recent OBBBA tax law changes, but be rebuilt even more directly around client-realistic Case Studies.
In addition, in the second half of 2026, we'll be piloting a new "Level Up" training program for financial advisors, which will give opportunities to review real client case studies, live with an experienced advisor instructor, in a group learning format that allows newer advisors to compare notes with others on what they would recommend, hear how other peer advisors might have approached the situation, and get input from experts on the planning opportunities they identified (and how they'd deliver the recommendations to clients).
At this point, we're anticipating the pilot program for this "Level Up" Case Studies Training will have two 90-minutes sessions per month (at a pre-scheduled set time and day of the week, so advisors can plan their calendars around it), which will allow time to review the case, ideate planning strategies and compare with others, and get instructor feedback… without requiring much of any prep time outside of attending the scheduled 90-minute sessions bi-weekly themselves.
In addition, the "Level Up" pilot program will also have dedicated community forums, for those who want to delve further into that week's Case Studies (in advance or after the training session).
In the second half of 2026, we'll be piloting a new "Level Up" training program for financial advisors, which will give opportunities to review real client case studies, live with an experienced advisor instructor, in a group learning format that allows advisors to compare notes with peers, and get input from experts on how they'd deliver the recommendations to clients. For advisors in their first five years of experience, stay tuned for more details in the coming months!
We anticipate the "Level Up" program will be most appealing to advisors in their first five years of experience (though more experienced advisors who want to brush up are welcome, too!), who have completed most or all of the CFP educational curriculum but lack (and crave) more case study experience on how to apply financial planning in real-world scenarios.
And in the process, we hope to alleviate the pressure on senior advisors and advisory firm founders, who often find themselves in the position of 'teaching' based on their own client cases... which for many, is a time and capacity struggle on top of their actual duties of serving clients. Accordingly, we hope this new "Level Up" Training Program is a relief both for newer advisors looking to learn, and senior advisors who are struggling to find the time to do the training themselves! Stay tuned for more details later this year!
CE-Eligible Podcast Pilot
Every year, Kitces.com conducts both a Reader survey and a Member survey to gather feedback on what we should be building next for the advicer community.
And one of the most popular requests for the past two years has been for Kitces to develop some kind of CE-eligible podcast, for those who don't necessarily want to read the entire long-form Wednesday articles for CE credit, but value the depth and learning opportunities from Kitces content. (Recognizing that for the past decade, all of our podcasts – Financial Advisor Success, and Kitces & Carl – have been practice-management related!)
As a result, later this year we will be piloting a new CE-Eligible Podcast, which for the time being we've dubbed "Financial Advisor Technician" (to highlight how it's intended to focus on not technology but what advisor technicians need to learn to deliver better advice).
At this point, our plan for Financial Advisor Technician will be a 25–30-minute weekly podcast that features the content that's in our Wednesday articles... but rather than simply audio-narrating the written content itself, we'll be hosting interviews with the expert authors about the topic. For those who have already read the content and want more depth, this will provide a way to further expand the learning journey. And for those who prefer to hear it rather than read it, they'll have an alternative way to engage with our Wednesday technical topics without needing to read the full article.
Accordingly, this means the CE Quizzes that we already create to offer CE credit for our Wednesday article content will also be available to Members who consume our new Wednesday podcast. So Members will either be able to read the article and take the quiz, or listen to the podcast and take the quiz (and maybe skim the article to brush up on technical questions that we didn't have room to cover in full on the podcast). Notably, though, because it's the same CE quiz, Members will not be able to 'double dip' and earn two CE credits for the same Wednesday content at this point.
As is the case for most new Kitces programs, we'll be launching this as a pilot for a few months this year, and based on your Reader and Member feedback and the engagement data, we'll make a determination about whether this is a continuing program.
Though given how strong engagement continues to be with our FAS and K&C podcasts, and how popular this has been as a request in our feedback surveys, we are hopeful and optimistic that the Financial Advisor Technician podcast will become a new staple of Kitces content!
Ongoing Growth Of Kitces And Its Team Of Nerds (Not AI)
While 2025 and 2026 have been years of major investments into our technology foundation here at Kitces.com, the reality is that as a provider of professional development for financial advisors, our business is driven first and foremost by our team of people (by our team of Nerds!).
Because the reality is that none of our content is AI-generated, and won't be in any foreseeable future. Our expectation is that just as someone needs to create educational content to train financial advisors (as we do), someone needs to create the content to train the AI tools as well. And so we remain as committed as ever to keep investing into human talent to craft and deliver the content that helps to make financial advisors (and AI tools!?) better and more successful.
Consequently, we continue to reinvest into our Team of Nerds, and since our last State of the Blog update, we have welcomed several new team additions, including Senior Technical Editor Zach Bennedsen (who is taking over for the retiring Erica Mito), Director of Live Events and Community Lisa Allen, and Research Associate Jaweriah Hazrana.
In addition, we're continuing to hire, and anticipate a few new positions we'll likely be hiring for later this year, including a new Director of Member Success (to work alongside the great Stacey Garber who is currently the face of our Member Services team, and Paula Frey our Engagements Manager who works with all of our large Groups, Enterprises, and other Partners!), a new Director of Sales and Marketing (as we continue to expand the reach of who we serve at Kitces!), and a new Director of People Operations (to support the ongoing expansion of our team and the systems and processes it needs to run efficiently!).
As our team continues to expand, future openings will be posted to our Kitces Career Opportunities page, and those who want to stay apprised of future openings with the Kitces Team can sign up for the Kitces Careers mailing list to be notified as each new role opens up, too!
All in continued pursuit of our mission at Kitces.com – to Make Financial Advicers Better, and More Successful, through our N-E-R-D-y organizational strategy: supporting 'Nnovation of solutions for advisors, delivering Educational Insights, conducting Research on Advicers, and supporting the Development of Advicer skills.
And notably, while we remain as committed as ever to creating our style of Quality, Nerdy, and Relevant content for the financial advicer community with our team of nerds, there are also plenty of opportunities for Advisors themselves to get involved or become contributors. So if you have some expertise or a best practice you'd like to share through the Kitces platform, you can do so as a writer, a guest who shares your story via our podcast or provides a demonstration of your best practices in one of our Summits, or by developing a formal presentation to be a paid speaker on one of our webinars or CE Intensives! We encourage advicers to take a chance and submit their prospective contribution if any of our opportunities sound like a good fit (click here for the details on how, for each of our various contributor options, you can get started now!) – after all, we only grow as an advicer community by sharing our insights and solutions with others! (But it's totally OK to simply keep reading/listening/following the content journey with us!)
If there's anything else you think we should be working on that we've missed, please share your thoughts in the comments below!
