The first quarter of 2025 brought a significant amount of turmoil for most financial advisory firms, as markets responded with high volatility to newly proposed tariffs – and advisors saw the challenging reality that in volatile markets, revenue dips while service demands from clients rise, as we're called (figuratively or literally) to help clients stay the course through turbulent times. Yet in recent months, the volatility has subsided, markets have rallied back near their highs, and advisory firms are back to dealing with the increasingly common challenge of how to continue to scale service in the face of growth as clients continue to accrue over time.
In recent years, the growth of Kitces.com has resulted in similar capacity constraints as our Members Section has grown by more than 20X since 2015, leading, in turn, to rapid growth of the team (from 2 to 25 team members since 2015), and ongoing reinvestments into technology. Which led us at the beginning of 2025 to announce a major new initiative for the year: to completely rebuild and replace our existing Members Section, which has struggled to keep pace with the growth of our Membership and the expanded breadth of our educational offerings to Members.
And now as we come to the middle of the year, we're excited to announce a first-look opportunity to check out our new Members Section. The new design and main navigation is in place, and the team has already solved for some of the most common problems (from a pathway to join Kitces webinars live via our new dashboard – without needing to search through your email to find the link – to a new Group Administrator dashboard for larger firms that need to manage the subscription of multiple members using Kitces), with a long list of more Members Section enhancements to come in the second half of the year (from a new Learning Center to manage all of your CE completions and certificates, to a new CE catalog interface to make it easier to filter for the kind of content you're looking for and navigate to it more expediently). Those who want to check it out (and leave us feedback on what you like and where we still need to improve!) simply need to click the "Experience What's New" button in the upper left corner of the current Members Section!
As we enter the midyear mark, the new Members Section isn't the only thing we spent the first half of the year building. We've also wrapped up the pilot for our new Directors of Financial Planning (DFP) Community, which is now open to any and all DFPs who want to join what is already a community of nearly 100 DFPs to share and collaborate on best practices in building and growing a centralized financial planning team and/or leading their firms' financial planning decisions (from what the 'right' client deliverables should be, to the best technology to select for a good client experience). As we also continue to expand our library of Kitces Training Courses (the new name for our MasterClasses, reflecting their intended focus to support Paraplanners and Associate Advisors) with a newly launched course on how to conduct a great Discovery Meeting with a new client, to be followed later this year by another on how to deliver a Financial Plan Presentation meeting.
As we enter midyear, registration is now open for our annual IAR Ethics CE Day taking place on Thursday, August 28th. We've also announced a Save-The-Date for a second IAR CE Intensive Day later this year – on Thursday, October 30th, we'll host an "IAR P&P CE Day" (covering the Products & Practice portion of the IAR CE requirement), with a particular focus on advanced tax and retirement planning. Which will now allow advicers to complete their full IAR CE obligation from our two CE Intensives, for those who would rather get their content through a live event than consume it incrementally through blog articles and webinars throughout the year. And yes, our IAR CE Intensives will still cross-apply CE credit for all other eligible CE types, including CFP, CPA, all the designations from IWI, College for Financial Planning, the American College, and more!
In the meantime, our own Team of Nerds continues to expand. We recently hired several new team members, including Managing Editor Robert Long and Research Associate Karl VonZabern! 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! 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 AdviorTech 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 2025 and beyond!
