With another strong year in the markets, most advisory firms are near or at record highs for their revenue, their numbers of clients, and the headcounts of their teams. Which is surprising to some, given that a decade ago, the emergence of so-called "robo-advisors" was supposed to displace human financial advisors and compress advisory fees. In reality, though, the robos struggled to gain traction, and the human financial advice business just continues to grow. To the point that now, ironically, the biggest emerging challenges for the profession are how best to leverage technology to further scale financial advice, and even with tech efficiencies, we may have an outright talent shortage as more and more advisory firms hit their client capacity wall and need to hire new advisor talent.

In a similar manner, the growth of Kitces.com over the past decade has led to capacity constraints, the need for an expanding team (which has already grown from 2 to 24 team members in under a decade!), and reinvestments into technology. And so we're excited to announce that, for 2025, our major company initiative will be a complete redesign and rebuild of our Members Section! Feedback from our Members has been clear that the navigation and user experience of our Members Section is one of the most challenging aspects of being a Member, and we fully recognize that the technology we use to power the Members Section, which was once cutting-edge, is now quite dated. Which means over the next 12 months, we're going to rebuild it all from scratch, with a modern technology foundation that will allow us to better scale over the next decade. (And also make it easier for us to redesign the Nerd's Eye View blog side of the website as well, in 2026!)

In addition to rebuilding the platform that runs Kitces.com, we're also making several updates to our content offerings for both Nerd's Eye View blog Readers and advicers who have joined our Members Section. After several years, we've decided to wind down our current Office Hours programs (Software Showcases and Advisor Makeovers), though the archives of our prior events will remain available to Members. However, this shift will free up time for us to focus on initiatives that we believe can have even more reach and impact!

Building on the back of our popular Advisor Technology Map and Directory, in 2025, we'll also be developing a new Advisor Services Map to make it easier to find whatever consultants, coaches, outsourcing partners, or other solutions advicers may be seeking (and like our AdvisorTech Map, will be openly available to the entire advicer community). We've also rolled out a new private community specifically for Directors of Financial Planning (DFPs), who are increasingly becoming the lynchpins that drive planning excellence in advisory firms… which is so in alignment with our own Kitces mission that we wanted to start hosting a community for DFPs to further foster their success! And we continue to expand the types of CE we provide as well, including the ability for Canadian CFP certificants to earn CE credit from Kitces (effective immediately for 2025!), and we're aiming to offer CE for Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF) designees by the second half of the year!

We're also further expanding our more 'deep-dive' educational programs. In the second half of 2024, we launched two new 6-hour MasterClasses – one on Optimizing Roth Conversions, and the other on Optimizing Tax-Efficient Withdrawals From Retirement Portfolios – and in 2025, we'll be developing new MasterClasses on best practices in how to conduct a Discovery Meeting and a Plan Presentation Meeting with clients (launching in mid-year and Q4, respectively). We're also bringing back our popular IAR Ethics CE Day; save the date for Thursday, August 28th, to get all 6 hours of IAR Ethics CE (and cross-qualify the 6 hours for every other type of CE, too!) in one fell swoop, and registration is already open now! And based on your requests, in 2025, we'll be offering a second "CE Intensive" Day, sometime in Q3, to cover the other 6 hours of required IAR CE (on "Products & Practice") in a one-day virtual live event format (and again, cross-applying for other CE types as well). As always, though, we remain committed to providing IAR CE (and all our other types of CE!) for all of our Kitces article and webinar content as well; these CE Intensives are simply meant for those who would prefer to 'binge' the content all at once in single-day live experiences!

In the meantime, our own Team of Nerds continues to expand. We are currently hiring for a Research Associate to support the ongoing growth of our Advisor Productivity, Marketing, Technology, and Wellbeing studies (so please forward along to anyone you know who might be interested!). And we recently hired several new team members as well, including Managing Editor Shannen Patel (as former Managing Editor Sydney Squires transitions to become a Senior Financial Planning Nerd writer for Kitces) and Manager of People & Culture Dora Ogar!

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!

And all of this remains 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!

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After several turbulent years in both markets and workforces, 2024 appears to be the 'most normal' year of late, with strong market performance, cooling (or at least no longer rising!?) interest rates, and relatively little new tax legislation (yet).

Yet the need for advisor education – and the regulatory requirements to get it (in the form of Continuing Education obligations) – never ends, with the latest focus for most financial advisors being on the ongoing expansion of NASAA's 2020 Model Rule that implemented the first Investment Advisor Representative (IAR) requirements to get 12 hours of Continuing Education (CE), including 6 hours of Products & Practices and 6 hours of Ethics & Personal Responsibility, in order to maintain their IAR registration. This new model rule is enacted on a state-by-state basis and has currently been picked up by 18 states… though, because it applies not only to IARs physically located within those states but to anyone who is required to register as an IAR in one of those states, in reality, the new IAR CE obligation is quite far-reaching (especially with California and Florida IAR CE requirements taking effect this year!).

Given the continuing growth of advicers who fall under these new IAR CE Requirements, the Kitces platform is not only continuing to offer IAR CE (along with all of its other CE types) through its Nerd's Eye View blog articles, but, starting this year, has also expanded IAR CE eligibility to our webinars as well. And to meet the growing demand for the required "Ethics & Professional Responsibility" content in particular, we're also excited to announce the return of our IAR Ethics CE on August 29, 2024! Attending IAR Ethics CE Day allows advicers to fulfill all 6 hours of their required IAR Ethics & Personal Responsibility CE obligations in just 1 day, preventing an end-of-year CE crunch and providing high-quality education from top experts in the field of ethics and compliance (while also satisfying their CFP Ethics and IWI Ethics requirements, too!).

In addition to IAR Ethics CE Day, the ongoing growth of our Kitces Education team has allowed us to offer more frequent live CE webinars (now running the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month at 3:00 PM EST), and next month, we'll be rolling out our newest Kitces Course, a master class taught by our own Jeff Levine and Michael Kitces on "Optimizing Tax-Efficient Roth Conversion Strategies And Implementation", which will let advisors practice the skill of determining the 'right' amount to Roth convert, identify which clients should do Roth conversions and when, and also explore ways to explain the strategic components of Roth conversions to clients (who may otherwise resist the upfront tax liability, notwithstanding the long-term tax benefit!). Additionally, the upcoming Kitces Value Summit, coming December 12, 2024, will tackle how real advisors provide and communicate their ongoing value to their clients.

Along with the expanded CE offerings, we've also been reinvesting heavily into making the Kitces platform easier to use. Our major focus this year has been on supporting the growing number of multi-advisor firms buying Group and Enterprise subscriptions… and then needing to manage all of their Kitces Group members! Going forward, our new Group and Enterprise dashboards will make it far easier for firms administering their Kitces membership to add and remove individual advisors and to enroll their advisors into IAR CE (as more states add the requirement) with just a few clicks of a button! (And yes, in the coming year, we will be looking at a broader overhaul and re-design of the entire Kitces Members Section for all advicers to make it easier to navigate – we've heard your feedback!😊)

Of course, CE is not the only part of the advisory landscape that's changed. Our newly released Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing shows that fewer advisors are reporting client referrals as a methodology to attract new prospects (and the growthiest firms are relying on referrals the least!), but that there is no one dominant marketing tactic taking its place. Instead, the firms that are the most successful at marketing don't appear to be engaging in materially different tactics than the rest; they simply have more clarity of the ideal client they're pursuing, and how to communicate with them, such that they're executing the same marketing tactics but getting much better results (which, in turn, leads them to invest time and dollars into their marketing efforts and further compound their growth lead!).

In the meantime, if you (or anyone else you know) wants to join our Team of Nerds, stay tuned for more openings in 2024, including the Managing Editor role (available now!), an Operations Coordinator (coming soon!), and other roles. We'll be listing these roles as they become available on our Kitces Career Opportunities page, or you can sign up for our separate Career Opportunities mailing list (via that 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 or 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!

Ultimately, though, the focus remains the same as it always has been – on our mission to "Make Financial Advicers Better, And More Successful" – through our 4 strategic pillars of creating Navigational resources, insightful Education, original Research, and skills Development for financial advicers across the spectrum of experience and firm sizes (and yes… or organizational strategy does spell N-E-R-D😊). We look forward to continuing the journey with you through the rest of 2024!

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