There are roughly 2,800 registered investment advisor firms in the United States that have crossed $100M in AUM while reporting five or fewer employees on Form ADV. Some of these are family offices serving a handful of related households. Most are individual practitioners (or small founder-led teams) who built a focused book and stayed disciplined about scale.
The live filtered view is at /insights/solo-high-aum. This article walks through the numbers that define this group — AUM per advisor, clients per advisor, revenue per employee, fee structures — and what those benchmarks imply for a solo practitioner trying to reach the same scale.
The shape of a $100M solo practice
Across the filtered population, the median solo-or-near-solo practice in this AUM band has roughly these characteristics on Form ADV:
- AUM: $180–$280M (the band runs from $100M to about $500M before the firm typically adds enough staff to leave the "solo" definition)
- Employees: 2–4 (one principal advisor, one operations or paraplanner, occasionally a second advisor)
- Investment adviser representatives: 1–2
- Client count: 60–200 households
- Average client AUM: $1.0M–$3.5M
- Compensation model: fee-only or fee-based with minimal commissions
- Custodian: predominantly Schwab, Fidelity, or Altruist for the post-2020 cohort
That's the median. The distribution is wide. At the bottom edge of the band, you'll find solo advisors serving 250 mass-affluent clients at $400K average accounts. At the top edge, you'll find advisors serving 40 ultra-high-net-worth families at $5M+ averages.
AUM per advisor: the productivity number
AUM per investment adviser representative is the single best productivity number for this segment. It captures, in one figure, how much wealth one person can credibly oversee given their service model and tooling.
Industry-wide, the median across all RIAs is roughly $50–60M of AUM per advisor. The solo high-AUM segment runs substantially higher: median $90–130M per advisor, with the top quartile crossing $200M per advisor.
What drives the productivity differences:
Service model. A solo advisor running an annual review cycle with quarterly check-ins can credibly serve more relationships than one running monthly meetings.
Investment approach. Model portfolios (often run on a turnkey platform like Orion, BlackDiamond, or Altruist's custodial tools) free advisor time from per-account allocation decisions. Custom portfolio construction limits productivity sharply.
Client homogeneity. An advisor serving 80 households that all face roughly the same situation (e.g., executives at one employer, business owners at a specific revenue band) can templatize most planning and reduce per-client work.
Technology stack. The solo advisors at the top of the productivity distribution have invested heavily in process automation: AI meeting notes, automated CRM workflows, scheduled rebalancing, automated billing and reporting. Their economics improve faster than their headcount.
Clients per advisor: the bandwidth number
Where AUM per advisor measures scale, clients per advisor measures bandwidth. Both matter.
Solo advisors with 200+ household relationships and one advisor are running a high-bandwidth practice. They're typically not delivering deep planning to every household. They're delivering investment management plus light planning for most clients, with deeper planning concentrated in a smaller "A-tier" subset.
Solo advisors with 40–60 household relationships and one advisor are running a high-touch practice. Average client AUM is correspondingly higher, fees are higher in absolute dollars per household, and the planning depth is much more individualized.
Both models work. The ratio that doesn't work in this segment is the one that splits the difference: 100–150 households per advisor with heterogeneous service expectations. That's usually where advisors burn out and either narrow their focus or hire.
Revenue per employee: the operating-leverage number
Revenue per employee is the cleanest read on whether a practice has operating leverage. The industry median across all RIAs is roughly $450–550K of estimated revenue per employee. Solo high-AUM practices skew higher: $600K–$1M per employee is common, with the top decile above $1.5M.
Solo advisors clearing $1M+ in revenue per employee usually have:
- A model portfolio approach (not custom-by-account)
- Strong process automation
- A narrow client segment with repeatable planning
- An average fee schedule of 0.85–1.10 percent on AUM
The figure starts dropping as soon as the firm adds a second advisor or a third operations hire, because revenue lags hiring by 12–24 months. Tracking revenue per employee year over year on a firm's profile is a useful indicator of where the business is in its growth cycle.
Fee structures at this scale
Almost all $100M+ solo practices report compensation models that are fee-only or fee-based with negligible commissions. The pure commission model has essentially disappeared from this AUM tier — the math doesn't work for a one-person shop at scale.
Within fee-only, the dominant structures are:
- Tiered AUM fee (60-70 percent of practices): typically 1.0-1.25 percent on first $1M, declining to 0.50-0.75 percent above $5M
- Flat percentage (15-20 percent): typically 0.85-1.00 percent across the board
- Hybrid retainer plus AUM (10-15 percent): typically a $5,000-$15,000 annual planning retainer plus a reduced AUM fee around 0.50 percent
- Pure retainer or hourly (under 5 percent): more common in this segment than in the broader industry, but still a minority
What this benchmark group tells you
If you're a solo advisor, the leaderboard at /insights/solo-high-aum is a useful peer set. The firms above you in AUM are firms you can study — most publish enough on their websites and Form ADVs to understand their service model, fee schedule, and segment focus.
If you're a prospective client, this segment is often the right one to research. A $100–500M solo or near-solo practice typically offers the combination of deep personal relationship with the principal advisor and enough operational scale to invest in technology and process. The risk: founder concentration. If the principal advisor steps back or has a health event, succession is a real concern — one that the largest platforms have institutionalized away.
Browse the live filtered list at /insights/solo-high-aum, or see the broader views: largest RIAs by AUM, fastest-growing RIAs.
2,800 solo and near-solo RIAs above $100M in AUM, updated monthly from SEC Form ADV. Each entry links to the firm's full profile.