Content Cabinet
The problem with how wealth firms talk
Open the insights page of most wealth firms and you will find a monthly market note, a few press mentions and a PDF. Every firm in the category publishes the same things, so none of it tells a family why this firm is different. The work is also made for existing clients, so it does little to bring in the next ones.
That matters more every year. The next leg of growth comes from people with no referral into the firm, such as first-generation founders and families going through a liquidity event. And the families a firm already has are changing hands. Capgemini's World Wealth Report found that 81% of next-generation inheritors plan to move away from their parents' wealth firm. Those heirs grew up choosing whom to trust from what they watch and read.
The usual excuse is compliance. In practice, the rules stop firms from promising returns and making claims. They leave plenty of room to teach, to explain a philosophy and to tell stories. The firms that stay quiet are leaving that space to someone else.
How Ritholtz Wealth Management did it
Barry Ritholtz and Josh Brown started Ritholtz Wealth Management in 2013, with Brown as CEO. Both had spent years building an audience before the firm existed. Ritholtz wrote the blog The Big Picture and went on to host Bloomberg's Masters in Business podcast. Brown wrote The Reformed Broker and became a regular on CNBC.
The firm did not keep the voice to its two founders. It hired people who wrote and talked in public too. Ben Carlson writes A Wealth of Common Sense, and Michael Batnick and Carlson host the Animal Spirits podcast. Brown and Batnick host The Compound and Friends. All of it sits under The Compound, the firm's own media brand on YouTube and podcasts.
What it did to the business
RIABiz, the trade publication for US advisory firms, reported the firm's assets at $825 million in 2018, $2.8 billion in 2022 and about $6 billion by October 2025. That is roughly a billion dollars a year. The firm raised no outside capital and made only one acquisition. RIABiz called it a "radically organic business model" that runs on leads from its own content.
The demand ran ahead of the firm. Brown told RIABiz that for years they were "turning down hundreds of people who had emailed us for help", because those readers had less money than the firm's minimum. The firm then built a service for smaller accounts to take that demand in. In early 2026 it expanded ownership to 29 employees, with no outside investors.
Five things wealth firms can copy
- Make the advisors the voice. People trust a person before they trust a logo. Ritholtz has several named voices, and each one has its own following that leads back to the same firm.
- Teach, and leave the selling out. The shows explain markets, behaviour and money decisions in plain words. That is the kind of material the rules allow, and it is what builds trust at a distance.
- Own the channel. TV and Bloomberg built reach, but the firm put its main effort into channels it owns: blogs, podcasts and The Compound on YouTube. A clipping in someone else's paper fades. A library on your own channel keeps working.
- Show up on a schedule. These are weekly shows and near-daily blogs, run for over a decade. The steady rhythm is what turns a reader into someone who emails you.
- Let the work be the referral. A family with no friend at the firm can still feel they know its people. That is a referral that needs no referrer.
The Indian version
India already has a few firms doing this. Saurabh Mukherjea of Marcellus has written four bestselling books and is a familiar face on video, and his name now arrives before the firm's does. SEBI's action against unregistered finfluencers has also cleared some space: registered firms are now the ones with a credible right to talk about money in public, and most of them still are not using it.
We see the same pattern in our work with Waterfield Advisors. We produce their show Capital Conversations and cut reels from it and from Let's Mint Money, their show with Mint. A single reel with Saurabh Mukherjea passed 242,000 views. That is far more people than any market note reaches, and every one of them heard the firm's voice, not just its name.
