RIA Wire Articles · July 30, 2026 · By Karilyn Colegrove, Publisher, RIA Wire

The Unfashionable Matter of Timing

How do you know when you arrive late?

Not the dramatic kind of late that gets remembered in stories. The ordinary kind. The kind that feels reasonable at the time. By the time the sequence is built, the list is loaded, and the outreach begins in earnest, the growing RIA has often already made its important decisions and settled into the quieter business of living with them.

There is a short period when new and expanding advisory firms in the $100M to $500M range behave differently from the rest. It lasts roughly ninety days. During that stretch they are still assembling. After that, they are mostly defending.

The industry prefers not to dwell on this distinction. It complicates the clean story that a good list and persistent follow-up should be enough.

The Brief Period When Almost Nothing Is Settled

A firm that has just registered, or one that has newly crossed into the mid-sized band, faces a practical and slightly overwhelming set of needs. It requires custody. Compliance. Portfolio systems. Insurance. A way to track relationships. The shopping list is not infinite, but it is long enough to keep people busy.

For a short time these firms exist in an unusual state: budgets are forming, vendor relationships are still thin, and the cost of changing direction remains low. They are putting pieces in place rather than protecting pieces already chosen. That difference is larger than most prospecting approaches care to admit.

The window does not come with an announcement. It opens quietly when the firm enters the relevant range, stays open while decisions are made, and then closes as the new relationships settle into place. Most people notice it only afterward, if they notice it at all.

Then Inertia Does What Inertia Always Does

Once the main vendors are selected, attention shifts. The urgent work of building gives way to the longer, duller work of operating. Switching costs rise. Familiarity sets in. The next serious evaluation cycle may not appear for years.

This is not stubbornness so much as ordinary human preference. People rarely enjoy reopening decisions that already feel finished. A conversation that would have been natural while the firm was still assembling its stack becomes noticeably harder once the stack exists and has begun to feel normal.

An outdated list is practically engineered to deliver exactly these firms — the ones that have already left the open window and entered the long stretch of quiet resistance that follows. The salesperson then finds himself trying to create urgency where little remains. It is possible to succeed this way. It is also a hard way to spend a career.

The Part Almost Everyone Underweights

A great deal of sales advice in this market focuses on messaging, cadence, personalization, and persistence. These things are not irrelevant. They are simply less decisive than reaching a firm while it is still making decisions rather than defending them.

The ninety-day window is not a precise scientific measurement. Some firms move faster. Others take longer. But the pattern repeats often enough to matter: there is a compressed period when growing RIAs are unusually receptive, followed by a much longer period when they are not.

Most prospecting systems treat firms of similar size as roughly interchangeable. They are not. A firm still choosing its vendors and a firm that finished choosing them two quarters earlier may look alike in a spreadsheet. They do not feel alike on the telephone.

What the Public Record Quietly Reveals

The SEC's monthly Form ADV data does not publish buying intentions. It does, however, show when firms appear or cross meaningful thresholds. That signal is imperfect and incomplete. It is also the closest thing the public record offers to an indication that a firm may be entering the period when decisions remain fluid.

Most commercial lists move too slowly to make consistent use of it. By the time the names have been collected, cleaned, packaged, and sold, a portion of the firms have already passed through the open window and into the more resistant phase that follows. The list still looks respectable. The timing has already deteriorated.

The market continues to treat timing as a secondary concern — something to be overcome with better scripts and more activity. The firms themselves suggest a simpler explanation. They are open for a while. Then they are not.

Those who reach them while the window is still open tend to have conversations that feel almost natural. Those who arrive afterward often discover they are working much harder for a good deal less.

The difference is not primarily talent or effort.

It is mostly a matter of when the first call was made.