Brooke’s Note: It was only a quarter. But clearly nobody saw this coming and it has evoked strong reaction. Breakaways are a lifeblood of RIA business so it may be more proper to overreact than underreact.

LPL Financial and Raymond James hit a serious cold snap in their recruiting efforts during the first quarter gaining few new advisors — and colorful remarks by Schwab CEO Walter Bettinger suggest similar recruiting weather at that company. TD Ameritrade revealed that its recruiting numbers were off, too.

LPL’s CEO blames the hot market for the cold snap and says advisors don’t want to leave because they’re working with active clients who are moving assets out of cash.

“Overall growth in net new advisors was modest this quarter particularly compared to the strong fourth quarter,” said Mark Casady, CEO of LPL Financial on Thursday during an earnings call with analysts and reporters. “We believe improving market conditions extended the business development sales cycle.” See: LPL shows flashes of its new image at Financial Masters 2013.

The Maher Group had about as good a long-term business plan as you could ask for — — on paper.

The former Merrill Lynch team had eight individuals, some with legal or accounting degrees or CFA credentials. Better yet, it had established a niche over the past decade of serving business owners with $5 million to $250 million of revenue — many of whom have or will soon be seeking specialized knowledge and connections to liquidate their holdings.

The company had grown substantially for the past decade under wirehouse ownership, and its clients were involved in $250 million of deals last year — but there were nagging concerns. As more and more of its clients contemplated liquidity events, the need for big-time amounts of capital and commercial loans was on the rise.

With Merrill being part of Bank of America Corp., there were some weighty options in house. But the situation was still not ideal because those loans couldn’t be shopped against a range of banks and some specialized lending wasn’t on hand.

Brooke’s Note: What says everything about what the Robertson Stephens brand once meant was that when I moved to San Francisco I was told where the young “Robbie” guns had drinks on Friday after work. It was suggested maybe I go there to tap into the pulse of business activity in the city and region. But the brand will impress me even more if it can pull a Lazarus-like rise from what sure had the appearance of dead as captured by a 2002 The Economist article: Boom, Fizzle, Silence. If anyone can turn fizzle to sizzle, it’s someone like Joe Piazza. He believes.

The once-great underdog investment banking brand of Robertson Stephens is getting another shot at life after one of its former executives bought it and set up an RIA and broker-dealer under the name.

Joe Piazza has rented 8,000 square feet on the Bank of America building’s 16th floor at 555 California St. in San Francisco on behalf of his new venture, Robertson Stephens Asset Management, and its sister broker-dealer, Robertson Stephens Securities.

The chairman, chief executive and founder of the new venture plans ...

In 2011, Leo Kelly was a top-producing Merrill Lynch broker with a wrenching decision to make. Seeking a collegiality that he no longer experienced at Merrill Lynch, he was looking to make a move. On the one hand, he had thoroughly vetted HighTower Advisors LLC and decided that that was probably the best place for he and his partner, Brian Grumbach, to move their $700-million book of business.

But Kelly was also being courted by Tom New, the manager of the 50-person Morgan Stanley office in Hunt Valley, Md. Kelly had known New for about 10 years and found him to be the very best manager of financial advisors in the region. Morgan Stanley did not respond to an inquiry seeking comment for this article.

In the end, when Kelly joined Chicago-based HighTower in February 2012, New was one of the first people he told. In that conversation, Kelly opened up the possibility that there could be a best-of-both worlds scenario for the two of them to salvage their hard-earned bond. See: HighTower wins a $700 million Merrill Lynch advisor in Maryland horse country and wrests an LA-based IAR from ...

Brooke’s Note: Lyman Howard recently wrote a column about all the decisions he made about technology in forming his newborn RIA, Point Bonita Wealth Advisors LLC of San Francisco. See: How I picked technology — from Black Diamond-in-SSG to Dudamobile — to use in my startup RIA. His style, disarming transparency, smarts and humor made me hungry to hear much more about his efforts and thinking that led him to this juncture. Lyman was game. I think he has produced a column here that is long overdue in the RIA industry — a start-up story delivered from a laptop in the start-up trenches with mortars whizzing by. Please give him encouragement for this effort that consumed part of his President’s Day weekend. I’m hopeful we can convince him to continue sending missives as he reaches various milestones and speed bumps. I promise it’s stuff we can all relate to.

At some point, having collected all of the advice, analyzed and planned, you have to actually step out of the nest, flap your wings, and hope that you’ll fly.

I am talking, of course, about starting up an RIA ...

Brooke’s Note: It is pleasing to see HighTower doing what Tiggers do best — executing routine alpha predator take-downs of wirehouse brokers and making RIAs out of them. Nobody else really does that and it’s part of a healthy ecosystem to have large carnivores at the top of the food chain.

HighTower Advisors LLC is officially back in the deal-making business, grabbing its largest breakaway in six months — a Philadelphia-area team with $650 million in assets.

HIghTower announced Tuesday that Gregory C. Sarian and Francis X. Masse II of The Sarian Group joined the firm as partners and managing directors. They left Merrill Lynch on Friday to join the Chicago-based RIA and combined have more than 35 years’ experience in the financial services industry. The assets are now primarily with Schwab Advisor Services for custody and Black Diamond is the chosen performance reporting system provider.

Merrill Lynch spokesman Matthew Card confirmed that the team had left but declined to comment further for this story.

Brooke’s Note: We never tire of writing about the transitions made from big, safe positions in life to the more rickety but more promising ones that the RIA business creates so many of. Our contributing columnist on PR matters, Jason Lahita, has been an admiring bystander for many of these transcendent acts and the articles about them. His columns have always impressed me not only for their insights but for their courage (especially from a PR guy!) in delivering unvarnished truths. See: Opinion: How Goldman Sachs exposed its jaw to a massive PR blow from The New York Times’ op-ed page. Having a writer’s spine isn’t something you teach. It comes from life experience. Here writes about his life in terms of experiences with a few of the more inspiring entrepreneurs he worked with, particularly at the elbow of Joe Duran, and how he is accepting his heartbreak surrounding his mother’s recent illness as a gift of courage. The latter tragedy opened a door for him to self-realization as a breakaway PR firm to the RIA business. His story in turn is a gift to us ...

“They made it clear that they wanted to sell more stocks, including initial public offerings. How did I feel about that? I told them I didn’t think I could do it in all good conscience. So they basically fired me. Yesterday, I had been at the top in terms of production and today I was out of a job. I had a wife and three little boys at home. I was wrestling with worry, wondering how we were going to make ends meet.” — W. Patrick Clarke (says about a 1975 incident) from the introduction of his book, “Change One Letter, Change Your Future.”

One of the great unsung pioneers of the RIA business — and a practically prehistoric wirehouse breakaway — has died in a tragedy that also took the life of one of his sons.

W. Patrick Clarke, 67, co-founder of NorthStar Financial Services Group LLC in Omaha, Neb., died in a plane crash along with one of his sons, Dr. Scott Clarke, 41, near Fresno, Calif., heading home after a day of driving at the Skip Barber Racing School at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on California’s Monterey peninsula ...

Brooke’s Note: Selfishly, we were sorry to see HighTower catch its breath for several months. Often the breakaways are of eventful size and, by their nature, provide some of the drama that makes the breakaway movement exciting. The constant and intense level of deals is also a bit of a serial adventure for the industry’s followers. It’s of interest to readers of RIABiz. HighTower CEO Elliot Weissbluth promised a resumption of deals in January. Here it is.

HighTower Advisors is back in the game — albeit with a modest splash — and is giving a heads-up of more to come.

The big Chicago-based strategic acquirer and outsourced platform has added two advisors to existing offices with combined advised assets of about $400 million — after not announcing any deals since early September. See: HighTower passes up $40 million capital raise, takes a big breather from deals and implements a pacing regimen.

Matt Moore joined HighTower’s Kelly Wealth Management of Baltimore as a managing director and partner on Jan. 11. He manages $250 million in assets. Moore works with affluent families, individual clients, closely held businesses and non-profit organizations. He ...

Sanctuary Wealth Services LLC has announced that Craig Johnson of JMP Group Inc. — a large investor in Sanctuary — will become the firm’s first chairman. The San Francisco-based firm is bringing him aboard as chairman but expects him to roll up his sleeves and make things happen — namely recruiting.

Johnson, 58, is vice chairman of JMP Group Inc. and a member of its executive committee. He joined Sanctuary’s advisory board in 2010. At that time, JMP made a $1.5 million investment in Sanctuary — the only outside investment the firm has received to date, says founder and CEO Jeff Spears. Johnson served at JMP Group from 2007 through 2010 and was president of JMP Securities from 2002 until 2007. Johnson spent 20 years, from 1980 through 2000, at Montgomery Securities and its successor, Banc of America Securities. See: Notes from the RIABiz one-year anniversary party.

Spears met Johnson in 1995 when he was working at Montgomery and Johnson was running institutional-equity sales there. “Craig has had the experience at successful growth companies and you can learn a lot from best practices of other successful firms,” says Spears. “Also, Craig ...