Procyon Partners Takes Center Stage: Leading the Charge Among Rapidly Expanding RIAs in the Country

When I succeeded Alex Rosenberg as editor of Citywire RIA, I admit that one of the things that made me nervous about the role was the annual 50 Growers Across America report, which was his brainchild and had been his pride and joy since 2020.

Alex crunched the numbers we got from Discovery Data himself, creating a hefty Excel file that would frequently crash my laptop when I tried to open it. But as we got to work on this year’s 50 Growers project, I found out that my fears were largely unjustified. Sorting through the data to identify the fastest-growing firms in each state wasn’t a chore. In fact, it was pretty darn fun. As you read on, you’re guaranteed to find names both familiar (Creative Planning, Procyon Partners, Moneta Group) and unfamiliar (like Geometric Wealth Advisors, the RIA in Washington, D.C. that specializes in working with partners at Bain, McKinsey and BCG). The project got my team and I talking to RIAs all around the country. I’m happy to say we learned a lot. One fear was unfortunately realized: this year’s Excel file was, once again, a laptop crasher. Allow me to give you a brief refresher on how this project works before you dive into our interactive map. We use historical Form ADV data compiled for us by Discovery Data, then we run it through a layer of screens. We screen out RIAs that don’t include financial planning as one of their core services, as well as firms that are offshoots of broker-dealers and banks (firms whose advisors may be dually registered with a broker-dealer but maintain their own RIA entity are in bounds). Lastly, we screen out firms that primarily function as back-end service providers for advisory teams. Once we’ve done all that, we look at the eligible firms’ performance in 2022 across three categories: percentage growth in AUM, monetary growth in AUM, and percentage growth in employees. We crunch those numbers into a single figure known as the ‘growth factor’: the end result is what you can see here. As you’ll see, the competition is tougher in some states (New York, California, Texas) than in others (North Dakota, Hawaii). We take pride in our legwork on this: We reach out to firms for this report, they don’t contact us. Firms may not want to appear on this list (we have had angry emails in the past), but the numbers are the numbers. No one is paid or compensated for their appearance, nor are we. It’s all based on cold, hard numbers (which is particularly appealing for a statistics-obsessed baseball fan like myself). Deputy editor Andrew Foerch, senior reporters Sam Bojarski and Payton Guion, and myself reached out to every single firm that topped the list in each state. As you’ll see, not everyone was particularly eager to talk. But we did our best to give you a little bit of insight into how these firms tick and what might be behind their growth. Lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Discovery Data for their assistance, as well as our former Citywire colleague Lara Mullen, who put together the laptop-crashing Excel document. Most importantly, I’d like to thank you for reading.