Brad Wales’ Transition To RIA Podcast Hosts Advisor Logistics CEO Brett Wheeler, CFP®
On June 30, 2026, Brad Wales of Transition To RIA released the latest episode of his Vendor Profile Series, featuring our very own Founder, CEO, and COO Brett Wheeler, CFP®. They discussed how Advisor Logistics supports growth-minded RIAs, giving them back the hours they need to scale.
Click here to watch the podcast on TransitiontoRIA.com or watch the video below.
Full Transcript:
Brad Wales – Hi, I’m Brad Wales with Transition To RIA and this is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On today’s episode, we’re answering the question, “What is Advisor Logistics?” And to help us with that is Brett Wheeler. Brett, thanks for coming on.
Brett Wheeler – Yeah, thanks for having me, Brad.
Brad – I’m particularly excited about this episode. Not that I’m not excited about all my episodes, but as I’m a big fan of and I talk about often, the RIA ecosystem has evolved tremendously. This has been true particularly over the last even five years, but surely 10 years and 15 years to the point where if you were to transition into the RIA model or you’re already there and you need or want some sort of service, there are generally specialized solution providers out there that provide that particular service.
Today’s episode is certainly no exception to that. I won’t steal your thunder so we’ll have you kind of explain what Advisor Logistics is and then we’ll get into the details. I think for the viewers you’ll see how this is a specialized service that can be very valuable for the people that are interested in it. So with that, Brett, if you could just give us that high-level elevator pitch telling us what is Advisor Logistics?
Brett – Yeah, sure. Advisor Logistics – we’re an outsource trading and portfolio administration firm. So the boutique or independent RIA will design and develop portfolios and then they’ll hire us to run them for their client accounts and households.
It’s can get very tailored, very nuanced. We like to operate with a high level of efficiency, but still with levels of customizations that the advisor needs for their particular client. So we are doing daily trades, we’re doing high-level trades, model portfolio changes, tax loss harvesting, kind of these big ideas, these big things that advisors want to do.
We’re doing all those levels of tradings and then considering within those the various intricacies that client accounts have. So the idea is that the advisor paints the picture, they develop the portfolios with their investment committee and team, and then they turn them over to us to be able to run on a daily basis.
Brad – And if we think of this as outsourcing something, who are you, not that we’re looking to displace anyone, but just understand where you’re at in efficiency, who is this normally done by that perhaps you can do it better or more efficiently for folks?
So, if I’m an RIA, there’s a couple different ways, right, asset management could be done. But if I want to make my own models and kind of manage the investments in that sense, but I’m not necessarily passionate about nor do I want to do it myself as the advisor, the actual implementation of those models and the ongoing trading associated with that could be done by Advisor Logistics instead.
So normally I might have team members in my team that I need to kind of make sure they stay on the team and that they’re trained and that they do it right. Is that where I could just outsource to your team of folks to do it? I still get to do the part I’m passionate about, but you’re doing the actual implementation of the trades. Is that kind of correct?
Brett – Yeah, I mean, that’s right. I think often when we come to work with a firm, normally the advisor might be doing trades themselves. They’ve kind of grown and hit this inflection point where they’ve been doing the work. They’ve been trading the client accounts. Normally they’d have already established their own investment portfolios within the firm and either they’re doing it or a client admin is doing it. Neither one of them is a good choice. Neither one of them is the right devotion of assets.
The advisor needs to be out there meeting with clients. The advisor needs to be growing their business. The admin or operations support has so much on their plate already. It’s really such a very nuanced and specialized area that when they hit this capacity and inflection point, they’re looking to do something else with it.
Historically, the only other option has been hire a TAMP, hire somebody that tries to do everything. And I think the issue there is the advisors are so equipped nowadays with the knowledge and the ability to develop their own portfolio IP that they don’t want to pay and have this outside entity developing portfolios. Their clients expect them to be able to design and develop portfolios. So they’re hiring us just to pull this grunt labor force, if you will, to do the nitty gritty and make sure that their portfolios are operating as they should.
Brad – And I think I’d add to that being able to outsource as opposed to having someone directly on the team is if you’re an RIA and you have maybe one or two people on the team that they are the traders, they are the ones doing that, that perhaps works for you, but you as the RIA owner also have to realize that those people are going to want to take vacation at times and they’re going to call in sick at times. There’s going to be turnover at times. And particularly if you only have one person doing it, that will be very disruptive if those happen.
I assume it’s fair to say, Brett, that it becomes your problem. If folks use your services, it’s your problem on your side to make sure your whole team is staffed and that you manage those kind of scenarios, so I think it’s a big plus on that front as well.
And now let’s dive farther down to when you kind of compared it to a TAMP. For someone that’s maybe using SMA managers now or TAMP, what is the different approach that you could bring to the table?
Brett and I kind of talked about this before we hit record, is this where hey, maybe I can either save some costs or just do things in a better way that aligns with my style and use an outsource CIO-type offering, but then that still needs to be implemented or that person that’s currently using a TAMP, currently using an SMA, how does that look to maybe convert to what you’re offering?
Brett – Yeah, I mean, that’s great because we want the advisor to be the brain behind their portfolios as I think clients often do too. And I think sometimes it can be hard for an advisor to maybe say, hey, you’re hiring us, we’re doing your planning, we’re doing all of your financial management. But then also this firm over here is the one that’s going to actually be creating your portfolios and running them. And sometimes that can be a hard conversation.
And so it’s a really nice coupling if a firm is able to work with an outsourced CIO that’s on their investment committee. They’ve got a lot of professional minds together to create portfolios. And then they can use us as just an extension of their team to actually do the hard stuff to go out and execute those portfolios.
So it’s a way of unbundling, bringing in-house all of these professionals to develop something that is for the firm and for the firm’s clients, which are unique, right? They’re unique. Firms are in Miami. Firms are in New Jersey. Firms are in California and the clients are different in a lot of different areas and I think it’s important for a firm to be able to be flexible to develop their financial planning, their investment strategies for their clients that they serve particularly rather than trying to bring them to some larger scale model.
Mechanically, we’re a bit different than a model or a TAMP because we’re very behind-the-scenes. Firms are contracting with us directly. We’re a sub-advisor in the true sense of the word. We don’t have any contractual relationship with an end client. It’s all, you know, us to the firm. We’re very behind the scenes.
There’s a small ADV disclosure that you may make. Other than that, a lot of our firms will put us on their website as a part of their trading team too. So we want the feel to the client to look very much like your RIA has this stuff in-house on their team.
Brad – Or to put it differently, the RIA, for complexity reasons, just to kind of put it bluntly, the client doesn’t even necessarily need to know that Advisor Logistics is involved at all. I know there’s some disclosures that would be put in there, but as far as the client’s concerned, it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s essentially someone sitting in their office or Advisor Logistics that’s doing the actual trading.
Whereas as you talked about, if it’s more of a fully sub-advised TAMP, then now you’ll have to explain who this other manager is or whatnot. So it’s fair to say, right, the client, just to put it bluntly, doesn’t necessarily even know you exist unless they choose to do, like you said, for advantageous reasons, put you on the website as part of the team kind of thing.
Brett – Yeah, that’s right. And our firms vary and sometimes they want to go to great lengths and explain to the client that, look, we’ve hired this professional trading team. You know, it’s a really great thing. And in that regard, we’re very highlighted. In other regards, we’re not highlighted in any way. It doesn’t matter to us how a firm wants to do it. And we’ve never talked to, we’ve never heard from, we’ve never conversed with the end clients. All of our dealings and functions happen with the RIA.
Brad – And where do you see this typically start to make sense? So maybe we’ll address this from two approaches. One, and we’ll kind of get into how you price out something like this, but I assume you have kind of a minimum relationship size that would make it worth it for you, that the RIA needs to be of a certain size. So if you could, just help us understand what does that look like and then regardless of that, where are you seeing the sweet spot where I assume an RIA gets big enough, they do fill out a whole team right there locally. So what’s your minimum and then where would you say that sweet spot is?
Brett – Yeah, I mean, I don’t like to say we have a minimum of AUM or something like that. We’ve started with firms at 7 million in assets and we’ve watched them grow to 300 million in assets. So what we like to do is work with firms that have a good growth strategy that are going to grow.
They’re the ones that need us because they’re going to hit capacity. They’re going to have a lot of accounts coming in, strong influx. So
I think logically for firms when they kind of hit that approaching towards 100 million is when they start to get capacity issues where they’re starting to look for a firm like us.
But I would never want to turn down an opportunity to grow with somebody. We love good, growing firms that are really planning-centric. A lot of times real young firms. We don’t work with a lot of lifestyle-type advisors, if that makes sense, that are really hunky dory in their process. We are very energized and love working with those firms that are seeking to grow.
So for us, it’s less about assets and where you start and more about where you’re trying to go and what you’re trying to do.
Brad – Because there are different scenarios, obviously, $10 million firms can be quite a bit different type of relationship than a $300 million type of firm. How do you price something out? And I’m not expecting to give any specific solid numbers because every situation is unique, but is this a basis point thing? Is this a percentage of revenue? Is this flat fees? How do you kind of price this?
Brett – It’s commonly a basis point that we do try to accommodate and charge the firm in the similar way that the firm is charging their clients.
We do have some relationships where they’re a fee only, like a true fee only, where they’re invoicing clients based on a household. And so for those, we may work with the advisor on charging by household rather than AUM.
It’s all variable. It’s based on the amount of size and workload that we believe we’re going to have with a firm, but we try to accommodate that to be tailored to the way that the advisor charges. A lot of fee only out there, a lot of people out there that are now shifting to want to do a true fee only, we want to accommodate that. Most of the RIA space is still in an AUM charge and we’ll also accommodate that too. That makes sense.
Brad – Yeah, seeing that growth, I’d call it the flat fee approach, I think is what you were alluding to as opposed to just AUM.
A thing I often point out to folks that we talk about, I’m talking to advisors and outsourcing tasks, and obviously there’s going to be a cost involved, but there’s also a cost of doing things yourself, right?
So one, you might not even be able or willing to do something yourself, but whatever your fee might be, well, that’s not a 100% increase to the expense bucket on the P&L because that’s going to replace having to do it locally, right? It might even be cheaper; it depends on what the local costs are to do things. So I always encourage advisors that you understand the cost, but then understand the default of not outsourcing has a cost as well.
Something I was particularly curious about for the viewers and that Brent and I kind of chatted about briefly, but I think everyone here will want to understand as well that, okay, this sounds great and you’re just going to magically do all the trades for me and wow, that’s great, but how logistically is that actually happening?
So maybe if I just give a scenario, if I’m a RIA of whatever size, couple hundred million, and I use, we’ll pick on Schwab as my custodian and maybe I’m using Orion as my portfolio management tool, okay, great. With that set up, how are you and your team actually doing these trades and what not?
Brett – Yeah, so this is a great question. We like to say that we’re a trading group powered by technology when I think a lot of people that are trying to be in our space are a technology that’s kind of got a trading group behind the scenes that might be monitoring things. So when we’re working with a firm, the very first thing that we’re doing is setting up custodial data and custodial feeds. Those feeds are going into our systems. We have some proprietary stuff that we’ve built out.
We have some big portfolio and rebalancing systems that we use for the actual trading. So as we’re identifying and creating trades, we’re getting data from the custodian, creating the trades, and then executing the trades back at the custodian.
So we’re not having our own separated relationship with the custodian. To the custodian, it looks and feels very much like we’re a part of your team, and functionally, that’s a lot of the way that it works. And so for us, because we have our own tools and systems over here that we use, we’re agnostic to whatever the advisor is using for their portfolio management system, their billing system, reporting system.
We really don’t get in there. We don’t get in their WealthBox. We don’t get in their Salesforce. Whatever system they’re using, we really don’t care what it is because we’re operating the trading enterprise outside of that. And so that really means that there’s a bit of them learning to deal with us and us learning to deal with them.
And so I think this is kind of a really important distinction as time goes on because we’re not training them to just use the technology that they have to run. There’s a learning curve where not only are they learning working with us, but we are learning how they want to trade, how they want portfolios to come about, what the nuances are within their clients.
You know, they might have a level of clients that work at a company, they can’t own a particular ticker. We’ve got to really work around that, legacy positions, capital gains, constraints. These sorts of things are prevalent in RIA businesses. We’re trying to understand and learn the way that the advisor wants their stuff traded so that we can utilize these systems that we have and our expertise in them to bring about the portfolios and trading style that the advisor wants.
I think that’s why runway time takes a little bit. It’s about a one to two month onboarding process. It takes us six months or so until we’re really kind of in this flow state where we’re executing and doing trades and running the portfolios the way that the advisor wants us to.
That also means we end up sticking around a long time for firms because once we learn them and we’re an extension of their team, we have become so critical to them that it’s very hard to break from us, which is good for business, but it’s also good for the RIA because we provide such a high level of continuity.
You know, something you mentioned earlier was the training of staff or having staff and the costs that go along with staff doing it and advisors doing it. That also requires a level of infrastructure built out that the advisor has to do to implement robust trading systems.
And when they’re hiring us, kind of this hidden cost that they have to go through is you don’t need the trading and rebalancing software when you hire us, but also we’re coming in with this infrastructure. You don’t have to train us on how to build out a trading infrastructure and work with these nuances. All you have to do is paint the picture of how you want things to be, give us the client nuances, and we build this infrastructure out for you.
Brad – Yep, and I appreciate that you gave a little timeline on that, that there’s a, you know, they’re kind of going forward maybe six months to really get gelled in on each other’s style or approach.
We’ll get to here in a moment how if people want to learn more, they can reach out. But let’s say someone does reach out, they talk to you, your people on the team, they want to do this. Ideally, how much time would you like from when they kind of decide, yeah, hey, we would like to engage you here until we’re actually kind of going live with trading.
I assume there’s logistics, there’s some training involved or whatnot. Ideally, how much time do you typically like to have for that?
Brett – Yes, so we typically put this in two buckets. It’s to get the data in, so when we first get the data to when we’re actually starting to produce trades is about a month. Normally it’s about three weeks of the custodian getting it together to send data out. But in that time, we’re able to build out the infrastructure, build out the models, build out cash holds, build out security exceptions and all this within the system. And our goal is that within a month, we’re able to start in on kind of daily trades, right?
The advisor sends us a ticket, client needs $50,000 because they want to remodel their kitchen. You know, can you raise that cash? And so very early on we’re moving slow in the trades to make sure that we’re producing the appropriate trade that the advisor wants.
So there’s a lot of back and forth with our team and the advisor to ensure that everything is good before we execute. And then the goal is that kind of first month of trading is us making sure we have everything nailed down. And then by the end of the second month, that’s when we want to be able to do the broad trades, big rebalances, all the sweeping checks and everything that the advisor wants done.
And that’s our typical timeline and how it rolls out. It could operate a little bit slower if the advisor wants a little bit slower pace. You know, everyone’s particular and advisors are very protective of their clients, rightly so. They want to make sure that trades look right. But then sometimes we are so familiar with how somebody is doing something that we can get going quicker than that. So it’s really about an advisor’s pace on that.
The thing we want advisors to understand is they’re not hiring robots. This isn’t a tech that, you know, they build out and then it just pops a trade off. I mean, we’re flesh and blood. We’re traders. We have a great deal of experience in trading. Our most junior trader has five or six years of industry experience. Our most experienced trader was trading when you had to trade by fax machine.
So we’ve been through it all. We’ve seen it all. And so we are there to help guide and make sure the advisor is comfortable and we’re doing the things the way that they want them done.
Brad – I love this, I said at the top of the episode. I just think it’s really cool that there’s this kind of solution out there. And if I was running an RIA, I don’t know that doing the trading myself would be something I’m passionate about doing. And the fact that you can outsource it in this regard, I think is really cool. And just like anything, it’s not going to be for everyone, but I could certainly see where you’re adding a lot of value and people are finding it attractive.
So for folks that do want to start to learn more, and obviously that’s just going to take a conversation on the front end before you start worrying about some of these steps involved, what is the best way for someone that’s watching this that says, I would like to have a chat and to see what this would look like with my particular practice?
Brett – Yep, advisorlogistics.com. We’ve got a contact form there. It’ll ping our wonderful representatives. They’ll reach out and those first conversations are very consultative. We’re really trying to learn your business and learn your business, not just the portfolios, but what’s your operational setup, how we might be working together, and then really trying to understand your portfolio.
So it’s hitting our website, getting a contact form in, and then one of our representatives will contact you and we’ll start the conversations there.
Brad – Cool. Well we’ll put that in the show notes. Just to say it again, advisorlogistics.com, and again, we’ll put it in the show notes and everything starts with a conversation. You can learn more from there.
With that, Brett, I appreciate you coming on and helping us better understand what is Advisor Logistics.
Brett – Yeah, thanks a lot Brad, it was a lot of fun.
Brad – Enjoyed it. Thanks.
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About Advisor Logistics:
Advisor Logistics provides professional outsourced trading services for RIAs. Designed to function as a seamless extension of an advisor’s investment team, Advisor Logistics handles rebalancing, trading, and execution, allowing RIAs to focus on client interaction and the strategic growth of their business. Visit advisorlogistics.com to learn more.
