Forty-Eight Firms in My City Told the SEC Almost the Same Thing
Ninety-two percent of the advisory firms in my local peer set tell the SEC they serve individuals. Seventy-nine percent say high-net-worth individuals. Ninety-eight percent charge a percentage of assets. Ninety-eight percent describe their service as portfolio management, and sixty-seven percent add financial planning.
Forty-eight firms in one metro, and on the filed record we are one firm repeated forty-eight times.
The filed record
Same checkboxes, same client categories, same fee structure. Forty-eight firms.
A prospect cannot tell anyone apart.
Your website
The only place a specific claim about a specific client exists in writing.
A model has something to quote.
That is not a criticism of anybody. It is what happens when a regulator asks every firm the same multiple-choice questions. But it explains something that took me years to work out about advisor marketing, and it changed what I am going to publish next.
Where this data comes from
Every registered investment adviser files Form ADV. Part 1 is structured: assets, employee counts, client types with numbers attached, compensation arrangements, services offered, state registrations, disciplinary disclosures. Part 2A is the brochure, written in prose, where Item 4 describes the business and usually names the client types the firm focuses on.
All of it is public through the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site. Nobody is estimating these figures or selling them to you. The firms filed them.
A peer set is just a filter over that record: advisors in your metro, of a similar size, serving a similar client mix. Mine runs to 48 firms, ninety-two percent state-registered and eight percent SEC-registered, which is itself a fact about my market I did not know.
This feature is the direct result of market research I conducted figuring out which markets where the best to focus SEO efforts on and which needed a more targeted SEO approach.
The peer set
48
advisory firms
1
metro: Nashville
92%
state-registered
8%
SEC-registered
Built from Form ADV Part 1 filings: firms in the same metro, in the same size band, serving a similar client mix. The set is defined before any figure is read, which is the only way a percentile means anything.
The market map
Here is what 48 local firms look like when you line up their filings.
How they charge
Item 5.E, share of 48 firms
Percentage of assets98%
Fixed fees54%
Hourly40%
Other19%
Performance-based8%
Subscription2%
What they do
Item 5.G, share of 48 firms
Portfolio management98%
Financial planning67%
Selecting other advisers31%
Pension consulting21%
Other13%
Educational seminars8%
Who they serve
Item 5.D, share of 48 firms
Individuals92%
High-net-worth individuals79%
Corporations23%
Charities21%
Pension and profit sharing21%
Banks and thrifts6%
Form ADV Part 1 filings for 48 advisory firms in one metro, September 2026. Firms file multiple categories, so columns total well over 100%. Read the top bar of each column and the sameness is the finding.
How they charge. Ninety-eight percent take a percentage of assets. Fifty-four percent file fixed fees. Forty percent file hourly arrangements. Eight percent take performance-based compensation. Two percent run a subscription.
What they do. Ninety-eight percent portfolio management. Sixty-seven percent financial planning. Thirty-one percent selection of other advisers. Twenty-one percent pension consulting. Thirteen percent educational seminars.
Who they say they serve. Ninety-two percent individuals. Seventy-nine percent high-net-worth individuals. Twenty-three percent corporations. Twenty-one percent charities. Six percent banks and thrifts.
What is going on underneath. Half the peer set grew regulatory assets by more than ten percent over the last twelve months. Fifteen percent report at least one disciplinary disclosure. Four percent participate in a wrap fee program. The median firm has been registered four years.
Read those four lists as a prospect would and you get almost nothing to choose between. Four out of five firms describe the same clients. Nearly all of them describe the same service, charged the same way.
The line that reframed it for me
The benchmark says it plainly on the screen: your client types match what most peers report, and the niche work happens on your website and in your brochure.
That is the whole thing in one sentence. The filed record cannot differentiate you, because the filed record is a checkbox form and everyone ticks the same boxes. Your pages are the only place a prospect, or a machine reading on a prospect's behalf, can tell one firm from another.
Which lines up exactly with what I found when I scored 368 AI answers about Nashville advisors in September. Questions about a specific kind of client cited my site in 98% of 92 responses. The plain "an advisor in Nashville" questions, 54%. Questions about a specific service, 45%.
The pages where I say plainly who I serve get pulled into answers. The pages that sound like a Form ADV checkbox do not. The full field report has the rest of it.
What the filings are actually good for
Firm A, same metro
Firm B, same metro
Both can appear in the same search result. Only one is competing for the same prospect, and the filed figures tell you which before you spend a quarter writing a page to beat the other one.
Form ADV Part 1, September 2026. Both firms are based in the same metro. Names withheld; the figures are public.
Not differentiation. Two other things, and both are worth an afternoon.
Working out who is genuinely competing with you. My metro contains firms with $2.0 billion in regulatory assets, eleven advisory staff, and registrations in thirty states. It also contains firms with under six million dollars and one advisory employee. Both are Nashville firms. Both can turn up in the same search result. They are not competing for the same prospect, and only one of them should influence what I write.
Filed figures sort that out in a way a homepage never will. A firm's compensation arrangements, its client counts by category, and its state footprint tell you whether the prospect who found you both would ever have picked either of you.
Watching what changed. A single filing is a snapshot. The record holds years of them, and the differences are where the story is. In the last thirteen months my competitor set includes a firm that went from $36 billion to $45 billion in regulatory assets, up twenty-seven percent, while advisory headcount went from 214 to 320 and offices opened in five more cities. That is a firm growing by acquisition. Another firm in the set added a single state. A third added a DBA.
What changed in one competitor set, 13 months
-
April
Regulatory assets $36B to $45B, up 27 percent. Advisory headcount 214 to 320. Offices added in five cities, two removed.
-
May
A firm adds an office in another state.
-
June to August
One firm files three new DBAs across three months. Another removes one.
-
September
A firm adds a state. Another adds an office. A third files a name change.
Filed changes across one advisor's competitor set, newest first, names withheld. One of these is a firm growing by acquisition. Two of them need no response at all. Telling those apart by hand means downloading two brochures a year apart and reading prose side by side.
Those require completely different responses from me, which is to say two of them require none at all. Doing that comparison by hand means downloading two brochures a year apart and reading prose side by side, which is why almost nobody does it.
The finding that made me stop using size as a proxy
Regulatory assets, as filed
Firm AOver $2B
Firm BUnder $6M
Cited in 368 AI answers
Firm ANot in top 10
Firm B124 of 368
Left, Form ADV Part 1 as filed. Right, citations across 368 scored AI answers about advisors in the same metro, September 2026. Absence from the top ten cited domains is not proof of zero citations, and one metro in one month is not a law of nature. Names withheld.
Put the filings next to the citation data and something inverts.
The largest advisory firms based in my metro, the ones at a billion dollars and up, did not appear in the top ten domains AI assistants cited across 368 answers about Nashville advisors. A firm with under six million dollars in regulatory assets and one advisory employee was cited in 124 of those 368 answers.
Size does not buy AI visibility. Pages do.
An assistant assembling an answer needs a page making a specific claim it can quote. A large firm running a national template site often has nothing written for your city. A small firm that published three honest pages about who it serves does.
If you run a small practice, that is the most encouraging thing in this dataset.
How to read your own benchmark without fooling yourself
Middle of the pack
Tells you your practice is loaded about like everyone else's. True of most firms on most measures, actionable on none of them.
Far from the middle
In either direction, this is the only kind of attribute a prospect can tell you apart by. Each one is either a page you have written or a page you have not.
Not a grade
Half of any peer set sits below the median by definition, and no filed figure speaks to whether a firm's clients are well served.
Three habits, learned by getting them wrong first.
Ignore the measures where you sit in the middle. They tell you that you are loaded about like everyone else, which is true of most firms on most measures and actionable on none of them. The report says as much about capacity measures: assets per advisory employee is a capacity signal rather than a quality one.
Look for the bars far from the middle. Whatever those are for you, in either direction, they are the only attributes a prospect can tell you apart by. Every one of them is either a page you have written or a page you have not.
Do not read a percentile as a grade. Half of any peer set sits below the median by definition, and nothing in a filed figure speaks to whether a firm's clients are well served. Regulatory assets in particular are self-reported, unverified, and calculated under rules that allow some discretion. They describe scale and nothing else.
How the three pieces work together
Competitor Analysis watches what the firms around you publish. Competitor Filings tells you what their businesses actually are and what changed in them. ADV Benchmark shows you the shape of your local market and where your own filed figures sit inside it.
In that order they answer one question: which lane should I claim, and what page proves it. Filings narrow the field from every firm in your city to the few genuinely competing for your prospect. The benchmark shows which of your attributes are unusual in that market. Competitor Analysis shows whether someone has already taken the ground you are about to write on. Then the AI Citation Monitor tells you next month whether the claim registered.
None of that makes you rank faster, and I would not trust anyone who promised it would. What it does is stop you spending a quarter writing a page aimed at a prospect a competitor was never going to take from you. The wrong page costs a quarter. Working out which page to write costs an afternoon.
All three are in the one plan at $199 a month, with the citation monitor and everything else. No separate tier.
The guardrails, stated plainly
Regulatory assets are self-reported. Nobody verifies them, and they say nothing about performance or quality of advice.
Percentile is not a ranking of firms. It is the share of the peer set whose filed value sits below yours, on one measure, for one period.
No peer is named. The benchmark aggregates the whole set deliberately, because naming one turns a benchmark into a comparison, and a comparison against a named competitor carries a different compliance profile. Hold that line in your own marketing too.
Public does not mean publishable. Using competitors' filed figures to decide what you write is ordinary competitive research. Putting their figures in your marketing beside yours is a conversation for your compliance reviewer first.
Questions advisors ask
How is the peer set built? From Form ADV Part 1 filings: advisors in your metro or state with a similar size and client mix. The set is described at the top of the screen, so you can see who you are being compared against before you read a single percentile.
Is competitor Form ADV data public? Yes. Part 1 data and Part 2A brochures for registered investment advisers are public records through the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site. Nothing here involves private or purchased data.
Does a low percentile mean I am doing badly? No. Half of any peer set is below the median by definition. The useful read is which measures put you far from the middle, in either direction.
How current are the filings? Firms file an annual updating amendment within 90 days of their fiscal year end, plus other amendments when specific items change. A figure can be up to a year old, so the filing date matters as much as the number, and both appear in the tool.
What if I have no filing from twelve months ago to compare? Then the growth comparison sits out and the benchmark says so rather than inventing a baseline.
Shaun Melby, CFP® is the creator of AdvisorSEO Max, SEO software for financial advisors and RIAs, and the founder of Melby Wealth Management, a fee-only RIA in Nashville. He runs every tactic on this blog on his own firm first. This content is educational and does not constitute investment, legal, or compliance advice. Consult your compliance officer before implementing any marketing changes.
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