In 2022, Rick Hu, founder of Midas Wealth, conducted his annual business audit and found his planning manager still in the office at 6 p.m. on a Friday, working through fee-based planning cases for prospects who might never become clients. Hu had known the manager since high school. Watching him give away hours he would never get back for people who hadn't committed to anything was the moment Hu realized his process had to change.
Hu, who has coached hundreds of advisors, sees two failure patterns among veterans with over a decade in the business. Some get stuck and quietly decide they've hit their ceiling. Others get comfortable, which is worse, because comfort doesn't feel like a problem until the numbers stop moving. Under the old model, Midas Wealth kept 20 to 30 fact finders a month, running full discovery meetings for prospects who often didn't implement anything. The work was free, but the cost was real: the team's time, Hu's own bandwidth, and a pipeline that looked busy without being productive.
Pricing signals value, Hu learned. When you charge next to nothing for a comprehensive financial plan, ultra-high-net-worth prospects don't read it as generous; they read it as evidence you have nothing worth paying for. One peer in his study group put it bluntly: don't be so cheap that you come off like a scam. That reframed how Hu thought about fee-based planning entirely.
The old model taught advisors to dive straight into a fact finder on the first call. Hu now believes that's a mistake if you're building a genuine fee-based planning relationship. His process starts with a short introductory call, no more than 30 minutes, purely about mutual fit. If there's alignment, the firm sends a short list of documents to review before a deep-dive discovery meeting, typically 60 to 90 minutes. Only after that meeting, once they understand a prospect's full financial picture, do they quantify the value they can add and name a fee tied to it.
This isn't just Hu's firm's process. Cerulli Associates projects that most advisors will operate under fee-based models by 2026, reflecting an industry-wide shift away from transactional, product-first relationships. Since restructuring around this framework in 2022, Midas Wealth's fee-based planning revenue has grown from roughly $6,000 to more than $1 million, and firm-wide revenue has grown from $450,000 in 2017 to more than $6 million today. Those numbers aren't the point, though. The point is that the firm now keeps about eight fact finders a month instead of 25, and closes a materially higher share of them, because it no longer spends hours qualifying prospects who were never going to move forward.
Hu believes artificial intelligence will replace advisors whose value proposition begins and ends with a product. Clients can already ask an AI model to compare investment products, weigh pros and cons, and estimate compensation faster than most advisors can explain it face to face. What AI won't do is call a client unprompted to flag a gap in their tax return, or connect a business owner's real estate plans to a bonus depreciation strategy before they think to ask. That kind of proactive, relationship-driven advice is exactly what a fee-based planning model is built to deliver, and it's the reason Hu doesn't believe in racing competitors to the bottom on fees. The advisors who compete on relationship and process, not price, are the ones who'll still be standing.
Hu recently spoke to thousands of advisors at Northwestern Mutual's 2026 Annual Meeting about this shift. The discussion resonated strongly with veteran advisors who found themselves having to rebuild long-standing processes in response to a changing industry. The shift also aligns with broader trends in the advisory space, such as advisors moving toward integrated portfolios and record annuity sales, as clients demand more holistic, transparent advice.
None of this happened overnight. Hu's first year in fee-based planning, he collected $6,000 in fees. He made plenty of mistakes before the process worked. But the industry's retention problem and growing client demand for transparent, education-first advice tell him the shift toward fee-based planning isn't a trend advisors can wait out. It's a rebuild worth doing deliberately, one fact finder at a time.
