RIA Practice Benchmarks: How Does Your Practice Compare?

A benchmark is only worth reading if you know where it came from. Synseus does not publish industry benchmark figures on this page, and the reason is simple: it does not hold a licensed dataset for most of what practices want compared. Naming a median without naming its source is the same claim as inventing one.

What Synseus does compare, and against what

One source, and it is public: the SEC Form ADV filings that advisory firms file themselves. Synseus matches your firm to its own filing, places it in the national cohort of firms in the same AUM band, and shows where it sits on the dimensions that filing actually carries. Every figure is shown with the cohort it came from and the number of firms in it. Where a cohort is too small to say anything, or your filing does not carry the value, nothing is shown rather than an estimate.

What it cannot compare, and why

Client retention, revenue per client household, operating margin and profit share are not on Form ADV. No public filing carries them, so there is no cohort to compute and nothing honest to print. A figure for any of those would have to come from a commercial benchmarking licence this product does not hold. Until it does, those dimensions stay empty here and empty in the app — which is the point: an empty field is information, and a plausible number in the same place is not.

Where your own numbers come from

The calculations Synseus runs on your practice start from what you entered — your revenue, your clients, your fees, your channels. Those are your figures, not a cohort's, and they are labelled that way throughout. The Peer Benchmark Dashboard is the one place a comparison to other firms appears, and it draws only on Form ADV.