You can rebuild a client base in a year. Rebuilding fifteen years of history takes fifteen years.
Performance generated while managing accounts at a firm is generally the firm's record. There are narrow circumstances in which some portability is possible, and they are narrow, technical, and entirely dependent on documentation and on counsel.
Assume it does not come with you until a lawyer tells you otherwise in writing.
Not much with existing clients, who have their own statements and know what you did for them.
It costs you with prospects. A firm founded eighteen months ago looks like a firm founded eighteen months ago, whatever the experience behind it.
Your professional history is yours. Years in the industry, roles, credentials, the kind of clients you have worked with, and how you approach the work are all factual and none of them are performance claims.
The line is between describing your experience and presenting returns you cannot substantiate and do not own. The Marketing Rule is unforgiving about the second.
Experience and track record are different assets. You keep one of them.
Some adopt a strategist's or platform's models, which arrive with their own documented history — belonging to the strategist, presented as the strategist's, with all the required disclosure.
Some simply start the clock and say so. An honest new record beats a defensible-looking one that generates an examination finding.
Presenting a prior firm's performance as your own, or reconstructing a record from memory or from partial data.
Both are exactly the kind of thing that turns a routine examination into a problem, and the commercial upside is small compared with the exposure.
The gap is predictable. Deciding in advance what you will show prospects in year one is a better use of the pre-launch period than most of what usually fills it.
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