The invoices are knowable and smaller than most people expect. Two of the real costs never appear on one.
Entity formation and the registration filing. A compliance consultant to build the programme and usually to maintain it. Errors and omissions insurance. A custodial relationship, which is normally free to establish. Technology. A website and email.
Every one of those has a quotable price and the total is a business expense rather than a barrier.
Compliance and technology. Both scale with how much you outsource and how complex your firm is. A single adviser with one custodian and a model-based approach sits at the bottom of the range. A multi-adviser firm with several custodians and bespoke portfolios does not.
Several months of it, on work you have never done, while still serving clients. Priced at what your time is actually worth, it usually exceeds every invoice combined.
Accounts take time to transfer and billing takes time to restart. You will run expenses before receipts catch up.
The firms that struggle in year one are almost never the ones who lost clients. They are the ones who did not fund the gap.
Budget for the months you are not billing. That is the number that decides how the first year feels.
Spend on compliance and on whatever touches the client directly. Both are expensive to fix later.
Defer office space, brand design, and anything whose value depends on scale you do not have yet. A good compliance programme and a working client experience beat a good logo by an enormous margin.
Founders fixate on the launch cost and underestimate the run rate. Registration renewals, compliance, technology subscriptions, insurance, and the annual review are the number that determines whether the firm works.
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