The setup invoice is the smallest number in this decision. The expensive part is the part that does not appear on any invoice.
Entity formation, registration, errors and omissions insurance, a compliance consultant, technology, and a website. You can get quotes for all of it in a week and the total will be lower than you feared.
That number is not the cost of the decision. It is the cost of the paperwork.
For roughly a year and a half you are running an advisory practice and building a company at the same time. The building work is unfamiliar, it has no obvious stopping point, and it competes directly with the work that generates revenue.
Nobody budgets for this because it does not look like a cost. It looks like being busy.
Most advisers are surprised on the upside by how many clients follow them. What they are not prepared for is the gap while accounts transfer, paperwork clears, and billing restarts.
Plan for a period with expenses running and receipts not yet caught up. The firms that struggle are rarely the ones who lost clients. They are the ones who ran the cash forecast on the assumption that revenue resumed the week they opened.
Which custodian. Which reporting system. Which models. What the compliance calendar looks like. How billing runs. Who answers the phone.
At a large firm these were settled before you arrived. Each one is now a project with vendor calls, a contract, and a switching cost if you get it wrong.
The clients are the part everyone worries about. The decisions are the part that actually takes the year.
The loneliness of it. Inside a big firm there is always someone down the hall who has seen this before. Independently, you are the person down the hall.
Advisers who make the transition well almost always have a peer group of other principals. That is not a soft benefit. It is the replacement for the institution you left.
Ownership of an asset that has enterprise value, control of the client experience, and the ability to make a decision on Tuesday and have it in place on Wednesday.
For a lot of people that trade is obviously worth it. It is still a trade, and the honest version of it includes the year and a half.