Almost everyone who leaves says the same thing afterwards. The reasons for waiting are real — they are just mostly not about the decision.
Ask advisers who went independent what they would change and the answer is overwhelmingly the timing. Not the decision, not the model. The delay.
That consistency is worth taking seriously, with the obvious caveat that you are only ever hearing from the people who went.
Unvested compensation with a defined date. A genuine family or health reason. A firm that is about to be acquired in a way that changes the calculation.
Those are real constraints with an end. Waiting for them is a plan.
Waiting for a better market. Waiting until the practice is bigger. Waiting until you have time to plan properly. Waiting for the firm to fix the thing you have been complaining about.
None of these has an end date, which is what makes them different from the first list.
A reason with no date is not a reason. It is a way of not deciding.
The infrastructure is comfortable. Not the firm — the fact that someone else handles compliance, technology, and the operational floor.
Leaving means picking all of that up. That is a legitimate thing to weigh, and it is worth weighing explicitly rather than converting into a market-timing argument.
Every year inside a firm that owns the relationships is a year of enterprise value you are not building. That cost is invisible because it never shows up as a loss.
Write down your reason for not going yet, with a date attached. If you cannot attach one, you have learned something more useful than any comparison of models.