Integrated Partners’ Rob Sandrew on Market Corrections and ‘New Blood’
The chief growth officer is at the forefront of preparing RIAs to grow their businesses and train advisors for the future.

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When Rob Sandrew went to work at the Boston-based Putnam Investments in the 1990s, he quickly realized he’d been thrown in the deep end.
For eight months he took shareholder calls, many of which had him explaining to elderly, retail clients how one of the firm’s mutual funds had unfortunately blown up. He remembers sitting at his desk, reading The Wall Street Journal, and not understanding half of it. When the training finally began, he was hit with the classic “sell me this pen/coffee/sandwich/stock/whatever” test. He passed.
“If you start hyping up the product, they’re going to say no,” he said. “It’s about understanding the consumer’s wants and needs.”
Fast forward to today and Sandrew is chief growth officer with Integrated Partners, a Boston-based RIA and planning firm, where he spends his time thinking about the next generation of financial planners. “What about getting new blood into our industry?” he said. The Daily Upside caught up with him at Rockefeller Center in New York City to discuss how RIAs can better prepare their businesses for the future, train advisors, and deliver better financial planning.
TDU: What’s the biggest challenge facing the industry today?
Rob Sandrew: It’s keeping up with where the market is going and the growing complexities of clients. If you rewind 15 years ago, an advisor meant you were running a portfolio, managing stocks and bonds. That was it. Today, if an advisor or firm is just doing that, they’re really leaving a significant amount of value off the table for their clients.
It also depends on your size. The market has changed dramatically, and $10 billion for a RIA is the point of delineation, meaning if you’re under that, you’re probably going to have some challenges in terms of scaling and resources. It’s the classic situation of the big get bigger and the smaller firms fall behind.
What are advisors thinking about as we enter 2025?
A significant market correction. We had the pandemic downturn, but government bodies responded well to that and the market picked back up quite quickly. There is a concern for a downturn in the next few years because we haven’t seen anything like that since 2008.
And that goes back to what advisors are focusing on. If it’s just money management, you’re living and dying by the return factor, and that’s just not sustainable.
What’s something nobody is talking about?
Plenty of advisors are going to be retiring in the next few years, and it feels like the succession talk stops there. It’s been one of those kick-the-can-down-the-road scenarios, and as an industry we’ve been doing a massive disservice by not training the next generation of advisors.
Wirehouses had excellent training programs: very polished, very methodical. It used to be you would get out of school, a wirehouse like Merrill Lynch or one of those firms would train you, and then they figure out where you fit in the company. I don’t think that’s happening as much anymore. They seem to be more focused on having big teams do the training today.
On the independent side, you had these cottage houses that were bootstrapping it. The training may not be as linear, but clearly that portion of the industry is on fire right now.