By Steve Garmhausen

Having steered the wealth management company he co-founded 12 years ago to 190 advisors in 25 states, James Spinelli has one thing on his mind: more growth. And his firm, Great Valley Advisor Group $(GVA)$, has capital from LPL Financial to help him achieve that goal. "This is where it gets fun," says Spinelli, CEO of Berwyn, Pa.-based GVA, which manages $10 billion of assets.

Speaking with Barron's Advisor, the Pennsylvania native explains why he left an executive position at a big telecom company, not to become a financial advisor but to build a platform for advisors. He reveals the reason the firm sold a stake to LPL in 2024 and how he plans to put some of that capital to work this year. And he shares his experience building a tech solution for his firm that took on a life of its own.

Where are you from, and how did you get into the industry? I grew up in Berlin, Pa., about 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia, around the corner from where our office is currently located. I graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in management information systems. I went right into the technology field. I was a freelance developer, and then I worked at Comcast in a finance/technology role. I worked with large-scale systems, process design. In 2014 I made the leap into the RIA landscape, founding GVA.

What prompted you to change careers? The human element. As a developer, working in large database environments, you're not interacting with folks much.

Wealth management is very relationship based. What was the adjustment like? It was definitely a little difficult at first. When you're working with different personalities, in an environment that's faster paced, adapting can be a challenge. It did take some time to wrap my head around how to best work with our advisors, who are ultimately my clients. It was totally different from working at a large corporation like Comcast.

As an aspiring entrepreneur why did you choose the wealth management field? I think everything happens for a reason, and there was a little bit of luck here. I was talking to my now-business partner, Ryan Todd, who is a CPA and financial advisor, and I started researching the RIA industry. I thought there was an opportunity to build something a little bit different.

How did you and your Ryan split duties after you co-founded the business? From inception, we had complementary roles. Ryan focused more heavily on our financial and compliance infrastructure, while I led operations, advisor recruitment, platform development, and overall growth strategy as the firm scaled.

W hat do our readers need to know about your business? We are our own RIA; sometimes people consider us LPL Financial's corporate RIA, but we are stand-alone. We do use LPL as a custodian and broker-dealer, but we're multicustodial -- we use Charles Schwab, we use Fidelity. We're built with the mind-set of working with advisor entrepreneurs, those who want to build the business they've dreamed of and want support doing that. We have more than 190 advisors across 25 states. We're for those advisors who are thinking more like founders, not employees, and want more than just a platform. They want to build valuable business and enterprise value. I feel we've done a good job of building up an infrastructure for them.

Do these advisors get equity ownership in GVA? They're building enterprise value of their own businesses, but they're not owners of GVA.

What would you say is unique about your value proposition? One of the big things we give them is the technology component of the business. Every advisor that joins GVA gets a strong infrastructure, with a customized Salesforce CRM, our SecureOffice cybersecurity and operational platform. We have a nice asset management platform and an insurance arm. We've begun building out a centralized retirement planning solution. Our goal is to offer a more formalized and centralized set of retirement-specific solutions, enabling advisors to deliver these services more efficiently and at scale, rather than each advisor re-creating the wheel independently.

We're also doing recruiting all the time. We help advisors evaluate a range of funding options that may include internal GVA capital, external capital partners, or hybrid structures, depending on their goals. Our role is advisory and strategic, not merely transactional: When our advisors win, we win. So we're well positioned in different areas. But I would say our technology and infrastructure are above and beyond. They are advisor-built and advisor-driven and they continue to evolve every day.

Speaking of technology, is artificial intelligence's impact on wealth management being hyped, or do you think it will change the industry radically? I don't think it's hyped. I do believe that there is a great need for AI in the space. It's positioned to drive efficiencies. We're integrating Jump.ai into more of our everyday life here within the GVA ecosystem. I think the evolution of AI and its involvement within the space is going to benefit advisors tremendously in terms of efficiencies and being able to scale.

You have equity backing from LPL. What was your thinking behind that deal? When we started the business in 2014, we were all reaching out to connections, cold calling, sending out mailers. I give a lot of credit to those advisors who joined GVA early on when everybody was still building. We had the opportunity to do a couple of RIA acquisitions along the way, which helped with growth. By 2022 we were at a crossroads as far as our next step as an organization. We'd started to enter new territory because of our size. So we decided to take on LPL as a 20% partner. Our model includes both organic growth and structured transactions. While many relationships begin as partnerships, we also support minority and majority equity transactions when appropriate. LPL's capital helps strengthen our balance sheet, allowing us to invest ahead of growth in technology, talent, and infrastructure. The collaboration with LPL helps us deliver solutions to support advisors throughout their business life cycle.

How many practices have you brought on board? We've done three deals, and with our scaling capability, our focus in 2026 is to identify practices that we would want to merge into the GVA ecosystem.

What does your target acquisition look like? We like them to be with one of the custodians we're already working with. That makes life a lot easier, makes the transition a lot more seamless. Size-wise, that's always a tough question, because you might find, for instance, a two-person RIA that simply wants to wind down -- they want to continue doing what they're doing, but they don't want to run an RIA anymore. That kind of firm might be $150 million. And we'll go up to $750 million or so. The other thing I find so valuable in acquisitions is the talent that comes along with them. We want to find those RIAs that have good talent, and have been working at those custodians, and are looking to grow by joining a bigger organization.

How many acquisitions might you do in 2026? We're probably looking at about three to five acquisitions in 2026. That could be another RIA or it could be a personal book, and figuring out a way to work that into our ecosystem, maybe with one of our existing advisors.

You've also created and sold a technology solution during your years as an advisor. What was that process? A couple of years after we founded the RIA I founded AdvisorBOB, which stands for advisor book of business. It's a compensation tool that we actually sold in May to AdvicePay. It was built when we were running the RIA and started adding advisors. There was no compensation tool available for splitting advisory fees.

The firms underneath us wanted to have payouts for their advisors, with overrides appropriate for the services they were providing, and everything that goes along with building a successful advisory practice. So I reconnected with a developer and mentor I had worked with when I was a freelancer. And I said, "Hey, I've got this problem at the RIA." So we built it. Later I ran into another RIA owner at a conference who said he had the same problem. So we made what was called RIAFees.com. Later we made AdvisorBob to make it more of a software platform. From there we rolled it out to RIAs within the industry. AdvicePay acquired it in May of 2025. It was honestly a great adventure.

What's advisors' biggest pain point today, and how are you addressing it? The pain points are less on the nonrevenue generating activities and more on the revenue-generating activities. We've built the resources and support to allow them to go out to do more revenue-generating activities. We are looking at rolling out a lead-generation tool in 2026 that I think will be very compelling for advisors.

Your asset management business has grown from $350 million 2 1/2 years ago to about $1.8 billion after a restructuring. What did that involve? In response to advisor feedback, we added team members, including chief market strategist Eric Parnell, while introducing more flexible pricing, operational efficiencies, improved client reporting, and more client-focused materials. We also established multiple advisory boards to ensure that the feedback advisors receive from their clients is directly incorporated into our asset-allocation strategy development. In doing so, we shifted from an investment-centric model to an advisor-centric model, simplifying model lineups, increasing transparency, aligning pricing, and designing strategies that reflect how advisors actually build portfolios. That alignment ultimately drove both adoption and growth.

What has been the hardest part of creating this business? It wasn't easy in the beginning to leave a stable job. A lot of thought went into that and how we were going to make it. You run it through your head a million times. My fiancée at the time -- we're now married -- was like, "I think you're crazy." But am I? Here's the long-term vision. So it was getting over the short-term discomfort and following the long-term vision.

Another challenge is staying ahead of the curve on all the technology that's available out there. The Kitces technology map gets bigger every month. So it's how do we make sure we're partnering with the best firms and putting the best technology in front of our advisors. That's a big piece, because advisors want to partner with firms that are going to help them grow. It's how we've gotten where we are. And if you lose sight of that in business, it doesn't usually bode well.

You seem like a pretty confident business builder. Was someone in your family a role model? My paternal great aunt and uncle founded ANRO Printing, in Devon, Pa. It began with a typewriter in a basement and grew and grew; my dad became the general manager and is now CEO. I was around the business all the time; I got to see the ups and downs, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Did having a role model embolden you to start your own business? Absolutely. And that's something I always enjoyed doing. In college I started several small, primarily service-oriented ventures. While none were large enterprises, they provided early exposure to entrepreneurship, cash-flow management, sales, and operational execution, which significantly shaped how I think about building businesses. One of those ventures was a web development company, Peng-Win LLC, which later became the entity that owned AdvisorBOB.

What's the long-term plan for GVA? The long-term plan is to continue to grow, to continue to partner with best advisors out there. At some point I think we will look at the advisor network, get feedback, and say, "All right, what is our next step, what are we looking to do as an organization?" We have a ton of calls with our advisors, just feeling out where they are and what direction they're going in. One of the things that minority position did is to put us in a good position to continue to grow. That's my goal. I started this when I was 27 years old. I'm 39 now. This is where it gets fun.

Thanks, James.

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January 30, 2026 09:03 ET (14:03 GMT)

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