The Firm Where Brent O'Mara Works
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Brent O’Mara is a Senior Wealth Advisor at Feltz WealthPlan, an Omaha, Nebraska Registered Investment Advisor, and a cofounder of WealthPlan Group, an Omaha based organization that supports independent financial advisors. He joined in 2000 as a college intern and never left. He became a partner in 2014 and one of the firm’s owners in 2019.
He cofounded the organization in 2014, the same year he became a partner. It gives independent advisors investment resources, technology, operational infrastructure and compliance support of a larger organization while they keep their independence and retain their client relationships. The idea came partly from his own start: people invested time and confidence in him early, and through the organization he extends the same to other advisors. Those sentences are the whole of what this page says about either organization. What follows is general education, from cited sources, on what a Registered Investment Advisor is, what such a support organization does for independent advisers, and how such firms are organized.
The term and the trade
In the shorthand of the trade press, a Registered Investment Advisor is an RIA: an advisory business registered as an investment adviser, paid to advise clients rather than to sell them products. The entry on what a Registered Investment Advisor is sets out the legal definition with its sources. A Wall Street Journal briefing uses the term for the registered investment advisory firms that advisers either build from nothing or bolt onto, and it names, as one kind of supporting organization, a company that provides investment and technology services to such firms.4 That is the general shape of the model: an advisory practice at the front, holding the client relationship, and a layer of organizations behind it supplying the pieces a small practice cannot build alone.
Where the accounts are held
An advisory firm does not keep its clients’ money in its own vault. A trade magazine for advisers describes the custodians that hold the accounts, a market in which four large firms were reported to control roughly 85 percent of the business, and a crowd of smaller rivals competing on pricing, technology and service.3 The same report cites a 2023 research finding that just 4 percent of advisory firms had changed custodians in the previous twelve months, because moving accounts means repapering every client and learning new systems, while one in four firms had explored adding a second custodian for products or services the primary one did not offer.3 The entry on what a custodian does explains the division of roles.
Solo practices and ensembles
How the advisers themselves are organized varies more than clients usually see. A 2014 analysis in WealthManagement.com reported that 47 percent of advisers in that year’s compensation survey worked alone, another 20 percent sat inside a branch with little in common with their neighbors beyond the office and overhead, and 33 percent worked in teams building a business together; among registered investment advisory firms, teams made up half of the structures.1 The pressures pushing solo advisers toward partners were capacity, the need for resources such as better technology and research, the question of who carries a practice on when its owner retires, and consolidation across the industry.1 The author’s test for any merger was a single question: what can two practices do together that neither can do alone, and his warning was that control is what a solo adviser surrenders in exchange for resources and support.1 The entry on how independent advisory practices are organized goes further.
Building a firm or joining one
Independent firms are often founded by advisers who leave larger institutions. The Wall Street Journal told the story of one team that resigned from a large brokerage in Pennsylvania after half a year of quiet preparation to open its own advisory firm, and described the pattern as a trend reshaping the industry and eroding the dominance of Wall Street.2 For an adviser weighing that move, the Journal’s briefing listed three questions: whether the adviser is an entrepreneur at heart, how the economics of the models compare given the adviser’s clients and revenue, and whether the adviser’s spouse is committed to the pressures the move brings.4 It noted that advisory firms assign multiples to the cash flow of practices that bolt on, but do not pay the signing bonuses that large brokerages do.4
What a supporting organization does
Put those pieces together and the role of a support organization for independent advisers becomes clear. The custodian holds the accounts; the technology, research, operations and compliance that a solo practice struggles to afford are what an ensemble or a support platform supplies; and the adviser keeps the client relationship, which is the part a client actually experiences. The sources above describe that division from the outside, as an industry structure. This page names where he works as plain fact and nothing more; the subject index on independent advisory firms carries the entries that go further, and the entry on the rise of the independent advisor tells how the model grew.