Contact Our Research Team for Advisor Practice Insights

How to Reach Advisor Impact

The fastest way to reach us is email. Send a note to [email protected] and it lands in front of a real person on the research team, not a routing queue that shuffles your message across three departments before someone reads it.

We keep the front door deliberately simple. One address handles everything from media questions to data-sharing requests, and we triage internally rather than asking you to guess which inbox fits your query. If your message is time-sensitive, say so in the subject line. That single cue reshapes how quickly it moves through our queue.

We read messages in English. If you're writing from a non-English-speaking practice or institution, a plain-language summary of what you need works better than a polished formal letter — we'd rather understand your goal than admire your prose.

What to Include in Your Message

A useful inquiry answers three questions before we have to ask them: who you are, what you're trying to learn or build, and what a good outcome looks like for you.

Consider a financial advisor who wants to compare their client-loyalty scores against a wider sample. The message that gets a fast, specific reply reads something like: "Solo RIA, roughly 140 households, running annual client surveys for three years, want to know whether my retention figures track with firms my size." That's enough for us to point you toward the right frame of reference or explain why a clean comparison isn't possible with the data on hand.

Details that consistently help:

Attachments are fine. If you're referencing your own client data, strip identifying information first — we don't need it, and neither of us wants it in an inbox.

Collaboration and Research Opportunities

Most of our meaningful work starts as a conversation rather than a proposal. Practitioners bring us the questions that don't fit neatly into existing studies, and some of those questions become the next round of research.

We collaborate in a few recurring shapes. Firms sometimes contribute anonymized feedback data to broaden a benchmark sample. Industry bodies occasionally co-design a study on a theme like referral behavior or advisor capacity. Individual advisors pilot a measurement approach and report back on what held up in daily use and what fell apart.

One clarifying note on our benchmarking claims: the comparisons we publish hold within the segments we actually sampled, and we're explicit about where a figure rests on a thin slice of respondents rather than a broad one. That boundary matters more in practice research than in most fields, because a loyalty pattern among large wirehouse teams tells you little about a two-person planning shop.

Our collaboration with several practice-management groups has run across consecutive research cycles rather than a single project, which is part of why the benchmark questions have grown sharper over time. If you have a dataset, a hypothesis, or a stubborn practice problem worth studying, the collaboration inbox is the same as every other: [email protected].

For PhD Students and Researchers

We hear regularly from doctoral students working on advisor behavior, client trust, and service-firm economics. A few notes save everyone time.

What we can offer

Access to framing, prior study design, and — depending on the topic and stage, conversations with the researchers who built our measurement instruments. We're most useful early, when your question is still taking shape, and again late, when you're pressure-testing an interpretation.

What we ask in return

Clarity about your program, your advisor, and your timeline. Tell us whether you're looking for informal input, a citable data reference, or something closer to a formal partnership. Those are three different commitments, and conflating them tends to stall a promising exchange.

If your work touches client-level data, read our Privacy Policy before you write — it will tell you quickly whether the data you're imagining is data we can share.

Lab Visit Requests and Protocols

Visits to our research space happen, but they're scheduled deliberately rather than dropped in. We host a limited number each quarter, weighted toward active collaborators and researchers whose work overlaps directly with a study in progress.

To request one, email us at least three weeks ahead with the purpose of the visit and who's attending. That lead time isn't bureaucratic caution — it lets us line up the right people, because a visit where the researcher you needed to meet is traveling helps no one.

A few standing protocols shape any visit:

• We confirm scope in writing before you arrive, so both sides know which discussions are on the table and which touch confidential firm data.
• Recording during sessions needs prior agreement, particularly when unpublished findings come up.
• Group visits work best kept small; conversations stay sharper with four people than fourteen.

If travel is impractical, most of what a visit accomplishes translates cleanly to a scheduled video session, and we treat those requests the same way.

What Happens After You Reach Out

Once your message arrives, it moves through a short, human sequence. Someone reads it, decides who's best placed to respond, and either replies directly or flags that a specialist will follow up. Straightforward questions usually close in a single exchange. Collaboration and PhD inquiries take longer, because a thoughtful answer often means checking a dataset or looping in a second researcher.

You won't get an automated acknowledgment that pretends to be a reply. If your note needs more time, we'll tell you it needs more time.

Should your inquiry fall outside what we can help with, we say so plainly and, where we can, point you somewhere more useful. A referral-growth question that's really a compliance question, for instance, belongs with a different kind of expert, and we'd rather tell you that on day one than three weeks in.

If you want a sense of who's likely to read your message and how the team is structured, the Leadership and About Advisor Impact pages fill in the picture.

So before you draft that email, ask yourself the question that determines how fast you'll get a useful answer: what single decision are you hoping our reply will help you make?