After years going solo, Edward Jones advisors now sharing offices
Giant retail brokerage Edward Jones’ decision last year to give its financial advisors more flexibility to work in ways other than its tried and tested, one-advisor, one-office model has spurred 700 financial advisors, or more than 3%, to combine and work in bigger offices, an Edward Jones executive said.
“We’ve always had the traditional single-financial-advisor branch office,” Don Aven, principal for branch and regional development at Edward Jones, said in an interview. “We’ve been doing that for 100 years.”
The firm’s founder, Edward D. Jones Sr., opened the first office in 1922 in St. Louis.
About a year ago, the firm revamped the way its advisors could potentially work, including introducing an option for multiple financial advisors to work under the same roof, with two or more sharing real estate while maintaining their separate relationships with clients, Aven noted.
“This is personal preference,” he said. “A lot of advisors will stay in the branch as a solo operator with a branch office administrator.”
“Now that our multi-financial advisor office is open, there is a definite wow factor for clients and with members of the community,” Jeff Kitchen, an Edward Jones advisor and principal, wrote in an email. “That’s just one of the reasons we wanted to create a multi-FA office.”
Combining offices is also a way for financial advisors to reduce costs; each Edward Jones advisor operates under his or her own profit-and-loss statement.
Edward Jones is a private partnership that also happens to be one of the largest firms in the retail securities industry. For years, it has focused on training financial advisors and finding professionals — think retired schoolteachers or firefighters — who have strong connections to
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