September 10, 2026. Ocho Advisor insights

The fee increase most advisors are one letter away from

Advisors who raise fees almost always report the same thing afterward: fewer households left than they feared, and the ones who left were the ones they were quietly subsidizing.

Ask a room of independent advisors when they last changed their fee schedule and most will name a year that starts with 201. The reasons are familiar. The relationships are personal. The market did the raising for them for a decade. And nobody wants to write the letter.

The advisors who have written it describe a consistent pattern. A minimum fee or a higher schedule is announced as a service standard, not a price change. It takes effect next quarter, not next week. Every household gets one of two paths, the new fee or a smaller planning-only engagement, and the advisor calls the households they most want to keep before the letter arrives.

Why it works

Clients do not price advice the way advisors fear they do. The households most likely to leave over a fee change are the ones with the smallest balances and the highest service demand, which is to say the ones the practice was losing money on. Losing them is not a cost. It is capacity coming back.

The three sentences that matter

• What is changing and when, in one line.
• What they get for it, in concrete terms they have already experienced: meetings, tax work, the call they made in March.
• What their choices are, with the door held open on both.

The number to know before you send it

Revenue per household. Sort every household by annual revenue and draw the line where the practice stops making money on a relationship. Everything below the line is the conversation. Everything above it is proof the service is worth what you are about to charge.

Fee compression is not a market force that happens to you. It is the sum of the years you did not have this conversation.

Run your own numbers on the fee pressure calculator. Two basis points a year sounds like nothing until you see it over five.

Want this applied to your practice? Run the Practice Pulse or see Ocho Tools.