Zoop Alpha Advisors is a fractional family office for independent solo and small RIA owners: one shared investment desk, tax team, estate desk, insurance line, marketing engine, and compliance team you plug into, without selling your practice or your name.
A one or two person practice can build a real book. What it usually can’t build, on its own, is the bench: the tax desk, the estate team, the investment research, and a real answer to what happens to your clients the day you stop working.
Tax questions get referred out to the client’s own CPA, so tax strategy never happens before the return is filed, when it could still change the outcome.
Portfolios get built on the same off-the-shelf models any advisor, or any app, can offer. There’s no dedicated research behind the number a client sees.
New introductions depend entirely on you remembering to follow up. There’s no system quietly working the gap between a first meeting and a third.
If you step back tomorrow, whether by choice or by accident, there’s no documented plan for who serves your clients, or what your practice is actually worth.
You join, you don’t sell. Your clients, your brand, and how you run your day stay yours. What changes is everything running behind you.
Heavy-tail portfolio construction, long-dated options overlays, and structured notes, run by a dedicated quant most solo firms could never afford on their own.
Ten years of IRS and state tax data feeds straight into the planning and estate work, and specialists work alongside a client’s CPA to reduce taxes and convert qualified accounts.
Documents drafted, notarized, and actually funded, completed in minutes, using what the rest of the platform already knows about the client.
Insurance agents bring cases that arrive already sold. The client has decided, and the case does not close without your license to complete it.
A branded landing page, LinkedIn outreach, and webinar campaigns, built and compliance-reviewed before a single message goes out.
Independent custody, compliant archiving across every channel, and credential control: the risk most firms are carrying without realizing it, until an exam finds it.
Advisory fees are the floor, not the whole picture. Every founding advisor also earns points toward the Founder’s Pool, a 15% ownership stake in the platform that vests once it reaches $500 million in assets.
Points earned per $1 million you bring to the platform double while the platform is still small. The rate steps back down once total platform assets pass $100 million.
Two pills on the table. Only one of them is actually a decision.
Nothing changes.
Keep running the practice exactly as it is and hope things quietly improve on their own. Hope the right acquisition offer eventually calls. Hope your clients never realize how much of what you do they could get elsewhere for next to nothing. Ride it out until it stops working.
You plug in.
A story no one else in your market can tell. An investment desk you could never hire on your own. Agents and a marketing engine putting cases on your calendar instead of you chasing them. Most of the overhead gone, an ownership stake in place of a book nobody is offering to buy, and for the first time, a real plan for how this ends.
Twenty minutes is what it costs to find out. We model your book, your fees, and your costs against the platform, and if it does not clearly beat what you already have, you stay right where you are.
Roughly 75% of a book is expected to follow within this window, so the number that shows up on transition day rarely surprises anyone.
Letter of intent signed. Paperwork and your client transition plan begin immediately.
You resign and give notice. Account paperwork is already prepared alongside it.
You call every client yourself. Each one signs a new agreement and a transfer form.
Transfers settle. Standard accounts land at Schwab as they arrive.
You’re live on the platform and its systems. Your book is now an ownership stake.
The infrastructure behind you changes what you’re able to say across the desk, not just how you say it.
The left column is available from any advisor, or an app. The right column is what turns a first meeting into a client for life.
A platform asking you to move your practice should hold up under real scrutiny. Here’s what to verify before you do.
Zoop Alpha Advisors, LLC is an SEC and state-registered investment adviser, subject to the same regulatory oversight as any advisory firm.
Client assets are held at Schwab, not by Zoop Alpha. The platform never has direct custody of a client’s money.
Form ADV Part 2A is available on request. Any conflict of interest, including the relationship with affiliate Zoop Benefits, is disclosed there.
You keep your book. This is a platform membership, not a buyout, an earn-out, or a claim on the clients you’ve already built trust with.
Twenty minutes is enough to model your book against the platform and see the real numbers side by side.
No. You’re joining a shared platform, not selling your practice. You keep your clients, your name, and how you run your day. What changes is the infrastructure behind you.
You call each one yourself during the transition window. Nothing moves to a new agreement or a new custodian without that client signing off first.
Advisory fees on the assets you manage, plus overrides, tax and estate program shares, and insurance commissions where licensed. On top of that, every dollar you bring earns points toward a 15% ownership pool that vests at $500M in platform assets. The full breakdown is in the Compensation section above.
Most advisors are live on the platform and holding funded client accounts within 30 to 45 days of signing a letter of intent. See the full week-by-week breakdown above.
Independent custody, not the platform. Client assets are held at Schwab, the same structure used across the independent advisory industry.
Three founding conversations, condensed. If one of these sounds like your Tuesday, that’s not a coincidence.
He left a wirehouse to build something of his own and found that most of the job is not advising at all. Mornings on paperwork, evenings deciding whether the planning software is worth the money. It is, and he cannot afford it yet. What he offers a prospect is the same broken model portfolio the last three offered. A portfolio they could build themselves on Robinhood in an afternoon, without him. Nothing different. Nothing compelling. He is credible, careful, and completely undifferentiated. The full stack, the investment desk, and the tax and estate work. None of it billed to him. He stops competing on being likeable and starts competing on capability. Agents and the marketing engine send him cases instead of him hunting alone.
Dana does everything. She trades, she bills, she plans, she markets when there is time, and she is her own compliance officer. She converts what she can and services what she has, and there is nothing left over. The deficiency letter cited communications that were never archived (years of client texts on a personal phone with no capture at all), along with marketing that went out without documented review. Remediation she pays for, the possibility of a fine, and a quarter spent on paperwork instead of clients. The program, the filings, the review, and an archive already capturing text, mobile, and call channels. Somebody else’s name is on the registration. Trading, billing, and onboarding move to the firm. The hours come back. 80% of the book she brings, permanently, plus four other ways to be paid.
Ray hired two junior advisors to buy back his calendar. One left after fourteen months and took a large handful of households with her. The other needed babysitting, so Ray reluctantly became a manager. His income went the wrong way along with his time and compliance risk. New assets now roughly equal attrition. He has been flat for three years, working as hard as he did at $40 million with the number not moving, and the offers he has seen for the practice are not offers he would take. Junior advisors are onboarded, trained, and supervised on the firm’s systems. Efficient supervision, not a management job. Tax work surfaces assets inside his own book every review cycle, and retention rises across the whole household. An $85 million book becomes 85 points: inside the founding window, 170, or roughly 3% of the enterprise valuation.
Pick a time below. Twenty minutes with a founding advisor lead, real numbers for your specific book.