How we think about the work.
Most RIA marketing begins at the surface — a new website, a refreshed logo, a content calendar. The work looks productive. But six months later, the firm is wondering why nothing has changed.
The reason is almost always the same: nobody did the foundational work first.
Before we design anything, we need to understand your firm's competitive positioning, your ideal client's decision-making process, the compliance framework everything must live within, and how your existing technology either supports or undermines your client experience. That foundation is where the real value is created. The website is just what people see.
The problem we solve.
There is a gap in the RIA industry between the quality of the advisory relationship and the quality of the digital experience. We call it the translation gap.
Your best clients would describe their relationship with your firm in words like "trusted," "personal," "indispensable." But your website says "comprehensive financial planning" and "personalized service" — the same language used by 16,000 other independent advisors.
The advisory relationship is exceptional. The digital translation is generic. And in a world where the next generation of clients will judge your firm by its digital presence before they ever take a meeting, that gap is no longer a branding problem. It's a growth problem.
Clarion exists to close it.
Designed within the rules, not around them.
The SEC Marketing Rule, effective since November 2022, fundamentally changed what RIAs can do with testimonials, endorsements, performance advertising, and third-party ratings. Most firms are still designing around the old constraints — either because their compliance team has not adapted, or because their marketing partner does not understand the rules well enough to take advantage of the new possibilities.
We design every engagement to live within the compliance framework your CCO operates under. Your CCO joins the creative process from the first conversation, not as a final checkpoint. The templates we produce are designed to clear review the first time. The marketing assets we deliver are built to fit your firm's existing archival and publishing workflow — not to require a new one.
This is the discipline that most agencies cannot offer. Designing within the SEC Marketing Rule is not a feature we added. It is the frame we work in.
Designed to fit your stack.
Your firm runs on systems your team already trusts — your CRM, your portfolio reporting platform, your planning tools, your compliance archive. Those systems are operated by partners whose entire business is keeping them running. We do not replace them, and we do not pretend to.
What we do is design the digital experience that sits on top of them — the brand, the website, the touchpoints your clients actually see and judge you by. Where a touchpoint needs to communicate with a system you already use — a contact form that delivers to your CRM, an asset that needs to live in your archival workflow — we coordinate with the partners who own those systems and design the handoff so the client never feels the seam.
The result is a digital presence that feels like one firm to your clients, built to fit the operational stack you have already invested in. The systems beneath stay where they belong, in the hands of the people who run them well. The surface is ours to design.
What marketing actually needs to do.
We organize every engagement around three jobs that marketing must perform. Not twelve. Not a content calendar's worth. Three.
Can your ideal client find you? Not through Google Ads targeting "financial advisor near me" — your $5M clients aren't searching that way. Through the channels that actually reach sophisticated investors: referral networks, COI relationships, industry presence, and a digital footprint that closes the deal when a referred prospect looks you up.
When they find you, do they want what you're offering? Not "comprehensive financial planning" — everyone offers that. The specific, differentiated value that makes your firm the obvious choice for the specific type of client you serve best.
Do they believe you can deliver? This is where the digital experience does its heaviest work. A website that looks and feels like a serious institution — not a template — builds the trust that converts a curious referral into a scheduled meeting.
When all three jobs are working together, growth follows. When any one of them is broken, no amount of content production or ad spend will compensate.
A small number of engagements each year.
Clarion is a single-principal studio by deliberate choice. The work requires that the founder builds it; the founder cannot build many at once. That is a constraint, and it is also the standard.
It's also why the work reads differently than what scales past a few hands can produce — the reasoning for that trade-off is laid out in Studio vs. the MSP.
We work with
- Independent fee-only registered investment advisers, $100M–$1B AUM
- Owner-operated firms where the principal is the brand
- Firms with a specific specialization or defensible niche
- Premium professional-services firms with a similar profile
Not the right fit
- Large multi-office firms with internal marketing teams
- Firms looking for a marketing agency or lead-gen partner
- Firms wanting to bolt schema onto an existing Wix or Squarespace site
- Anyone seeking the cheapest option
Six to eight weeks, scoped to the work.
An engagement is a sequence of considered decisions, not a templated build. Each phase has a defined output. Each transition is a moment to pause and confirm we are building what the firm actually needs.
What the methodology looks like, built.
Clarion's first RIA engagements are forming now. In the meantime, the methodology has been applied across professional services, trade, and consumer categories, where the work is live and the build quality is visible.
Northwest Lagotto: read the case study →
Investment.
Engagements begin at $35,000 and are scoped to the work.
Most engagements land between $35,000 and $65,000, depending on the depth of the editorial system, the number of principal entities, and the complexity of regulatory linkage required. A diagnostic conversation establishes the right scope before either of us commits.
Every engagement begins with a diagnostic conversation. No pitch. No slides. A structured assessment of where you are today and whether there's a fit.
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