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2025 Top Retirement Plan Adviser: Michael Francis
Thoughts from Michael Francis, with Francis LLC.
This year, PLANADVISER followed up with advisers on our 2025 Top Retirement Plan Advisers list to get to know them better. These are the responses from Michael Francis of Francis LLC in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
PLANADVISER: For those plan sponsors looking for a new plan adviser, describe what makes your firm stand out.
Michael Francis: People seeking professional advice expect the best information possible at a fair price. Imagine going to an accountant for tax advice and learning the accountant can manipulate his own compensation depending on what advice he gives. Alternatively, imagine going to an estate planning attorney and being told your estate plan—trusts, wills, powers of attorney, etc.—was going to cost you a percentage of your liquid net worth each year for the rest of your life. Most people would find either of these scenarios unacceptable when seeking tax or legal advice.
Yet when people seek an investment adviser, this is typically what they’re asked to accept—an adviser with the power to inflate [his] own compensation at your expense and/or one that expects to get paid a fee in perpetuity for what was a few hours work.
Multiple studies have shown that the conflicted compensation schemes most investment advisers foist on their clients lead to overpaying for investment products and services and suboptimal performance.
At Francis, our advisers get paid like you pay your accountant or attorney, based on the time and expertise required to give you the best advice possible. We push back against the industry’s conflicted and unfair compensation schemes, and that means we provide superior advice at a meaningfully lower cost to our clients. This means better results, period.
Our firm exists for one purpose: to provide conflict-free advice to sponsors of qualified retirement plans and their employees. Because of its focus, our firm’s business model is different than any other you will consider for this assignment. Specifically, we sell no investment products; accept no remuneration of any kind from any third-party service provider (asset manager, recordkeeper, trust or custody); only charge clients based on the time and expertise required to complete the work contracted (no asset-based compensation); and are 100% employee owned.
Furthermore, to ensure our clients’ employees receive financial planning and investment advice that is solely in their best interest, we do not offer wealth management services to individuals. This ensures that our advisers are conflict-free when an employee asks them what to do with [that person’s] hard-earned savings at retirement.
It should go without saying, but because there is so much money spent on advertising to convince people otherwise, conflict-free investment advice is superior to conflicted investment advice—even when properly disclosed and rigorously supervised. Our business model delivers superior results, a fact to which our many satisfied clients will gladly attest.
Click to see the list of 2025 Top Retirement Plan Advisers |
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