PLANADVISER: What professional experience or lesson has had a lasting impact on how you approach advising or leadership?
Daley: Before I co-founded Multnomah Group, I spent the early part of my career on the vendor side of this industry. I led the Portland practice of a national retirement services firm and served on its investment committee. I learned a lot. I also learned something I didn’t expect: how often the structure of the business put the vendor’s interests ahead of the plan sponsor’s. Decisions that should have been about what was best for participants were too often filtered through what was best for the platform or for next quarter’s revenue.
That disconnect is what led Scott Cameron and I to launch Multnomah Group in November 2003. We built an employee-owned firm so we could work directly with plan sponsors without the constraints of any single vendor platform. The lesson I took from those vendor-side years has shaped every decision since: Structure determines behavior. How a firm is owned, how it’s compensated and who it answers to will, over time, dictate the advice it gives. You can’t conflict-check your way around an ownership model that rewards conflicts.
I had a mentor early on who reinforced this in a different way. When we workshopped the original Multnomah Group business plan with him, I expected a debate about strategy. Every question he asked was about execution, people and culture. Twenty-two years later, I think about that conversation almost weekly. Plan sponsors don’t need clever frameworks. They need accurate, actionable advice, delivered consistently by a team that will still be here in five years. That’s a culture problem before it’s an investment problem.
PLANADVISER: What industry trends or developments do you believe will most influence retirement plan advising over the next five to 10 years, and how are you/your firm preparing for them?
Daley: Two trends will define the next decade, and they’re related.
The first is the private equity rollup of retirement plan advisory. Private equity-backed consolidators now control a meaningful share of the assets under administration in our industry, and the pace is accelerating. The economic logic of these deals requires margin expansion through scale, cross-sell, proprietary products and “platform” revenue. This pulls the advice further from the participant. I’ve written extensively about why I believe private equity ownership and Employee Retirement Income Security Act fiduciary duty are structurally difficult to reconcile, and I think plan sponsors are going to have to ask harder questions about who actually owns their adviser and what that ownership demands of them.
The second is what I’ve called the asset drift “beyond the perimeter” of the traditional investment menu. Recordkeepers are no longer just administrators; they’re platforms, monetizing managed accounts, retirement income products, IRA rollovers, financial wellness and increasingly opaque allocations to alternatives and private market structures.
We’re preparing for both in the same way: by staying independent and by investing in technical depth. We’ve expanded our ERISA technical services, vendor services and investment research functions because the questions sponsors need answered are getting more technical, not less. We’re also aggressively writing white papers, regulatory updates and client briefings, because part of our job is making sure the sponsors we serve see what’s coming before it lands on their desk.
PLANADVISER: For plan sponsors evaluating advisers, what characteristics or capabilities distinguish you from your peers?
Daley: Three things, in order of importance.
Structural independence. Multnomah Group is 100% employee-owned, with no parent, no investor, no affiliate and no broker/dealer relationship. We earn nothing other than the disclosed fees our clients pay us. That isn’t a marketing line; it’s the entire premise of the firm, and it’s increasingly rare. When we benchmark fees, evaluate recordkeepers or analyze a managed account program, the answer we deliver is the answer. There’s no other shareholder in the room.
Technical depth across the practice. Our investment team conducts proprietary manager research. Our vendor services team maintains a proprietary recordkeeper database built from years of search work. Our technical team tracks regulatory and litigation developments and translates them into action items for committees. Most plan sponsors don’t need a generalist; they need a team that can go deep on the specific question in front of them. That’s how we’re built.
Sector range with real experience. We serve defined contribution plans across corporate, governmental, nonprofit and higher education sectors. Each has its own legal framework, governance norms and market dynamics. We don’t treat governmental 457(b) plans like ERISA plans, and we don’t treat 403(b) plans like 401(k) plans. The range matters because the issues bleed across sectors, because what’s litigated in ERISA today shows up in governmental plan governance two years later, and because a firm that only sees one slice of the market misses those signals.
The thread connecting all three is the same one we identified 22 years ago. Strategy is easy to talk about. Execution, people and culture are what actually serve participants. That’s what we try to be measured on.