"2010 was for us-though for a lot of people it wasn't-a continuation of '09," says Raimondi. "It was a confirmation and continuation, and it allowed you to finally for the first time begin to make some plans to add staff or upgrade your office or do the kinds of things that had been on hold for a couple of years because of revenues declining. We made our acquisition of Oaktree literally at the bottom of the market, that was January 1 of '09. We had two more months of decline and that was it. But the firm had been fully transitioned into Banyan by the middle of '09 and now Banyan was focused for the rest of '09 and all of 2010 in building the kind of firm it wanted to, being confident we were in a rising revenue trend."

"I want to say it's 100% investment management driven, except that we do have a couple of dozen high-end wealth management clients that we do tax and estate planning work for," he says. The firm builds portfolios with small-, mid- and large-cap stocks, growth and value, etc., and also adds an options trading component so that it can create hedge-fund type products in-house.

Greg Miller, the CEO and CIO of Wellesley Investment Advisors in Wellesley, Mass., has carved out a business sub-advising for other RIAs as a manager of convertible bond portfolios. "We manage convertible portfolios for our own private clients, something we've been doing for 20 years. But we also manage money on behalf of other investment professionals who wish to offer an absolute return seeking-strategy to their clients. Since the crash of 2008, many investment professionals have seen the advantages of deploying an outside investment manager with an expertise in managing convertible bonds in an absolute return-seeking strategy."

Wellesley's convertible strategy has the goal of outperforming both equities and fixed income over complete market cycles, he says.

Indeed, outsourcing to specialists might be the wave of the future, suggests SEI's Onofrio. He says that SEI's outsourcing platform saw a 60% increase in users from 2009 to 2010. Onofrio says that one of the heaviest blows the financial crisis dealt to fee-only advisors was that it reduced their revenues at the same time fixed costs were rising. That's meant more advisors are looking at their variable costs.

"If they didn't outsource, then they had a squeeze in profitability," Onofrio says. And at the same time they've been trying to regrow their businesses off this low water mark-but at a time when the clients themselves have changed. "They ran into a much more sophisticated and educated consumer."

Those firms that still want to grow are going to have to more actively seek clients, he says, and must offer a more complete value proposition: tax planning and estate planning and comprehensive retirement. Also they will be able to outsource and automate functions like rebalancing, which is still a huge pile of busywork that drains time.

Onofrio also says that RIAs are often not so good in the client acquisition department, and it's the lack of a regular client acquisition process that keeps firms from getting out of the $100 million to $200 million rut. That's a big deal, he says, since all the money coming off the sidelines now is likely going to gravitate toward the bigger firms, and the smaller firms will continue to struggle.

"If they don't have a client acquisition process in place and it's just by chance and it's not regular-when you say intermittent or a passive process-yeah, they're going to hit a wall," he says. "It's those advisors who look at client acquisitions as an investment in their business, those are the ones that get the best return on that investment, and they have to think of it that way. It's not an expense; it's not a cost."