KICK START: A FAST-GROWING TAR HEEL MONEY MANAGER ATTRACTS ADVISERS BY SHARING A BIG CHUNK OF THE ACTION.

• Author: Dykes, David
• Position: NC TREND: Money Talk: North Carolina's financial set

Robert Russo may be the only N.C. financial adviser who can say he played college football with Peyton Manning, the University of Tennessee quarterback and NFL star. Well, sort of: Russo was a walk-on placekicker at UT who never got into a game.

But that experience forged some lessons that have enabled Russo to enter the big leagues of finance in his 12 years since moving to Charlotte. Fee and commission revenue at his Independent Advisor Alliance investment firm has doubled in size annually since 2014, totaling $54 million last year. The group's 170 advisers in 19 states manage assets of $4.6 billion, mostly in individual accounts. The Philadelphia-area native's first postgraduate job was in corporate sales for the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team. With his initial goal of becoming a sports agent looking like a dream, he moved to California and took an investment broker job with American Express Financial Advisers, now Ameriprise Financial Inc., in 2001. He later jumped to St. Louis-based brokerage A.G. Edwards Inc. for five years before coming to the Charlotte area to escape California's high costs.

Russo, 42, signed up with LPL Financial, a Charlotte-based company that later moved its headquarters to Fort Mill, S.C. While many financial advisers work directly as employees for Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo Advisors or other industry powers, LPL typically contracts with individuals who operate independently. Either way, advisers share a cut of their commissions with the parent organization.

Russo developed a version of an Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction, which takes responsibility for ensuring its affiliated advisers comply with industry and LPL rules. By offering them a significant share of revenue, Russo has attracted advisers whose cumulative assets under management make Independent Advisor Alliance one of the biggest asset managers connected with LPL, according to an LPL spokesman.

Creating a team of advisers struck Russo as a challenging opportunity compared with building his own book of business. The goal was to grow by having an experienced team that would share resources and knowledge while driving down expenses. To ease the...