In one of his recent YouTube videos, Root Financial founder James Conole sets out to bust the myth that most of us need to keep working until 65 to keep our employer’s health insurance before Medicare kicks in.
“Here’s the uncomfortable truth: that is the single biggest lie keeping you at a job you no longer need,” he says. “In today’s video, I’m going to show you how Medicare is not the gatekeeper to your retirement and what you can do instead.”
Intrigued? So were the more than 7,900 other viewers of Conole’s YouTube channel.
The post is one of over a thousand videos and podcasts posted by Conole and his Root Financial partner, Ari Taublieb, since launching the channel in 2017, and is partly what Conole attributes to his firm growing from zero to $2.4 billion in assets in about six years.
“We’ve been able to generate a lot of inbound [client] demand,” Conole said of the videos and social media strategy. “We try to make it valuable enough that a lot of people want to watch it. And we don’t make it complex or convoluted. Doing that is a waste of my time and your time, because that’s just going to live on the Internet somewhere and no one will ever see it.”
Encinitas, Ca.-based Root Financial made Wealth Management’s RIA Edge 100 list for the first time this year. The solely data-driven list includes firms with strong growth rates in AUM, clients and employees, as well as a high percentage of employees with CFP certificates, among other metrics.
Along with inbound prospect queries, Root has also seen relatively fast team growth, with over 25 advisors joining in the past few years. Each advisor at the firm has a well-produced, client-facing introduction video on the firm’s website.
Conole knew the value of a consumer-friendly content marketing strategy from his earlier success with popular consumer finance influencer Dave Ramsey’s SmartVestor pay-per-lead program, which routes inbound queries to qualified advisors.
A somewhat surprising knock-on effect of the video content strategy is that it has become a powerful recruiting tool for the firm.
“Once we started posting new jobs after getting on YouTube, a ton of people were applying that were saying, ‘hey, we’ve been following your videos for a year or two,” he said. “Not only are they all in on what we’re doing because they’ve been watching, but they’re already somewhat trained on the way we talk and think and the process we go through.”
Root’s client offering focuses heavily on financial planning, including budgeting, retirement strategies and tax management. The website stresses the firm’s focus on “people just like you,” though it also notes that most clients have at least $1 million in assets excluding 401(k)s, real estate, and 529 plans. (According to Root Financial’s Form ADV, about 75% of its clients are categorized as high-net-worth individuals.)
Root’s advisors use a process, developed by Conole, called The Sequoia System, named after the tree with its “deep roots” to “weather any storm.” The system focuses on five areas to build a person’s financial plan: finding purpose, reviewing income, optimizing investments, managing taxes, and planning insurance/estate needs.
Lead financial advisor Brett Grau joined Root in 2025 after over 11 years at Charles Schwab. After interviewing with other firms for years without accepting any offers, he said the ability to provide practical, holistic advice to clients was a draw to Root, given his feeling of being restricted at a larger financial firm.
“Part of what makes it different is how deep we can go with holistic planning,” Grau said. “I can forecast your tax for this year, and I can look for opportunities such as Roth conversions. … how rich these conversations are is just truly phenomenal.”
Grau said at his former job that compliance would often steer him away from such conversations.
“I hope it changes where clients start asking for more of their advisor for what they’re being charged,” he said. “At this stage, I just think so many clients are getting charged for things that advisors say, ‘Well, go talk to your CPA, you know, or ‘go talk to your estate attorney,’ where really the left hand and the right hand should be talking to one another to make this happen.”
Grau, who lives in Colorado and is an avid snowboarder, said he hopes to stay with Root “for the rest of his career,” a sentiment he says is not shared by many of his peers in the industry, given the movement he sees in the broker/dealer and wirehouse worlds.
Conole said he is trying to keep Root’s technology stack flexible to take advantage of the latest tools for financial planning, tax and estate planning. The firm is currently using Right Capital for its financial planning. While it custodies with Charles Schwab, Conole has also added Altruist, driven by an interest in the firm’s artificial intelligence work.
Root is majority owned by Conole, with stakes also held by Taublieb, a controlling member, and Chief Operating and Compliance Officer Alex Stickleman, a noncontrolling member, according to its Form ADV.
Other employees get to participate in growth through synthetic equity, Conole said.
And though the founder and team are looking to grow, he said they aren’t seeking external capital and have no plans to do so in the future.
“It’s fun to be doing things other people aren’t doing,” he said. “It’s a very high-performing, fun culture. Why wouldn’t the best advisors in the industry, specifically the best up-and-coming advisors in the industry, want to work here and spend their careers here? That’s the core of our value creation process.”