Brian McLaughlin, who co-founded customer relationship management (CRM) software developer Redtail Technology in 2003, is stepping down from his role as president of advisor technology at Orion Advisor Solutions, effective Sept. 27.
The 48-year-old says he has no plans to join another company or start a new venture; he is retiring to take a break and spend more time with his family and friends. The company will conduct a search for his replacement and in the meantime, his direct reports will report to Natalie Wolfsen, who was appointed CEO of Orion last September in the wake of Eric Clarke's retirement.
McLaughlin remains a shareholder in Orion and he will continue to serve on the company's board of directors. He will also stay on as an advisor to the CEO for the rest of this year.
“I poured my heart into day-to-day activities and operations and 100% full throttle for 20 years,” McLaughlin said. “I've decided now is the time for me to step back and breathe, get back in tune with my family, friends, and so on, other passions and hobbies that I have.”
“Having him change the nature of his role, but still remain actively involved in Orion, is extremely important to me and an extremely important part of Orion's future,” Wolfsen said.
McLaughlin follows in the footsteps of other company founders in the independent wealth management space who have stepped aside as their firms evolve from startups to sustainable businesses, including Evan Rapoport of SMARtXAllworth's Pat McClain and Scott HansonInvestCloud's John Wise and Nitrogen Aaron Klein. Orion's Clarke, who founded Orion in 1999, as well fits into that category.
McLaughlin was sold Redtail in Orion in 2022. In September of that year, Orion was reorganized into three business segments, with McLaughlin serving as president of Orion Technology Advisors. In that role, he was tasked with unifying Orion's collection of several disparate businesses into a single service platform for advisors.
“It's been more than two years since I sold Redtail to Orion, and a big part of my transition planning has always been aligning the teams, bringing them together and merging them in a way where everyone feels successful and feels opportunity in company. “, he said. “I feel like I've done a lot of that work and actually accomplished that goal, so it makes me feel comfortable that it's a good time to take a less heavy-footed, day-to-day approach.”
With the acquisition of Redtail, Orion saw itself as a “CRM-centric” asset that could orient services around the customer family, as opposed to simply processing a collection of accounts. That so-called “Entity Project” has been McLaughlin's personal mission and a top priority at Orion. It allows the clustered platform to receive a customer or customer record from any tool or service and flow the data through the rest of the ecosystem seamlessly.
McLaughlin co-founded Redtail with Andy Hernandez in 2003 to create a web-based CRM tool that would provide advisors with anytime, anywhere access to their client and calendar data.
They also wanted it to be a dog-friendly company, hence the name “Redtail,” which came from McLaughlin's Golden Retriever, Tucker-Me-Out McLaughlin.
The Redtail name will live on and that unit will continue to operate out of the Sacramento office, where McLaughlin lives.
Orion recently announced that more than 800 of its non-remote employees will gradually return to an office. Managers will return for two days each week starting in September, followed by all other non-remote workers in October.
Concurrent with McLaughlin's departure, Orion will also begin a search for a chief operating officer, a new position. Wolfsen said the firm needs someone focused exclusively on operations and service.
“When we talk to our customers about what they'd like to see more of in Orion, most customers say they'd like to see more of an emphasis on the support and training model, and we felt that it was raised to the level that it deserved an executive who lived and breathed every day,” she said.
Orion is backed by private equity firms TA Associates and Genstar Capital.