Hosted by Gui Costin, Founder & CEO, Dakota and Tim Dolan, Vice President, Institutional Sales, Dakota
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Executive Summary:
Episode 48 makes the case for the RIA channel as the first place an emerging manager should build relationships. Gui Costin and Dakota's Tim Dolan explain why wealth manager RIAs, which have discretion and need specialist ideas to grow their own businesses, are among the most receptive buyers of niche strategies, and why the opportunity keeps expanding: roughly 8,000 RIAs in Dakota Marketplace now use outside managers, up from about 650 tracked seven years ago, with 90 new wealth manager RIAs formed in September 2026 alone. The playbook is city scheduling across five cities at a time, with a deliberate focus on $100 million to $500 million firms rather than the largest platforms, which increasingly look like wirehouses and press hard on fees. Tim also covers custodian approval at Schwab, Fidelity, and Pershing as a scale step, not a prerequisite. The episode closes with two table-stakes habits: a quarterly webinar that turns the PM's update into reusable content, and a CRM kept current with call notes written in Claude or ChatGPT.
Show Notes
Products Discussed in This Episode
Dakota Marketplace - View Product The global private markets intelligence platform underlying every channel discussed in this episode: family offices, RIAs, and every other allocator type Dakota tracks, all updated daily.
↓ Download the Platform Guide | Book a Demo
Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce - View Product Referenced in the CRM discipline segment: Dakota's native Salesforce integration for logging call activity, meeting notes, and opportunity stages directly against Dakota Marketplace records.
Book a Demo
Dakota Family Offices - View Product 4,000+ verified family offices in Dakota Marketplace, including direct-investor filtering to isolate family offices that actually use outside managers.
↓ Download the Global Family Office Report
Dakota RIAs - View Product
17,000+ RIAs, 46,000+ verified contacts, CIO bios, investment preferences, and 13F holdings data.
↓ Download the RIA Capital Raising Guide
Resources & Documents Mentioned
The Dakota Way & Be Kind by Gui Costin
The only book written on investment sales: 4 core principles for fundraisers. Available on Kindle and softcover on Amazon.
Request a signed copy
Dakota Way Sales Coaching
A free, 30-minute monthly masterclass taught by Gui Costin covering the four principles of the Dakota Way, including city scheduling, email copy, and CRM discipline. Next session: October 22, 2026.
Register for Sales Coaching
Mastering Quarterly Webinars: Best Practices for Investment Firms
Dakota's step-by-step eBook on planning, hosting, and following up on quarterly webinars, covering webinar structure, technical setup, audience engagement, and post-webinar follow-up strategy.
↓ Download the Quarterly Webinar Guide
Episode #49 airs at 1pm on November 10, 2026
30 mins. Practical tactics. No pitch. Build for boutique investment firms raising capital without the budget of a large firm.
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