Built as a better alternative
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How it started
Rob Santos founded Arrowroot Family Office in 2013, guided by the lessons of advising clients through the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. He spent his early career inside the big wirehouses, close enough to see how those institutions made money off the people they were supposed to serve. Products were built to pay the firm, technology was updated at whatever pace protected revenue, and the culture treated client services as theater.
He left with a vision to build something better: a wealth advisory firm focused solely on serving clients.
The original brief was simple:
Give families the kind of guidance the ultra-wealthy quietly receive, and stop pretending it has to be reserved for them.
Be a single point of guidance across the whole financial picture rather than one specialist among many.
Take the long view and build the foundation properly before chasing returns.
Do it all under a real fiduciary obligation and refuse to sell products on commission.
Those four principles have not changed since the first client engagement. They are the spine of every practice the firm has launched since.
Expanding the scope
To continue being a single-source of guidance, Arrowroot built three practices that share a single foundation and serve distinct moments in a financial life.
The practice for families whose wealth has reached a scale where the questions get harder and the people answering them matter more. Every dimension of a family's financial life coordinated, including the structures, governance, and next-generation work most firms skip entirely.
Our broad wealth advisory practice serves individuals, families, professionals, and business owners who want their full financial picture, investments, tax, estate, retirement, insurance, equity compensation, and business planning coordinated under one senior advisor.
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Serves privately held companies, including those held by families and founders served by the other practices. Includes outsourced CFO work, business consulting, mergers and acquisitions, and exit planning. One partner from the next decision through the last.
LEARN MOREBuilding a national presence
The firm's geographic reach grew the same way the practices did: by bringing in people who were already doing the work the right way. Over the past decade, Arrowroot has merged with independent advisory practices in Michigan, Virginia, Washington, and Northern California, joining the original Southern California offices. Each merger brought a senior advisor with a built local practice, a defined client base, and a fiduciary standard that matched the firm's. None of them were rolled up into a generic template. The advisors who built those practices still run them.
This structure produces something a national platform cannot replicate and a single-office boutique cannot scale to: senior advisors with real local presence, backed by the bench, technology, and coordination of a firm operating across six markets.
Leading the way with technology
The firm was founded partly because the wirehouse world was unable to adopt the tools its clients deserved. Rob walked away from those institutions with a clear view of what technology should do for an advisory practice and what it should never replace.
Arrowroot was built on institutional-grade infrastructure from day one. eMoney aggregates the full financial picture. Orion runs portfolio reporting and rebalancing. Schwab and Fidelity sit on the custody side. Clients see their whole position in one place, updated in almost real time, with top security standards from enterprise platforms rather than retail apps.
The firm continues to evaluate where new tools, including artificial intelligence, can sharpen analysis, accelerate routine work, and free senior advisors to spend more time on judgment. The standard for adoption has not changed: A tool earns its place when it improves the guidance or shortens the path to it, and when it meets the proper data security obligations. Tools that do not clear that bar do not enter the practice. Technology supports the advisor; the advisor still does the work.
What stays constant
Three practices. Six offices. A growing bench. The work changes shape across all of it. What does not change is the structure underneath:
Fiduciary by obligation and structure: Compensation comes from advisory fees. No house products.
Single-source guidance across the financial life, coordinated under one senior advisor.
A concentrated client load that keeps the senior advisor in the work.
A long-view orientation that runs through every recommendation, every plan, and every decision the firm helps a client make.
Let’s get started
Tell us where you are, where you're headed, and what you're working with. We'll help you get there.
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