By Steven Clark, Senior Managing Director / President – Talent Search
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Private markets spent four decades as an institutional asset class. That ended somewhere in the last five years, and the numbers describing the shift are not incremental. Here is a look at the numbers:
Preqin counted 123 evergreen fund launches in 2025, a record, and 337 launched between 2023 and 2025 out of 661 across the entire preceding decade. Two-thirds of the vehicles that exist were built in the last three years.
Deloitte tracked the semi-liquid segment from 238 funds and $126 billion in 2020 to 455 funds and $349 billion in 2024, and projects $4.1 trillion by 2030 with retail investors contributing more than 40 percent of it.
Morningstar PitchBook put the US evergreen market at $607 billion across 567 funds as of March 31, 2026. Non-traded business development companies went from no assets at all in 2021 to more than $200 billion.
Those vehicles exist for one reason: to move private markets into portfolios that could never previously reach them. The structures came first, the minimums came down next, the regulators are clearing what is left, and the only constraint still standing is scaling the headcount at these investment managers.
Can Alternatives Platforms Scale Fast Enough?
Access is increasingly solved, but market share and scale are evolving in real time. The survey data shows it plainly. Cerulli puts private-market alternatives at roughly 2.4 percent of advisor-directed assets in 2025, moving toward 3.3 percent by 2027, and 4.4 to 5.7 percent for advisors managing at least $500 million. iCapital’s 2026 survey found 89 percent of advisors planning to maintain or increase allocations, with the share actively increasing jumping to 39 percent from 14 percent a year earlier. We see this as near-universal intent, but low single-digit allocations. Can you see the trajectory developing here?
The Value Proposition of Alternatives for RIAs
What has changed underneath all of this is why firms want alternatives at all. Matt Delorso, who runs SEI’s alts platform, made the point at our conference in April that the two reasons advisors allocate are portfolio diversification first and differentiating their own practice second, giving a client something they cannot get elsewhere. Gerasimos Efthimiatos at Chesapeake Asset Management in NYC put it more bluntly from the seat of a firm built around it. His clients could get traditional management and tax work almost anywhere. They come to Chesapeake for the alternatives sleeve specifically.
That reframing is exactly why the managers are moving with purpose. When alternatives were a portfolio decision, a manager’s presence in the wealth channel was a nice-to-have. When alternatives become the reason an advisor picks one platform’s product over another’s, being properly represented, supported, and explained in that advisor’s office stops being optional. That is a distribution build. You need a robust, A-list ground game to win market share.
The Growth Trajectory by the Numbers for Alternatives
Which brings me to the data I actually pay attention to. One research project in alternatives tracks capital formation hiring across the alternatives industry, and their numbers describe a build that has been running hard for three years.
- They recorded 162 private wealth hiring moves in the first quarter of 2026, an all-time quarterly high, against 152 in the first quarter of 2025.
- Full-year wealth management hiring reached 581 moves in 2025, up 33 percent, from 434 in 2024 and 310 in 2023.
- As a share of all hiring across the alternatives industry, private wealth climbed from 9.3 percent in 2023 to 12.6 percent in 2024 to 15.8 percent in 2025.
This is what I want to highlight, underline, and bold: Market share is both ripe and aggressively competitive. You need to have a predictable process (and partner) to help you build out sales leaders, marketers, portfolio specialists, wholesalers, relationship managers, and distributors that can support your vision.
Case Study: An RIA Accelerates Growth with Alternatives
Two firms illustrate what this looks like when it works, and they teach opposite lessons.
StepStone is the cleanest case study available, because the dates are public. In October 2024, with its private wealth platform just past $5 billion, StepStone Private Wealth hired a Global Head of Private Wealth Marketing into a newly created role, and a Director of Enterprise RIA Relationship Management out of a national sales manager seat at Neuberger Berman. That second hire’s entire mandate was to educate, onboard, and service the largest RIA firms in the country. Not managing money. Managing the relationship with the people who allocate to it.
Then look at what happened. The platform reached $10.2 billion by July 2025. It stood at nearly $18 billion by March 31, 2026, with over $2.3 billion of subscriptions in that quarter alone. More than 800 partners now sell StepStone Private Wealth funds, and among platforms that have been selling for at least a year, the average partner distributes two funds, a figure management tracks as its indicator of wealth-channel health.
I am not going to argue those two hires caused a tripling. Products performed, markets cooperated, and a great deal else went right. The sequence is the point. They built an enterprise RIA relationship function and a marketing leadership seat at $5 billion, before the growth arrived, and the coverage was sitting there when the advisor demand showed up. Firms that build distribution after the demand arrives are hiring into a backlog, and hiring into a backlog is the most expensive way to build a wholesaling team.
Case Study: Hamilton Lane’s Rapid Growth + Talent Problem
Hamilton Lane teaches the second lesson. Their evergreen platform reached roughly $15 billion across 11 funds by late 2025, built early and built well. In March 2026, J.P. Morgan Asset Management hired their Co-Head of US Private Wealth Solutions away to become Head of Private Wealth Alternatives, paired her with a national manager, and set the field-based team to reach 20 dedicated client-facing professionals by year end inside a 350-person organization.
That is what success in this category buys you. Build a distribution team that gets results and your people become the most attractive candidates in the industry to the next manager building the same thing. Pay attention to the moves in our space…
- A managing director from Ares to Fortress
- A head of wealth alternatives distribution from Harrison Street to Wellington
- A director from Brookfield Oaktree to StepStone
- A private wealth solutions hire from Hines to Blackstone.
Every one of those is a distribution or relationship seat, not an investment seat, and every one is a competitor poaching a coverage model already proven to work. It reaches the middle of the market too. H.I.G. Capital added three private wealth professionals in May 2026, recruited out of Monroe Capital, Sculptor, and Neuberger Berman, all covering RIA and family office channels.
What You Absolutely Need to Know to Win
Decades of doing this has taught me that the second problem is harder than the first. You might have found solid players early on, but growth and scale? You need to fill new, critical roles and replace departing talent at a high level. Organizational goals are only as attainable as the org chart you build.
Here is the question I would ask if I ran a manager pushing into this channel. It’s not whether advisors want access to alternatives; the data is clear. The question is whether you have people in the field and on the phone who can successfully close the gap between an advisor’s interest and an advisor’s comfort with liquidity, structure, and risk. If the honest answer is that your wholesaling team was built for traditional products and picked up alternatives as a second job, that is not a distribution capability. That is a firm waiting to lose shelf space to whoever staffs the coverage model first.
Are You Playing to Win?
Not everyone in it is going to win. The pool of people who can actually sell, service, and explain private markets to a wealth advisor is small; every competitor can see it, and firms with a robust hiring strategy are winning. There is no standing still: you’re either progressing or falling behind.
If your firm has real market share goals in the alternatives channel, the hiring plan is the growth plan, and it needs to run ahead of advisor demand, not behind it.
That is the work our search practice does: designing the seat, mapping who exists to fill it, and closing the candidate before a competitor does.
If you are building toward a serious position in this category and want to move faster than the firms you are racing against, don’t get left behind. Our robust track record of successful talent searches in alternatives positions us as the go-to name in alternative talent. Our team is here to help you accomplish your growth plan.
Steven Clark is the Senior Managing Director / President – Talent Search of Gladstone Group, a boutique investment bank and retained search firm serving the wealth and investment management industry. Steven has created and executed on winning search strategies for multiple decades. Reach him at contact@gstonellc.com.