YeskeBuie’s Succession Plan: Q&A with the ‘C3Os’

Our Clients — your needs and helping you feel secure in your financial future — inform all aspects of our work at YeskeBuie. As our Founders, Dave and Elissa, prepared to retire at the end of 2025, our new C3Os, Lauren, Lauren, and Yusuf, sat down for an exclusive interview with Tobias Salinger at Financial Planning. In the interview, they talked about YeskeBuie‘s succession plan and how it set the company up for seamless, continued success in serving Clients. We’re honored to share a preview of the article and our C3O’s thoughts below. You can also click here for the full article.

At the beginning of [2026], two stalwart planners who built their registered investment advisory firm and shaped countless financial advisors’ careers will step down from their roles.

Elissa Buie and Dave Yeske, spouses who are the founders of Vienna, Virginia- and San Francisco-based RIA firm YeskeBuie, will hand the reins of the firm to its three partners: Yusuf Abugideiri, Lauren Stansell and Lauren Mireles, the firm said last month. The company calls the three successors its “C3Os.”

Besides the change at the top, the company will alter its name in January to YeskeBuie, which it described as “turning what began as two proper nouns into an adjective that defines the highest standard of excellence in the financial planning profession.”

In addition to building the RIA into a firm with nearly $1 billion in assets under management, the founders have each acted in leadership roles at the Financial Planning Association from its launch 25 years ago, written widely read papers in the field that have shed light on planning practice, careers and history, and taught aspiring planners at Golden Gate University. Both are past winners of the FPA’s P. Kemp Fain, Jr. Award for lifetime achievement in the field, among other honors throughout their careers.

Buie and Yeske pledged to keep stakes in the firm, remain co-chairs of its board and attend future events at YeskeBuie, even as they drop the day-to-day duties of leading the RIA. But in the firm’s announcement, they wrote that their firm’s “standard of excellence is nonnegotiable,” and the sole difference that Clients will notice is the company’s “ongoing improvement as the firm continues to be a learning, evolving leader in the financial planning profession.

“The firm is committed to being independently owned, ensuring that its leadership retains full control over decision-making and client experience,” the company said in a press release. “This independence allows YeskeBuie to continue offering real financial planning (strategic and human-focused) to real human beings for whom they care from the bottom of their hearts.”

Check out feature quotes from our C3Os below, or continue reading the full article here.

FP: One thing that the company made clear in the announcement is the commitment to being independently owned and being independent. What does “independent” mean in terms of practice and in terms of structure at your firm going forward?

“We feel very strongly about the ways that financial planning should be done, and we want to be able to practice financial planning as fiduciaries with our Clients’ best interest first and foremost, in the way that we believe it should be practiced. And we don’t want to be beholden to anybody else’s expectations, considerations, requirements. 

We take the responsibility and the trust that our Clients place in us very seriously. We three have had the privilege of learning from two of the best who have ever done it, and so we feel clear about what the expectations and standards are internally. And for us, that’s where it begins and ends.”

FP: The whole profession, in a sense, is thinking about [succession planning], just because there are so many founders of large advisory practices and RIAs who are set to retire over the next decade. What are some lessons [you’ve learned] that others could take away from the transition at your firm?

“There has to be significant trust and communication, and you have to be able to have a lot of hard conversations for founders to be handing off their firm. As we see our Clients, too, it is a huge deal, and it’s not easy for them, and it’s not easy for people coming in.

At the end of the day, you have to know that you’re all on the same team. It’s not an ‘us versus them.’ One of the things that we talked about recently was that it’s not a new baton that we’re carrying forward, or a new torch that we’re carrying forward. It is the same torch that has always existed that we are now carrying, and they’ve been right with us, and now they’ll be on the sidelines cheering, but it’s still the same exact torch. It’s that underlying knowledge that everyone’s on the same team, and that you have to be willing to have the hard conversations and have a safe space to know that you can have the hard conversations to make sure it’s done right.”

FP: Is there anything else that our audience should know about this transition, or anything else involving YeskeBuie?

“I’d like to emphasize that we can’t do this without the team that is supporting us. This transition — serving Clients and entering into this big role — creates big shoes to fill. As Yusuf talked about, Dave and Elissa are two of the best financial planners in the profession, and it is our shared expectation that we exceed their accomplishments. We have a fantastic team supporting us and supporting our Clients, and so we’re very grateful for them.”