.png)
The Company
Premier Wealth Partners is a private wealth advisory practice of Ameriprise Financial, headquartered in Pittsburgh with offices across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Florida. The team helps clients plan, invest, and navigate life's biggest financial decisions, guided by a purpose the practice calls its Just Cause: helping others achieve their impossible, one conversation at a time. The practice is growing quickly, including through acquisition, and its leaders want the culture to grow with it.
The Challenge
Growth exposed a gap in the middle. The executive team had strong development of its own, and newer team members had mentorship. But the emerging leaders in between, the high performers being prepared for bigger roles, had nothing built for them. The executives knew they could not fill that gap themselves. They did not have the capacity, and after months of research they had not found a program that could meet people at different levels while building a shared playbook for how the practice leads, not just what it does.
- A Missing Middle: Development existed for executives and newer employees, but not for the emerging leaders the practice was counting on next.
- No Internal Capacity: A lean leadership team could not design and deliver a real development program on top of running the business.
- One Shared Language: As the practice grew and acquired, leadership wanted feedback, collaboration, and self-leadership to become everyday habits, not personality traits.
The Solution
Premier Wealth Partners started small with Bundle in 2025, putting a first group of leaders through live, one-on-one training. What they saw convinced them to build something bigger. In January 2026, the practice launched the Aspire Leadership Academy: a structured pathway of nine one-on-one sessions with an expert trainer, plus live peer reinforcement sessions where the cohort practices together. The cohort brought together the practice's rising leaders. Sessions cover the skills the practice cares most about, including communication, emotional intelligence, empathy, critical thinking, storytelling, and managing stress, each one tailored to the learner's actual role and clients.
The Results
The Academy is in full swing, and the clearest proof so far is what Premier Wealth Partners keeps doing: adding people to it.
- They Kept Adding Seats: The practice added a learner within weeks of launch, then opened more seats in May, with the one-on-one format letting newcomers catch up and join the group mid-program.
- Near-Perfect Ratings: Across dozens of rated sessions so far, learners score the program 4.9 out of 5 for overall experience, 4.9 for trainer effectiveness, 4.9 for engagement, and 4.8 for relevance to their role.
- Learners Would Send Their Colleagues: Session feedback to date works out to a Net Promoter Score of 78.
- Practice, Not Presentations: In their own comments, learners keep pointing to the same things: role-playing real scenarios, working through actual cases, and trainers who adapt the session in real time.
- Steady, Consistent Momentum: Learners have kept a one-to-two session monthly rhythm since January, with participation holding strong into the fall.
The Future
The cohort runs through the end of 2026, with peer reinforcement sessions bringing the group together and credentials awarded at completion. The Academy has given the practice what it set out to build: a consistent, repeatable way to develop its next generation of leaders. As Premier Wealth Partners keeps growing, the plan is for the Aspire Leadership Academy to keep growing with it.
.png)
