The numbers are definitely imposing. LPL Financial is the largest independent and fifth largest U.S. broker-dealer, has 12,500 advisors, a 98% retention rate and its 2008 revenues of nearly $2.6 billion more than doubled those of Raymond James, its next closest competitor in the independent space. Twenty years after the San Diego-based company was formed through the merger of Linsco and Private Ledger, LPL appears to have lapped its rivals, leaving nothing in its rearview mirror.

"Over the last probably four years we've had a chance to increase in size quite well, around the lines of what we hoped for in terms of size measured by revenues," says Mark Casady, chairman and CEO of LPL. "What the market crisis taught us was that our scale has arrived. We've arrived as a company."

Scale comes up a lot when talking with LPL's management team. What is perhaps most daunting for the company's competitors is that the separation LPL has created between itself and everyone else in the independent space appears permanent. Its investments in recruitment, research, technology and service are almost unmatched. Although LPL's executive team mostly sidesteps questions about the competition-their gaze is focused internally, they say-one wonders if the company actually still has any rivals in the independent broker-dealer world.

"That ship has already sailed," says Larry Papike, president of Cross-Search, a recruiting firm in Jamul, Calif. "It used to be 10 years ago that Royal Alliance would compete head-to-head with them for who was going to be the biggest. Now LPL dwarfs all of the AIG broker-dealers. So I don't think anyone is going to compete with them."

Even Casady, hesitant as he is to talk about competitors, offers a sobering assessment of what it would take for a broker-dealer to match LPL's expansion. Through a combination of acquisitions and organic growth, the company now stands at two or three times the size of its next competitor, Casady notes. And he doesn't see how this can be replicated.

"They would have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars," he says. "It would really be tough for someone to say they're going to be like LPL. I don't know how they would do it."

ut despite the company's tremendous growth over the last several years, despite its peerless stature among independent broker-dealers, LPL's place in the greater financial services world is perhaps not as clear as it would seem to be on paper. There is the lingering question of when LPL will finally launch its much-anticipated IPO. There is also the matter of public identity-the company is still relatively unknown outside of the independent world and most consumers have never heard of it. To be fair, LPL's management team insists that it puts no thought into becoming the second coming of Merrill Lynch-which, at the height of its powers, was, of course, a global and iconic financial services company. In fact, the firm has grown mostly outside of the big urban centers of commerce-focusing instead on the suburbs and rural areas in America.

"We never really think of ourselves as being in a certain place in a certain time. So we try not to say we're going to be this big or do these things by this date because it doesn't particularly work well that way," Casady says. "What we try to say is that at the end of the day we want to be the best broker-dealer in America as measured by our customers."

Recruit and Retain

While riding in a golf cart across LPL's pristine campus in San Diego, it's easy to feel as though one has woken up in an Oz-like paradise. There is, obviously, the weather. The blinding sunshine, deep blue sky and warm desert air of the idyllic La Jolla neighborhood, where the company is based, are intoxicating. There are also those weird quirks, maybe peculiar to corporate life in California, but maybe just peculiar to a successful company in general-like, for instance, was that maintenance worker who just passed us actually riding a Segway? He was.

"We spent extra money on this passive lighting," says Bill Dwyer, managing director and president of LPL Financial Advisor Services. He's standing on LPL's trading floor, where people are busy working the phones. And he's right: The lighting is much more muted than the normal harsh fluorescent bulbs that bear down in most office buildings. Dwyer mentions something about setting the tenor and tone just right in the telephones as well. It's all part of a quality-of-life initiative that LPL has emphasized.

"It's about seeing our advisors as customers," Dwyer explains. "It starts with the buildings."