The chief executive of St James's Place has acknowledged there will be advisers in the industry who the wealth firm will never be able to convert to its way of doing business.
Speaking after the FTSE 100 firm revealed it had grown its adviser numbers to 3,661 during 2017, Mr Croft said SJP aims to increase the amount of intermediaries by between 6 and 8 per cent a year.
Mr Croft said SJP will be developing its infrastructure and the support it offers its advisers in order to remain the "go to" place for advisers.
But Mr Croft said: "Those people that have the [negative] view that they have on St James's Place, I don't think we are ever really going to change their opinions.
"But we have a lot of conversations with a lot of good businesses in the IFA world.
"We will just continue to develop the support we offer to our advisers and to our adviser businesses and the support we offer to clients. We will broaden that and we will broaden the investment proposition.
"We are talking to people over many years and for whatever reason they have continued to talk to us and decided that now is the right time to join St James's Place.
"What we tend to get people saying 'I wish I had joined years ago'."
Mr Croft said there would be a strong emphasis on the St James's Place Academy for the company's growth.
Many of the 261 people currently in the programme will graduate in 2018 and 2019 and Mr Croft said SJP will continue to support those advisers who wish to progress to Chartered status.
Last week SJP announced that its profits for 2017 increase by nearly a third to £186m after seeing record inflows.
The company saw record gross inflows of £14.6bn, taking its total funds under management to £90.7bn.
Mr Croft also said SJP was looking into ways of holding onto its growing assets when its clients begin passing on their wealth to the next generation.
He said SJP is addressing this by emphasising the service it can provide and by "bridging the gap between parents and children".
Mr Croft said: "The research we have done with Capital Economics suggests there is a £2.8trn intergenerational transfer expected over the next two to three decades.
"We are highlighting that this is an important area where we have services that we make available to our clients to us help, for example around probate. We also have services that help parents wanting to help their children get onto the property ladder.
"What I see from my daughter as she grows older is she wants to deal with IT less and less but what happens as people get older they find they have less and less time in their lives because they become busy, their affairs become more complex and the amounts they have to invest become larger.
"They think they quite fancy finding someone to help them with the complexities of this world."
damian.fantato@ft.com
