Carson Group Tops $50B in AUM

“This milestone signals the strength of our strategy and the momentum behind a model that puts advisors and their clients first,” White said. “Carson advisors grow more than twice as fast as the industry because every system, service and strategy is engineered to accelerate their success.”

White said Carson is “defined by a culture with a heartbeat.”

“Wins are celebrated and challenges are met,” he said. “Crossing the $50 billion AUM milestone is a tremendous moment for our firm, but what I'm most proud of are our advisors who got us here.”

White also spoke about the importance of the talent that Carson Group has recruited, including the likes of Dani Fava, Heather Zack and Ramesh Vaswani.

“This team has built a truly reinvigorated strategy focused on strong M&A growth, attracting top talent, creating a practitioner-led community and delivering cutting-edge technology,” White said. “The company now has 33 wholly owned Carson Wealth locations and completed 21 acquisitions in 2025 to date, including welcoming 15 new wholly owned Carson Wealth locations this year alone.”

Other key developments, White said, include the rollout of Carson’s tax strategy team under the leadership of Debra Taylor and a dedicated private client services team led by Jamie Carroll. The firm also has benefited, he said, from tech-enabled efficiencies through integrations like Carson’s AI assistant Steve.

Here are some highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity:

THINKADVISOR: This milestone for the firm comes less than two years since you took over as CEO. How are you feeling about the news?

BURT WHITE: What I can say is that it has been a fun three years, especially in the time since I became CEO. Milestones can feel a bit arbitrary, but I think it’s good to take a pause and take a moment to celebrate what we’ve accomplished — to think about where we’ve been and use this milestone as a launching point for what comes next.

As you may recall, when I first came on board, we were at about $20 billion. We had actually been more or less moving sideways at that level for some years at that point. Part of that was choppy markets, of course, but frankly it was also a representation of what you see so frequently in the world of business.

That is, the highly successful strategy that had propelled us to that point was not the same strategy that would propel us to double our assets to $40 billion or now $50 billion. It was not the strategy that would allow us to multiply our earnings by six times or double our profit margins. We’ve accomplished both of those things. At that point, our advisor attrition level was elevated. It’s been cut in half today.

So, overall, our firm is operating with great momentum. It’s real. We can feel that momentum, and it really is coming bottom up. We’re nothing more or less than a community of amazing advisors.

THINKADVISOR: Can you talk us through in greater detail exactly how the strategy has changed? Was it ever painful or challenging to make the necessary changes?

WHITE: We made a concerted decision to say that we needed to make sure we were pulling all the levers of growth. We put a new focus on inorganic growth in a very balanced way. Many have joined us through traditional mergers and acquisitions. At the same time, we have directly acquired a growing number of our top existing partners.

On the organic side, we’ve rolled out an extraordinary number of new growth levers. Tax planning, estate planning, private client services and more. All of this, together, is fueling growth.

In just the last six months, for example, we’ve closed $1.5 billion in new high-net-worth assets through the specialized private client team. We had 10 different clients come in, and every one of those was the largest client that that advisor had ever landed.

But look, let me be candid, change is always hard. When you look at your team and say, “We need to have a different talent strategy and rethink how we’re doing things.” That’s just hard to do, because you know you have great people who have gotten you to where you were. But every firm outgrows its leadership team and strategy. Every good firm does, I should say.

I personally credit Omani for recognizing that and making the call to create this fantastic second generation of leadership.

THINKADVISOR: Tell us more about the dynamic with Omani departing and the new generation coming in.

WHITE: As you know, for several decades, the “Carson story” was all about Ron Omani Carson and his status as a real icon of this industry. For a long time, people came here to be like him.

But I think what Omani realized and what we’ve now embraced fully is that our future is something different. People come here to be the best version of themselves that they can be. That was a genuine change of polarity, and it couldn’t have worked out better. I’m so grateful to Omani for that.

A lot of leaders are unwilling to bring in truly amazing talent, because they come in and they challenge your status quo. They come into the room and change the dynamic. They have ambition and great experience and expertise. They take up space, and maybe you wanted that space. It’s hard to go through that, but that is how you get better.

THINKADVISOR: Advisor production and acquisitions are a key part of this story. But what about market growth? Do you worry about the possibility of a big market downturn? Would that alter your strategy?

WHITE: In the last few years it’s been very easy to be bearish. People have been expecting big drops in the markets, but that hasn’t really materialized — at least not in a lasting way. Our investment team has really been nailing it the last three years, so yes, that’s helped with the growth. We’re bullish about the markets, but cautiously so.

In terms of our strategy, in some ways, investments have taken a back seat to planning, tax, estate, etc. Those lines of business are durable even when markets pull back.

Something else I would point out is that I believe we’re in a very strong overall position, especially relative to some of the other firms out there who have been seen as major acquirers and whose growth has also really been significant.

The reason why is that we’ve been highly active, yes, but we’ve been careful to maintain a healthy debt leverage. Many of our competitors are leveraged seven or 10 or even 12 times. We’re about three-times leveraged. So, if the markets were to drop 20% or 30% and we fell into a recession, we could navigate that.

I don’t want our clients or advisors to have to go through that, of course, but we’re ready for that possibility. In fact, I think you could see Carson Group moving in an aggressive way to take advantage of good opportunities that could come about in such a situation.

THINKADVISOR: Is there anything that keeps you up at night about the business or wealth management in general?

WHITE: I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about just how significantly technology and AI will change not only our industry, but our whole society. I don’t want to be too philosophical here, but I often think about how these emerging technologies are literally changing what it means to be a member of society and how we interact with one another.

I have four adult children and my first grandchild on the way, and I sometimes worry thinking about how different their future could look when it comes to everything like growing up, getting a job, all of that.

It’s something we need to be watchful of, I believe. And look, we’re all-in on the productivity gains of AI under Dani’s leadership, but I do wonder about the long-term effects of AI.

The message I’ve been sharing with our partners is that we are always going to be a human-centric firm. The magic isn’t in the machines. It’s in what the machines enable us to do as great advisors.

Pictured: Burt White