Page 26 - Investment Advisor October 2022

Cover Story

to scale their businesses and focus on serving clients “The depth of experience
without the distractions of back-office responsi-
bilities,” according to a statement from Mariner. among the professionals at
“Today is a win for advisors who seek to the [Financial Services]
spend more time advising their clients and grow-
ing their business and less time managing the Network and the reach and
day-to-day operations,” Mariner Wealth Advisors expertise of LPL Financial
CEO and President Marty Bicknell said in the
statement. “The depth of experience among the will enable us to serve more
professionals at the [Financial Services] Network and the advisors and enhance their access
reach and expertise of LPL Financial will enable us to serve to some of the industry’s best back-
more advisors and enhance their access to some of the indus-
try’s best back-office and consulting resources.” office and consulting resources.”
The firm being bought by Mariner was founded in 1984. It is led
by Daxs Stadjuhar, Christopher Mercado and Jeremy Olen, who —Marty Bicknell
will stay in their executive roles after the deal is completed. “From
the day we met the Mariner team, it was clear that we shared the advisor-centric philosophy will accelerate the expansion of
same advisor-centric mission and passion for helping advisors our network, broaden the scope of how we work with advi-
excel as business owners,” Mercado said in the statement. sors, and help advisors overcome the traditional impediments
“The complementary nature of our expertise, solutions and to growth,” he added.

Focus Financial CEO Rudy Adolf Speaks Out on Dealmaking, Investing
One significant challenge that RIAs we need to have a more sophisticated approach,” he added.
face now is that the effective- After closing a record 38 transactions in 2021, including 14
ness of the traditional 60/40 new partner firms and 24 mergers, Adolf predicted that 2022
investment model has been will again be one of his firm’s strongest years for transactions
reduced as a result of mul- but will fall short of 2021’s count. Last year’s total included
tiple factors including high eight mergers for partner firm Connectus, which expanded
inflation, according to Rudy the company’s footprint in Australia, Canada and the U.K.
Adolf, CEO of RIA aggrega- Focus closed on 14 RIA and independent wealth manager
tor Focus Financial Partners. transactions in the first half of 2022, including three new
“For sure, the traditional partner firms and the others becoming part of existing Focus
asset allocation model, the tra- partner firms, according to Adolf. The company has complet-
ditional investment models really ed over 250 transactions since launching in 2006.
need an update. In fact, the traditional Recent additions Octogone, Icon Wealth Partners and
60/40 model just is not working in this environment,” he said Azimuth Capital Management should add about $9.5 billion
in a recent phone interview. in client assets to Focus. Its 87 partner firms manage a total
“For high-end clients, you truly need to move into a of more than $350 billion in client assets.
multi-asset class approach and these are very difficult to
build. It requires a lot of expertise. It requires access. It Beyond model portfolio issues, what other major challenges
requires sophisticated reporting, and it’s very difficult for do RIAs face?
many RIAs to build these sophisticated multi-asset class Clearly, we see a very dynamic technology environment. I’m
strategies,” he explained. really excited about much of the innovation that’s happening
“Quite frankly, this is one of the areas we are very helpful to right now from a technology perspective — whether it’s on
our partners [with] and we can really help them leapfrog into the CRM side, whether it’s kind of on the portfolio, reporting
the next level of investment management. But given where systems, rebalancing systems.
the economy is going and where interest rates are going, the Technology is becoming very, very helpful as an enabler of
traditional portfolio construction approach is not working, and more sophisticated investment management approaches and

24 INVESTMENT ADVISOR OCTOBER 2022 | ThinkAdvisor.com