Accelerated Wealth Partners, a New York-based investment firm, has made its first investment with a minority stake in RIA Advisors, a Houston-based wealth management firm with $1.6 billion in assets under management.
RIA Advisors was founded in 2009 by CEO Connie Mack. The firm also includes Chief Investment Strategist Lance Roberts, Director of Financial Planning Richard Rosso and Senior Financial Advisor Danny Ratliff. All four are partners in the firm, which AWP CEO and founder Eric Amar said was a draw in making the decision to invest.
“We like that, because they learn how to work with a partner, they learn how to make room for someone else’s opinion, and they learn how to support each other,” he said. “When I come into this relationship as a ‘fifth partner,’ it makes it more natural to agree on things, disagree on things, have this dialogue and come to the right answer, versus the solo owner.”
The deal comes shortly after AWP announced it had received a $200 million commitment from private investment firm J.C. Flowers & Co. Amar said that, as the team considered its first investment, RIA Advisors rose to the top partly because of the strong organic growth engine it had cultivated over the years. That includes blogs, podcasts and videos such as The Real Investment Show by Roberts.
“A lot of people are trying to establish a brand and trying to establish credibility, and they had done this for decades and were very good at it, so that was attractive for us,” Amar said.
Amar founded AWP after spending more than nine years at Focus Financial Partners, where he most recently served as chief growth officer, overseeing over 60 wealth and advisory transactions. His team also includes Jonathan Fass, vice president, finance, also a Focus alumnus who has led and supported financial due diligence, valuation analysis and acquisition integration efforts.
With the capital raise, RIA Advisors will look to expand in size and also into adjacent wealth services, such as tax, trust and estate services, to create a “family office experience.”
“By partnering with Eric Amar and AWP, we gain the resources to expand our footprint across Texas and enhance our specialized services without compromising our boutique service levels,” Mack said in a statement.
Amar said he sees M&A as one “elegant” path to adding scale and capabilities, and his team will work with RIA Advisors in that area. But they will also weigh in on fine-tuning the organic growth engine, as well as general best practices and firm operations.
“We want to leave room for these entrepreneurs and these founders to build their vision and build their firm their way … but we’re going to guide them along the way to figure this out,” he said.
Even with the capital commitment from J.C. Flowers, which holds a board seat at AWP, Amar said the firm will look to invest in a handful of firms so his team can stay actively engaged with all of them. He also said the firm doesn’t have a “religion around minority or majority investments.”
“The filter for us is, is it a high-quality business? Are they high-quality people? Do we share a vision for this firm and how we’re going to work together to achieve that vision?” he said. “If you cross those three thresholds, whether it’s financials or percentage of the business, it almost doesn’t matter for us.”
