New potential buyer for your book

It hasn’t yet reached the fever pitch of an auction, but another firm is raising eyebrows with its offer to buy advisor books.

It hasn’t yet reached the fever pitch of an auction, but another player is raising eyebrows with its offer to buy advisor books.

With the average age of advisors said to be 58 the need for succession planning is quickly becoming a big deal in the wealth management industry. Advisors unprepared for retirement do themselves and their clients a major disservice by not having a plan in place to make this transition a seamless one.

That’s where Evolution Wealth Advisors comes in.

The Mississauga-based firm has come up with a platform for helping advisors take care of succession planning that simplifies the process. To find out more we spoke to CEO Steve Meehan about the benefits to advisors.

“We were building an investment counsel platform [Bellwether Investment Management],” says Meehan “and saw an opportunity with a lot of assets moving in that general direction. As we got further into it and all the CRM2 issues started cropping up we realized that ultimately this was going to be good for the investment counsel business.”

Meehan’s experience as CEO and founder of Investment Planning Counsel Inc., which he sold to IGM Financial in 2004, allowed him to see that an opportunity existed thanks to the impending regulatory change to help mutual fund advisors transition their businesses to an investment counsel model.

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“Why not try to build a bridge between the mutual fund business and the investment counsel business,” Meehan thought to himself, “with the idea of being a provider of capital to advisors to allow them to do one of three things [with their practices]?”
The three things, which relate specifically to succession planning, include the following:

1. To allow an advisor to retool their business to an investment counsel focus making them more competitive with clients going forward meeting the challenges of CRM2 head on in a proactive, rather than reactive manner.

2.  The opportunity for advisors to take capital off the table to realize the value they’ve created in their businesses or alternatively to provide them with access to capital so that they can buy other businesses.

3. To provide advisors with a complete succession plan.

Up and running since January Evolution is making big strides as advisors learn about the options available to them when it comes to succession planning and/or future growth.

“It’s being very well received,” says Meehan. “We have 50 advisors that we are in various forms of discussion which can be anywhere from the first level of interest right through to deal completion.”

“We just completed our first two deals. We’re getting quite a bit of traction out there and the word’s starting to travel.”

Advisors interested in exploring the possibilities might want to pick up the phone. You now have another option when it comes to succession planning. 
 

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