Two Newport Beach wealth management advisers, founded by Business Journal award winners, last week in separate deals announced the acquisition of three firms with $1.2 billion in assets that will help fuel expansion into New York, Atlanta and the Midwest.
United Capital Financial Advisers LLC acquired Irongate International, based in Moline, Ill., near the Iowa border. Established in 2001, it has $455 million in assets and serves 56 high-net worth households in the U.S., with a typical account larger than $5 million.
Irongate’s nine employees will join the United Capital team.
It chose United Capital because of its growing scale and increasing back office needs that pulled the firm’s team away from client-facing activity, a statement said.
United Capital also bought Peachtree Investment Advisors, an Atlanta-based firm founded in 2006.
It has 100 high net worth households and $353.3 million in managed assets; its four employees will also join United Capital.
Beacon Adds
Beacon Pointe Wealth Advisors on April 1 announced its largest purchase to date, Heller Wealth Advisors, which has clients in the Tristate area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Heller Wealth has a staff of nine and $387 million in assets under management.
“We have been looking for the right partnership for quite a while, knowing that scale would be important to us as the industry evolves towards larger or smaller players,” Jordan Heller, founder and chief executive of Heller Wealth Advisors, said in a statement.
Heller and company president Donald Hertling are joining Beacon Pointe as managing directors and partners.
It is the 12th acquisition to date for Beacon Pointe, which was founded in 2002 by Shannon Eusey and her father Garth Flint, who was also a co-founder of Newport Beach’s Canterbury Consulting, a wealth manager that advises nonprofits.
The pair have grown their firm to $9 billion in assets under management.
Business Journal Honorees
Joe Duran, who founded United Capital in 2005, has also built his firm through a series of acquisitions and organic growth to more than $23 billion in assets under management and 95 offices nationwide. It also has a division, FinLife Partners, offering white label wealth management software tools to other registered investment advisers, who collectively have $22 billion in assets under management.
Eusey won a 2017 Business Journal Women in Business award, while Duran last month picked up a Business Journal Excellence in Entrepreneurship award.
The two wealth management advisers share another similarity: each have written highly regarded financial strategy and business books.
Beacon Pointe last year released ‘Your Dollars, Our Sense,’ while Duran is the author of several books, including New York Times bestseller ‘The Money Code.’
