Century Wealth, a support platform for Breakaway Advisors, announced a new partnership program, a joint venture with affiliated firms Concenture Wealth Management and G Squared Private Wealth, with offices in Houston, College Station and Galveston, Texas . Sanctuary has taken a minority stake in those firms and helped them form an entity called 6 Degrees, with the intention of the companies starting an acquisition strategy in Southwest.
Sanctuary Wealth CEO and founder Jim Dixon said this is the first of several transactions his firm will do with partner firms, where Sanctuary will co-invest with partners so that they can do M&A themselves. Dixon predicts that Sanctuary will do 15 to 20 of these partnership deals per year.
“One of the challenges of doing M&A is capital,” Dixon said. “Since they are part of our network and we have a minority stake, this gives them an easy way to participate in the M&A space by doing so with us.”
6 Degrees, which operates under Sanctuary’s registered investment advisor and broker/dealer, is led by CEO George Giorgiods, Chief Investment Officer Victoria Greene and President Robert Gilliland.
“Our goal in creating 6 Degrees is to give individual consultants the pricing and synergies of a national firm, but with local leadership to help them make a living and grow the business,” Georgiades said in a statement. “Our aim is to bring access, investment acumen, experience with a variety of clients, and the lessons we learned in taking our step towards independence.”
Jason Hardcastle, formerly an advisor to Edward Jones, is the first advisor to join 6 Degrees, and will be based in Galveston.
Sanctuary’s initial growth strategy was to build a network of breakaways; It currently has about 50 firms in its network, and that channel is still growing. Then in late 2020, it raised $50 million through European-based asset manager Azimut Group, which took a majority stake in the firm for M&A. The firm itself began to acquire RIA as a way to expand the network; Sanctuary completed three of these deals last year, and the firm expects to announce three more in the next 60 days.
This partnership program is the third growth strategy that Sanctuary has been working on for the past year; This allows partner firms to leverage their relationships locally and use Sanctuary’s capital for tuck-ins and acquisitions.
“If you think about our model, they’re traditionally separated from a wirehouse, they set up their own independent practice, then we always take a minority stake in that practice, and then we go out together. and do M&A with some of their relationships and our capital,” Dickson said. “We’ve got these great partners—60 of them in the United States and Latin America; They have got great reputation; They have great relations. So when we sat down and talked about our growth strategy, we said, ‘Why aren’t we going to take advantage of that?'”
Sanctuary has partner firms in 22 states with assets of over $19 billion.
Dixon said, “Now, compared to doing five deals a year, there’s a lot more we can do because we’ve got shoes on the ground across the country that we’re doing deals that make us think we’re going a little faster.” can grow.”
