Ex-LPL branch eyes doubling in size after buying $1.6B firm

A former LPL Financial branch that now has its own brokerage acquired a billion-dollar firm as it strives toward ambitious growth targets for a midsize wealth management company.

Dallas-based Level Four Group, which is owned by accounting firm Carr, Riggs & Ingram CPA and Advisors, purchased Raleigh, North Carolina-based Mid-Atlantic Securities, which has about 30 registered representatives managing $1.6 billion in client assets across its headquarters and a half dozen branches. Three years after leaving LPL and purchasing another brokerage called Harbor Financial Services that it rebranded into Level Four Financial in 2021, Level Four spans about 200 financial advisors with $8.5 billion in client assets. CEO Edmon "Jake" Tomes said in an interview that he's aiming for the firm's size to double by 2025. 

Jake Tomes
Edmon "Jake" Tomes launched Dallas-based Level Four in 2000. It merged into Carr, Riggs & Ingram in 2

The firm's recruiting and M&A plans are focusing on practices like those within Mid-Atlantic that have between $100 million and $500 million in client assets and "need to have more than just investment advisory services as part of their offering," Tomes said.

"You've reached a type of scale to be somewhat dominant," he said. "We're looking for advisors who really want to grow through offering a more comprehensive suite of services and who want to recruit or acquire through their branch."

The parties didn't disclose the financial terms of the transaction, which follows many that have consolidated smaller brokerages into larger players and trimmed their ranks significantly in recent years. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of FINRA-registered brokerages has tumbled by 24% to 3,394. LPL Financial and other industry giants have driven much of the record consolidation through transactions, such as its July deal to purchase Boenning & Scattergood's Private Client Group. Other examples from last year include Baird's acquisition of Hefren-Tillotson and Independent Financial Group's purchase of NPB Financial Group.

In an interview, Mid-Atlantic CEO Jimmy Glover and President John Nash cited as a factor in their selection of Level Four the fact that the two firms shared Raymond James in common as their clearing firm. Expertise in areas like planning, retirement and insurance, as well as operational capabilities to take some tasks off the incoming firms' hands, also played a role. The firm "needed a little bit more support than what we were providing ourselves" and sought to avoid folding into a giant after three dozen years as a smaller company, Nash said.

"When I first got into the business, firms were a lot smaller," he said, noting a similar "family atmosphere" at the two firms, which he said enables advisors to speak directly with top executives on a regular basis. "That was important and that is important. You'd hate to lose that. … The atmosphere seems to be more conducive to business and better suited for clients."

Such deals illustrate how some brokerages "have the greatest opportunity for value creation" in the industry amid the long-term shift to recurring advisory accounts and away from transactional sales, according to investment banker John Langston, who advises wealth management buyers and sellers on M&A deals as a managing partner of Republic Capital Group. In recent years, Langston has become "very passionate" about convincing buyers and sellers that brokerages can tap into the enduring need in the industry for operational services among the fast-rising number of registered investment advisors with record assets under management, he said.

"It has just created tremendous value for the owners of the company and the advisors, too," Langston said, noting that he has seen some brokerages triple or quadruple their value by shifting away from the traditional model of generating product sales and commissions. "There's opportunity there. I do think there will continue to be consolidation in that business model. It has a lot of competitive pressure."

Larger independent wealth management firms like Kestra Holdings have learned that "there's always a bull market for financial advice" among mass affluent and wealthy Main Street clients, said Stephen Langlois, the president of Kestra's largest company, Kestra Financial.

"I don't see the broker-dealer of the future getting in between the advisor and the client," Langlois said, comparing wealth management companies like Kestra to hardware unlocking the potential of computers. "We're like the Intel Inside enabling them to be successful and focus on the things that they do the best."

As a midsize wealth management company owned by one of the largest accounting firms in the nation, Level Four offers advisors an interesting vantage point. It owns an insurance agency as well, and its ranks of advisors are split roughly evenly between 1099 independent contractors and direct W-2 employees. The firm's RIA has added custodial relationships with Charles Schwab and Fidelity to its existing ones with Raymond James and TD Ameritrade since leaving LPL. It has 85 corporate employees across its compliance, legal, sales, marketing and other teams, as well as a trust company, an investment banking arm, a payroll unit and a third-party retirement plan administrator under the same ownership with Carr, Riggs & Ingram. 

Level Four's moves come after Independent Financial Partners, XML Financial Group and Arkadios Capital led the way among a very small handful of large branches leaving giant wealth management firms to build their own brokerages. The team led by Tomes left LPL in order to get greater "control of our legal and compliance decision-making" and develop "a far more sophisticated offering" for high net worth clients than was possible at their prior firm, he said. 

With an array of services "à la carte available to advisors," and "the ability to be nimble and make decisions in a quick way to support the growth" of practices, Level Four is eyeing significant expansion through recruiting and M&A deals, according to Tomes.

He noted "the way that the future of advice is going, and the need to integrate traditional investment management with insurance and estate and tax planning — we feel that we're positioning ourselves in a very disruptive way to take advantage."

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
Industry News Recruiting M&A
MORE FROM FINANCIAL PLANNING