What’s in a name?
A lot, if you’re asking Ken Stern, president of Los Angeles-based Lido Advisors, an acquisitive and fast-growing registered investment advisor backed by three separate institutional investors.
“There is absolute value in having a strong brand, one name, one vision, one shared ideology,” Stern said in a recent interview with WealthManagement.com. “That transcends throughout the client experience, transcends to the company and obviously it integrates into the valuation.”
Not everyone agrees that building a unified, overarching and hopefully recognizable brand is the best strategy for RIA executives building wealth management firms. For years, the sector has operated with thousands of players operating at firms often carrying the entrepreneurial founders’ last names. Many RIA aggregators let their partner firms keep their identities even as they join the aggregator’s Form ADV. The theory is that in a relationship-based business, advisors operating in the community are the main point of contact for clients and prospects, and the best “brand ambassadors” for their own practices.
Over time, however, RIAs have grown in size and scale to a point where clients, prospects and partners interact with the company through multiple channels and touchpoints.
“My takeaway on the push for brand names is that the RIA industry has moved past the cottage industry status,” said Joe Anthony, president and CEO of Gregory FCA. “There is a big push around organic growth where firms are trying to create a name for themselves for client referrals, and in many cases, where there is a strong market leader, it’s possible to make that push.”
Anthony, who hosts a podcast on wealth management marketing, noted that brand names can be as important for recruiting advisors in a competitive market as they are for client recognition.
“These enterprises need the advisors they recruit to give up their incumbent brand,” he said. “If the larger RIA invests in cultivating brand recognition and credibility for that brand, it makes it easier to use the opportunity to market better as a selling point with targeted advisor recruits.”
More Than a Logo
Stern does not need to be convinced. For him, the brand is a core part of Lido’s strategy across both acquisitions and client cultivation.
“This is our North Star and our one source of truth,” he said. “It’s right for us and it’s the model that we obviously embrace.”
Of course, brand building is more than just adopting a logo. Many national financial service companies have brand guidelines that could fill a phone book, dictating everything from color palettes and fonts to images and language style. Even the office decor and the music played when a caller is on hold are considered to communicate—and reinforce—the culture, values and expectations that firm leaders have set for the organisation.
Earlier this year, Lido hired Justin Barish as its chief marketing officer from a role leading digital marketing at Cerity Partners.
“There is so much open space in which to compete in the independent RIA world,” Stern said. “It’s amazing to me that there is really no independent RIA today that is a household name nationwide. Possibly a b/d, but clearly not an RIA. When you aspire toward having a brand or having a name, it creates more value with your stakeholders.”
This May, the firm sold a minority stake to BlackRock’s HPS, joining private equity firm Charlesbank Capital Partners, which saw the deal as a return for its 2021 investment in Lido, while retaining a holding in the company. Lido also has a non-controlling minority investment from Constellation Wealth Capital as of 2024, along with stakes held by approximately 135 employee-owners.
Stern said some of the investment dollars are dedicated to the brand strategy, and he and Barish will tap into the experiences of those institutional investors. The funding also fuels RIA acquisitions. This year, Lido has acquired five firms, helping to grow client assets from $24 billion to $38 billion since December. Stern said it only holds serious talks with firm owners who are willing to integrate fully into Lido, and that starts with adopting the name.
“We’ve had many conversations with firms who ask, ‘how would you feel if we kept our name?’” he said. “It’s not for us.”
To Brand or Not to Brand
Other large RIA aggregators follow a similar playbook. Creative Planning, Captrust, Wealth Enhancement Group, and, more recently, Wealthspire are large, acquisitive firms with full integrations and unified brands. Still others have taken a hybrid approach, building an independent contractor model—in which firms retain their names but may tag the parent firm—with the idea that they may someday join a fully captive RIA.
To be sure, many RIA platforms and aggregators aren’t fussy about a unified brand. Sanctuary Wealth has $55 billion in assets on its platform, managed by 125 partner firms. Concurrent’s Nate Lenz, which has grown to about $10 billion in assets, is a vocal proponent of the 1099 model for advisors, allowing those businesses to operate as their own brands.
Which model wins out—to brand, or not to brand—is still anyone’s guess, according to Anthony. For some firms, a local or niche name may still be an advantage.
“There are good reasons to keep a smaller brand name, particularly when there is a sharp resonance with a particular niche or geography,” he said. “Usually, if a firm has a truly differentiated niche appeal, its brand and underlying organic growth are seen as too valuable to disrupt. That said, if organic growth is lagging, then maybe that brand isn’t as valuable as some might think.”
For larger, national RIAs, however, Anthony believed there is a significant opportunity for a firm to capture broad recognition in the consumers’ mind, the same way people recognize and have formed impressions of companies like Coke, Pfizer or Merrill Lynch, even if they are not customers or, in some cases, are not sure of what the company does.
“Only in recent years has the financial services sector made RIAs a distinct category,” he said. “Who is going to represent the RIA? Lido and firms like it want to be the category identifiers.”
