RFG Advisory, the Birmingham, Ala.-based hybrid RIA platform with $6 billion in assets under advisement, has attracted advisor Tyler Brown to launch his own independent firm.
Brown, formerly of Edelman Financial Engines, is now founder and wealth advisor at TurnPoint Wealth, an RIA with over $100 million in client assets.
“He’s young and ambitious and wants to build his business,” said Abby Salameh, chief growth officer at RFG. “He’s just a classic example of an advisor that’s in kind of a captive place right now where he has the ambition and the desire to own his own legacy and build his own legacy, and that’s exactly where and how we came to connect with him.”
Brown has worked in financial services for almost 20 years, including as a regional vice president with Fisher Investments and a vice president and financial consultant with Fidelity Investments.
Salameh noted that Brown fits the profile of the type of advisor who has been joining the firm—one that skews younger and is more interested in getting to the next stage of growth than a payout.
“We will help him build his brand, which was important to him, and build his business,” she said. “He can build his own enterprise value that eventually he can either pass down to the next generation or monetize that business.”
Salameh said many advisors at RFG are seeing close to 20% organic growth, in part due to the support staff that helps create marketing collateral and campaigns ranging from websites to podcasts, depending on the advisor’s needs. She also said advisors who join are provided a stipend to execute some of the campaigns.
“It’s because we lean so heavily into helping them that our organic growth numbers are so much higher than industry average,” she said.
RFG also said former Financial Reserve financial advisor Claudia Porter has joined as a wealth advisor based in Portland, Ore.
Porter, who is the author of “Women, Wealth, and Winning,” among other books, is a good fit for RFG’s StrongHer Money initiative, according to Salameh.
StrongHer Money is a set of resources for advisors who want to work with female clients and offers investment solutions, prospecting campaigns, turnkey events, and a lead generation platform.
“We are working with her to help her expand her growing business of helping female clients,” Salameh said. “I’m excited to see how far we’re going to be able to help her and make sure that we’re driving her to success.”
The additions come after a February announcement that RFG had attracted another advisor from Edelman and one from Raymond James.
James Horn, an advisor with two offices in upstate New York, founded Matterhorn Private Wealth. Jarrod Biebel, a Denver-based advisor with about $300 million in assets, created TrekNorth Investment Management with RFG.
Salameh said RFG is not seeing a lot of advisors interested in joining their platform and growth-focused setup from wirehouses. Rather, she sees advisors from independent broker/dealers who are looking for more personalized help in creating and growing their brand and business.
“Advisors that fit into our wheelhouse, which are around $100 to $300 million in AUM and who want to double in size, get no attention at the large, independent broker/dealers,” she said “They’re not at a level where they get specialized services or a dedicated team to work with them. They’re considered much smaller, so they’re calling into a service center or going into a ticketing system, where it could take a long time to get any kind of service back. We see a lot of success from those types of firms.”
On the other hand, she said RFG is getting interest from people running their own RIAs and realizing it’s too much work to handle all the compliance, technology, marketing, and other tasks without support.
“We see success with those advisors who realize they want to be independent, they want to own their business and own their clients, but they need to outsource all of the non-revenue-generating activities,” she said. “That’s where we do very well.”