SignatureFD CEO Heather Robertson Fortner has tapped registered investment advisor M&A veteran Peter Nesvold to join the firm’s board as she pushes to hit a goal of reaching $10 billion in assets by the end of this year.
Nesvold’s appointment, effective Feb. 1, is in part to help guide SignatureFD’s M&A and recruiting strategies for “long-term value creation,” according to the firm, which has about $9.1 billion in assets under management.
Nesvold is the founder and managing partner of Nesvold Capital Partners, an RIA merchant bank investor and consultant. He was previously a partner and chief strategy officer at Silver Lane Advisors, where he worked alongside his wife, founder and managing partner Elizabeth Nesvold, to build the RIA investor and dealmaker toward an acquisition by Raymond James in 2019.
Fortner, who became SignatureFD CEO in 2020, set a goal with the firm to grow its AUM about 20% every year to reach the $10 billion mark, a mark that would make the firm a “pretty decent player in the space and open up some different financing opportunities for us,” she said.
Now that the RIA is close to that point, Fortner and team are chasing yet another objective: reaching 10,000 families by 2030. To get there, she said the firm needs to keep expanding its technological capabilities as well as increasing its advisor base through recruiting and successful M&A.
“Peter is an expert in financial structuring and M&A, and we didn’t have that internally,” Fortner said. “As we think about the avenues that build enterprise value, that was the next logical addition to the board that I believed we were going to need.”
Nesvold said his interest in the position came from seeing the results of the strategy that Fortner has led.
“I would say that SignatureFD has cracked the code when it comes to organic growth,” he said. “When you look at the growth profiles of a lot of RIAs, market flows can often fill in the gap to provide a misleading growth number—in the case of SignatureFD, they are actually adding households and new client inflows.”
Nesvold sees the next steps for the firm as building its recruiting and acquisition functions. Since SignatureFD does not have external investment backing, the buying side may be more challenging, but “other like-minded firms” looking for merger opportunities may be a good fit, he said.
Before Silver Lane Advisors, Nesvold was a portfolio manager at Bear Stearns and Lazard Asset Management. He has also published numerous books on M&A, including The Art of M&A Valuation and Modeling.
He is the second high-profile board member Fortner has brought on in recent months. In December, SignatureFD added former Orion founder and CEO Eric Clarke to help with technological expertise.
Fortner said SignatureFD needs such in-house expertise at this stage of its lifecycle as it seeks to constantly perform along the three legs of the stool for premium valuation that Nesvold preaches: organic growth, the ability to recruit advisors and the ability to win at M&A.
“Now the strategy has to be one, can you execute in all three at the same time, and can you continue to win in all three of those areas?” she said.
Fortner added that, when it comes to recruiting, she will not only be focused on adding advisors who are good fit, but with a personal goal of about half of them being female advisors.
“I believe that is a large differentiation for us as an organization, but also so important for our industry and for the future of what wealth looks like,” she said.