Carson Group Partners expects to surpass $9 billion in assets under management before the end of 2018 as it onboards advisory teams overseeing an aggregate of $3.6 billion in the second half of the year.
Ron Carson, the founder and CEO of Carson Group, described the firm’s growth trajectory as “exploding” in a statement on Tuesday about new assets committed to the firm. Carson Group added $613 million in AUM in the second quarter of 2018, the majority from the addition of Ruggie Wealth, a Florida-based registered investment advisory firm with $577 million AUM. The second quarter growth brought Carson Group’s AUM to $6.1 billion managed by 83 firms spread across 36 states.
But Carson Group anticipates its AUM to balloon before 2019 because other firms have also agreed to join, the company said. The RIA expects a undisclosed number of firms to transition to its platform and bring with them another $3.6 billion in client assets, boosting its total to more than $9 billion.
Advisors could back out of joining Carson Group, but a spokeswoman said that would be “highly unlikely and quite arduous at this stage in proceedings.” Stipulations related to either Carson Group or the partnering firms backing out of a deal are specific to each agreement, the spokeswoman said.
Carson Group said in January it expected to add more than $3 billion in net new assets in all of 2018; it added $2 billion in the first quarter alone. Coupled with the $613 million it added in the second quarter and assuming the partnerships in the pipeline come to fruition, the RIA is on track to more than double its net new asset goal for the year.
Carson Coaching Group, the coaching and resource program company owned by Carson Group, also recently added 45 new advisory firms bringing the total number of firm participants to 1,264.
Observers describe the wealth management industry as fragmented and one that will continue to consolidate in its future. Firms are looking to grow and achieve scale that will enable them to invest in technology and services clients now expect, and for Carson Group, getting to more than $9 billion AUM would certainly help that effort.
“If you’re not on the good side of scale, the market is going to pull away from you very fast because it’s going to become obvious in the type of digital experience that a client has,” Carson told WealthManagement.com in June about wealth managers partnering with private equity firms.
In 2016, Long Ridge Equity Partners invested $35 million in Carson Group, although Carson said the company “didn’t do it for the money, we did it for their knowledge.”