Jim Cahn of the Wealth Enhancement Group has a new title.
WEG announced Monday that Cahn, the firm's well-known chief investment and business development officer, has been named chief strategy officer and chief investment officer. He will oversee two recent hires: a new chief investment officer from BlackRock and a former Empower executive in the newly created role of chief product officer.
The firm targets the moves to improve and expand services available to the tens of thousands of clients served by the $81 billion RIA, including more than 15,500 ultra-wealthy households with an average of $3.2 million invested.
As WEG's new CIO, Michael Fredericks is responsible for leading investment processes, identifying opportunities and implementing “competitive solutions”. Before leaving BlackRock in July after more than 12 years, he led income investing and helped create and grow the firm's multi-asset platform strategies and solutions to more than $30 billion in assets.
“We wanted to bring in someone who could really elevate some of the things we're doing on the investment side,” Cahn said. WealthManagement.com. “As chairman of the investment committee, I'll be asking the tough questions rather than answering them, so that's kind of a new role, and we'll have someone to lead day-to-day in the investment style, to which I'm really excited about.”
In the newly created role of chief product officer, Dan Stampf has worked since September to enhance and coordinate the family office's ancillary services, including advanced financial and estate planning, tax and trust services, retirement and benefits. employers and individual insurance. Following her Buying Personal Capital in 2020 at Empower, he served as vice president of wealth services. Prior to joining Personal Capital in 2012, he spent more than eight years in various marketing and operations roles for Fisher Investments.
In addition to leading the overall strategy, Cahn will work to “accelerate” inorganic growth at WEG, which is already one of the nation's largest. the most productive shoppers of independent RIAs. In a marked shift, the firm has begun tapping into offices, banks and other RIAs to find breakaway advisory talent.
“M&A, for us, is really a talent strategy,” Cahn said. “The limit to our growth is not our ability to find prospects for our advisors. It is truly in the number of great advisors.
“The other thing you'll see from us from a strategy perspective is the work we're doing on our platform to really strengthen the ability of advisors to bring more of an offense versus a defense play,” he added. “We're really working on strengthening the platform to try to reduce the amount of time advisors and their teams spend on administrative work and increase the capacity to bring great solutions to clients. And I think that's going to be a real differentiator as we move forward.”
Founded in 1997, WEG has grown assets from about $4 billion to more than $81 billion since selling a majority stake to Lightyear Capital in 2015. The firm oversaw about $12 billion when TA Associates bought Lightyear's investment in 2019 When Onex Partners came on board as majority owner in 2021, WEG's advisors reached close to $40 billion.
According to Cahn, after completing 18 acquisitions last year, Wealth Enhancement Group is on track to reach $100 billion in the next few years.
“We'll get to a hundred billion without M&A,” he said, noting an annual growth rate of 22%. “But our data shows that we buy firms and we're able to accelerate their growth in a material way, which means we can continue to grow faster and so we can continue to bend that growth curve. And so, I guess the sky's the limit.”
After announcing two deals in 2024, Cahn said WEG is on track to close five more and has more deals under non-disclosure agreements than at any time in its history.
“There really isn't a market in this country that isn't a big market,” he said. “We're working on deals from coast to coast. We happen to like the parts of the country that are growing the fastest. We are seeing population flows in the southeast and southwest, so these are areas where we are looking to expand our presence. But the reality is when we get down to it, there really isn't a market in this country that isn't an attractive market to be in.”