Signature Estate & Investment Advisors, the Los Angeles-based registered investment advisor with $23.8 billion in assets, has acquired Beverly Investment Advisors, a Beverly Hills, Calif.-based RIA with approximately $300 million in assets under advisement. With the acquisition, Beverly President and founder Canon Price joins SEIA, where she began her financial services career three decades ago.
Price was first hired at SEIA by CEO Brian Holmes, who mentored him and helped him get licensed to practice wealth management. After seven years of working for the firm and learning the business, she felt she needed to be out on her own.
“Leaving was like leaving a family, but I knew that in order to grow, I had to try to do it myself,” she said.
Within the first year of starting her RIA, her clients followed and she tripled her income, she said.
Her business serves clients in the entertainment sector, business owners, attorneys and medical professionals. It also offers advice on pensions.
“After about 22 years of running my store, I got to the point where I felt like I was at capacity,” she said. “I realized I needed help to maintain the level of service I wanted to provide to my clients.”
Price, 58, also wanted to make sure she had a contingency plan in case something happened to her. Its existing contingency plan already had two EIA members.
“I'm just not getting any younger,” she said. “God forbid I get hit by a bus, I want to take care of my customers. I also want a retirement path so I can make sure I transfer my clients when I'm ready to stop working for a firm I respect and people I respect.”
In August 2022, the New York-based private equity firm Reverence Capital Partners took an equity stake in SEIA. Osaic, the broker/dealer platform owned by Reverence, has also made a minority investment in the RIA.
SEIA previously used Royal Alliance, one of Osaic's since-consolidated broker/dealers, for its brokerage business. But the firm now uses its own broker/dealer, Signature Estate Securities.