Sky Is the Limit for Ambitious RIAs: Burt White

Carson Group is on track for a record year of growth and profitability, according to CEO Burt White. He attributes that to internal and external factors that are set to accelerate the firm’s growth even more in the years ahead.

It’s been about five months since White took over as CEO from the firm’s founder and four-decade leader, Ron Carson. In an interview with ThinkAdvisor, White said he’s loved the position so far, noting that he still “collaborates closely with Ron” on a regular basis.

As to what’s driving the upswing, White pointed to Carson Group’s strong organic growth record, its success in recruiting and retaining top advisors, and the enthusiastic leadership of a revamped executive team that now includes Dani Fava, Daniel Applegarth, Heather Randolph Carter and other experienced industry professionals.

“We have entered into an exciting new phase that has really been in the works since I first came here from LPL more than 18 months ago,” White said. “We had the best year ever for the firm in 2023 in terms of profitability, revenue, number of advisors and retention rate. This year, we are well ahead of pace to have another record year.”

The firm faces challenges as well, White noted, including a need to continue to diversify its advisor force to better reflect changing U.S. demographics. While White is not among the camp predicting a major market downturn, he said he worries about the potential for a serious setback to hamper growth and test advisors.

White, who did not address the wrongful firing and discrimination lawsuit filed against Carson Group by a former executive, said the current moment at the firm is dynamic and optimistic, where “things feel a lot like they felt at LPL back when I first joined that organization.”

“When I joined LPL in 2007, this was pre-IPO, and it was before the major consolidation trend really picked up,” White said. “The growth journey at LPL was incredible, and I feel that we’re set for a similar journey here at Carson.”

Here are additional highlights from our conversation.

THINKADVISOR: How do you reflect on the pace of consolidation and dealmaking across the broader financial services industry? Does this benefit firms like Carson Group and its clients?

BURT WHITE: There’s no doubt that consolidation has happened everywhere in the ecosystem. The big banks have consolidated dramatically, to the point that you now have only a couple of banks that really drive the narrative.

The same is true of asset managers, independent broker-dealers and custodians. Remember, we just saw TD Ameritrade gobbled up by Charles Schwab. The pace of consolidation has remade the industry ecosystem, but the one area where this has yet to really take hold, in my view, is within wealth management.

It makes sense that wealth management would be the final part of the industry to see this trend take a deep hold, because wealth managers are the closest to the client. It’s not so disruptive to the client relationship if the investment manager behind the scenes is acquired or consolidated, but it is a big deal when it happens to the wealth manager.

This can be a challenging outlook for some wealth managers, but for a firm like ours that has real longevity, scale and expertise in business management, it’s a huge opportunity. I’m really excited about our strategy.

We’re now engaging in M&A transactions in a big way, but we’re also remaining focused on ensuring we achieve strong organic growth. It’s a multi-pronged strategy that gives us a lot of confidence about the future.

Can you describe the way that Carson Group thinks about its M&A strategy and identifies firms that could be a good fit to join up?

This has been an interesting evolution over time. When you look at where Carson has been on M&A and succession planning, the current strategy sort of completes the journey for us.

That is, we started off years ago with Carson Coaching. We offered a way to help advisors learn how to become better business owners and better practice managers — so that they can grow faster. That has long been a strategic advantage for us, and it led us to establish our partnership model.