$2B enterprise is Atria’s largest recruit to date

One of the fastest growing private equity-backed wealth managers has completed the largest recruiting addition of its nearly four years in business.

Financial advisor William Glubiak of Cedar Brook Group left Advisor Group’s Securities America after more than 15 years to affiliate with Atria Wealth Solutions’ Cadaret Grant, the wealth management holding company said April 28. The Cleveland-based enterprise is bringing more than $2 billion in assets under administration managed by 20 advisors.

Lee Equity Partners-backed Atria has grown to more than 2,500 registered representatives and $95 billion in AUA across six independent broker-dealers it’s acquired since launching in 2017. The move by Cedar Brook is the fifth largest in the IBD sector so far in 2020, in terms of assets, according to Financial Planning’s tracking of industry recruiting announcements. Glubiak’s 49-employee firm — which has its own RIA — chose Caderet as its BD to leverage Atria’s resources toward its growth goals in the Great Lakes region from Minnesota to New York.

“Financial planning is a relatively difficult, time-consuming and expensive process to do well,” Glubiak says. “We need the scale to be able to afford to get better and better at the focus, and the focus is financial planning.”

Without specifying the number, Glubiak notes that some of the enterprise’s advisors elected to stay with Securities America. Expressing gratitude toward his former BD, Glubiak says the choice to move to a new firm stemmed from being better aligned with Atria and came as part of a strategic growth process that started in 2018 with the launch of Cedar Brook’s hybrid RIA.

Representatives for Advisor Group didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Syracuse, New York-based Cadaret has more than 400 branches with 700 advisors. The move by Cedar Brook displays how advisors are taking notice of Atria’s technology, access to senior management and product selection, according to Atria Chief Growth Officer Kevin Beard.

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“We chose them as much as they chose us,” Beard says. “It's a testament to what we've done and what we've accomplished. That's what gets me excited about the recruiting opportunity for firms. They want to be part of the best, not with the biggest.”

In the sector so far this year, larger rival LPL Financial has notched the two biggest recruiting moves as it attracted the wealth-management arms of M&T Bank and BMO Harris, ushering in a combined 285 advisors and $34 billion in client assets. RIA aggregators Captrust and Hightower scored the next largest moves. Bel Air Investment Advisors, which has more than $8 billion in assets under management, dropped its own IBD for Hightower. And Genovese Burford & Brothers Wealth & Retirement Plan Management, which has $3.13 billion in client assets, left Advisor Group’s Royal Alliance Associates for Captrust.

Glubiak launched Cedar Brook in 2005, when he left Lincoln Financial Network for Securities America. He started in the industry with Lincoln in 1994, according to FINRA BrokerCheck. With additional offices in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and Strongsville, Ohio, the enterprise has specialties in serving business owners and medical clients, in addition to retirees.

For practices that may be considering a similar move, Glubiak advises them to “really spend time thinking about and working through why you are actually doing what you're doing” rather than looking for the highest bidder. He describes Atria and Cadaret as partners more than BDs.

“The world, like everything else, has gotten a lot more complicated,” Glubiak says. “There's a lot of moving parts and they are not coordinated...It's doable, but it takes time. Atria and their folks have been extremely helpful in this process.”