Private equity-backed CW Advisors is adding a large
Boston-based CW Advisors announced on Monday it is merging with Agili, a Richmond, Virginia-based fee-only firm with $1.2 billion under management. The deal pushes CW Advisors' AUM figure to more than $10 billion.
Agili will take on the CW Advisors' brand name, and Agili President Michael Joyce will become an executive managing director and the mid-Atlantic leader.
Joyce founded Agili in 1993, making it one of the first fee-only firms. He said in an interview on Monday that he likes the fee-only model because "it puts us on the same side of the table as our clients. We are not earning fees from the sale of products."
Joyce has twice served as the president of the board of the
"They are also very client-centric," Joyce said. "They look at treating clients in a very personalized and customized way. And that has always been our mantra."
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Agili has long billed itself as a personal chief financial officer to clients. Joyce said the firm specializes in working with high net worth clients, many of whom work as executives or in the medical field or have money from selling a business or an inheritance.
The firm's two offices in Richmond and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, now give CW Advisors 11 locations throughout the U.S. Joyce said Agili's 23 employees are all making the transition to CW Advisors, boosting its headcount to 113.
The deal, closed on Aug. 16 for an undisclosed amount, marks the fourth largest acquisition CW Advisors has embarked on since Audax Private Equity bought a majority stake in it in June 2023. Audax has its headquarters in Boston and has more than $19 billion under management. The other firms it has helped CW Advisors acquire include
CW Advisors was founded in 2009 as Congress Wealth Management.
Scott Dell'Orfano, the chief strategic officer at CW Advisors, said acquiring Agili was a good way to gain a foothold in Richmond, Virgina, and expand the firm's presence "up and down the eastern seaboard."
"They have also demonstrated growth year over year and shown that they are a growth-oriented firm," Dell'Orfano said in an interview.
Dell'Orfano said CW Advisors will continue pushing forward with mergers and acquisitions, adding that a couple more deals are now in discussion. He said CW Advisors and Audax Private Equity are more advanced with their M&A plans than they thought they would be by this point.
Dell'Orfano said Audax brings "expertise in M&A in general. They also provide a lot of resources related to legal and due diligence and evaluations and scenario planning."
John Eubanks, managing partner at the investment banking firm
"In this type of market where valuations are high and the competition is stiff, it's hard without having instiutional capital behind your company," Eubanks said. "It's really hard to be super competitive. And then it's not uncommon to take private equity capital and go on an acquisition spree because they have the institutional expertise behind them and they have that capital behind them."
Joyce at Agili said the private equity backing didn't necessarily weigh heavily in the decision to join CW Advisors. But he thinks Audax's considerable resources will help the firm add to its service offerings in needed ways.
"The business is going to change a little bit, especially as our clients age and perhaps have some health challenges," he said. "We are going to have to offer some more services, and having the scale to do that is a big plus."
