Bluespring Wealth Partners, Kestra Financial’s acquisitive RIA platform, has announced the addition of Goldstein Advisors, a Wisconsin-based financial services firm overseeing approximately $700 million in client assets.
Goldstein is a registered investment advisor in Middleton, Wisc., led by industry veteran Jon Goldstein, who founded the firm more than 20 years ago, and Andy Peters, a CPA who joined Goldstein in 2016 and became an SEC-registered advisor earlier this year. The firm provides investment, tax and financial planning services to a client base that has seen consistent organic growth.
Originally founded on the Ameriprise Financial advisor support platform in March 1998, Goldstein and Peters moved to Securities America’s corporate RIA Arbor Point Advisors for two years before choosing to join Bluespring. The newly independent firm, which includes a team of 14, plans to take advantage of growth opportunities provided by the partnership and leverage Bluespring’s administrative support and business consulting resources as it scales operations.
“We were doing a lot more consulting and needed the depth of resources that Bluespring was able to bring in terms of business consulting and different ways of looking at and approaching the structures that our clients were running up against,” Goldstein said. “We weren't able to get that type of depth of knowledge in the previous system we were in.”
“We really outgrew any of the previous platforms that we were affiliated with,” Peters added. “And we’ve moved toward complete independence because it fits our business model so much better.”
After months of searching for the right partner, Goldstein connected with Bluespring earlier this year and appreciated the platform’s flexibility, focus on practice management and back-office support for “non-value-add” activities. The new firm might even take advantage of the platform’s marketing solutions to develop a marketing strategy, something it has never had.
“We have done practically zero marketing over the course of our entire history; nearly all of our growth has been organic via existing client referrals,” said Peters. “But Bluespring has a phenomenal marketing team that I think we will avail ourselves of.”
“We fancy ourselves a practice management consultancy that happens to be in the RIA acquisition and growth game,” Bluespring President David Canter said during a recent webinar produced by WMIQ and RIA Edge on M&A trends in the RIA space.
Under the Bluespring model, a firm is fully or majority acquired but retains its own branding, culture and ADV while benefiting from enhanced services and capabilities provided by the larger platform, Canter said.
Goldstein and Peters both said they were surprised by the ease with which the transaction, which took around six months from start to finish, was accomplished.
“Everything was a very educated, knowledgeable step along the way,” said Goldstein. “Very little came up that wasn’t answered right away and that was really nice. It took away a lot of the uncertainty and, for a business partner coming in to merge and in terms of processes and systems going forward, that's exactly what you want to see.”
For now, Goldstein is primarily focused on continued organic growth but isn’t taking mergers and acquisitions off the table.
“I would say if we find the right fit, inorganic growth would make sense for us,” said Peters. “The hard part is we've been very choosy, and the difficulty is always in finding the right inorganic opportunities.”
Goldstein is the 29th firm to join Bluespring since it was founded in 2017. The Austin-based platform does not disclose total assets, but a spokesperson told WealthManagement.com that the pipeline of potential partners going into 2023 “is strong.”
“We’re continuing to target high-quality firms that align with the Bluespring culture, have shown consistent organic growth, and have built true ensemble practices,” the spokesperson said.