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 about $300 million in assets under advisement. With the acquisition, Beverly President and founder Canon Price rejoins SEIA, where she started her financial services career three decades ago.
Price was hired at SEIA for the first time by CEO Brian Holmes, who mentored her and helped her get licensed to practice wealth management. After seven years working for the firm and learning the business, she felt she needed to be out on her own.
“Leaving was kind of like leaving a family, but I knew that in order to grow, I had to try to do this on my own,” she said.
Within the first year of launching her own 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. She also provides pension consulting.
“After 22 years or so running my own shop, I got to the point of feeling like I was at capacity,” she said. “I realized I needed assistance in order to maintain the level of service that I wanted to provide for my clients.”
Price, 58, also wanted to make sure she had a contingency plan in place, in case something were to happen to her. Her existing contingency plan already had two members of SEIA.
“I’m just not getting any younger,” she said. “God forbid I’m hit by a bus, I want my clients taken care of. I also want a path for retirement so that I could make sure to transition my clients over when I’m ready to stop working to a firm that I respect and people that I respect.”
In August 2022, 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 broker/dealers that has since been consolidated, for its brokerage business. But the firm now uses its own broker/dealer, Signature Estate Securities.