Mission, KS – April 28, 2025 – A team of industry and advisor veterans today announced the launch of Uniting Wealth Partners (UWP), a revolutionary RIA Succession Incubator backed by Wealth Advisor Growth Network (WAGN), for advisors who want to maximize the value of their life’s work. Amid the record-breaking M&A activity in the RIA space, UWP’s model was intentionally designed to sell to an institutional buyer in the next three to five years.
UWP’s first-of-its-kind model allows advisors to not only retain majority ownership of their practice but also receive majority ownership of the holding company that provides the operational support and resources needed to run and grow their firms. Its two-step succession incubator concept allows advisors to realize immediate and future benefits from increased size, scale, and higher margins—all of which are very attractive to institutional buyers.
Advisors in the UWP ecosystem leverage the scale of the collective and WAGN’s network to access industry-leading technology, compliance, accounting, strategic marketing, transition services, and recruiting. In addition, within the RIA, advisors greatly expand their service offering to include lending, trust/estate planning, insurance (life and P&C), business valuation, and M&A advisory services. These advantages improve client satisfaction and create new revenue opportunities for advisors.
“We want to be truly holistic when we plan for our clients’ financial futures and that includes acting as a fiduciary across all areas that affect their financial success,” said Scott Shepherd, managing partner of the first advisory team to join UWP with $550m in AUM and an eight-person team.
“The mistake most advisors make when looking at succession is that they let middlemen benefit from the margin expansion created by aggregation,” said John Phoenix, Managing Partner, UWP, and Founder, WAGN. “UWP solves this issue by allowing the advisors to become the aggregator and to achieve the multiple expansion normally reserved for the middlemen and their institutional financers.”
“Most advisors today work for the house; with UWP they own the house. This will be the next trend in succession and, for those advisors willing to put a plan in place, the results will be multiples normally reserved for the private equity firms that are aggregating smaller shops,” said Jay Hummel, Managing Partner, UWP, and Founder, WAGN. “Our focus is to act as fiduciaries for advisors by putting their interests above our own. As my first boss said, having an opinion doesn’t mean anything if you don’t do something about it, and we’ve done something about it.”
