Two advisors with combined managed assets totaling $170 million are joining Woodbury Financial Services, one of Advisor Group’s broker/dealers, and in doing so, will take the reins of Life Certain Wealth Strategies, a five-person firm with $240 million in assets that is affiliated with Woodbury.
Joseph Di Biasi and Gregory McElheny will join Woodbury from MML Investors Services. Life Certain President and founder Herb White began seeking merger partners to enact his succession and retirement plan starting in 2019, and di Blasi and McElheny said they’d be interested in joining Woodbury. Advisor Group’s Succession Team was brought on to help with the transition.
“From my perspective, it was crucial to find succession partners who were a great fit for the culture we had built over the years at Life Certain Wealth Strategies, both within our organization and with our clients,” White said. “At the same time, it was equally important for me to stay with Woodbury, which has been an indispensable part of our success since we joined their platform nearly two decades ago.”
The practice will retain the Life Certain name, and will now be a practice of $410 million in assets with offices in Greenwood Village and Colorado Springs, Colo.
“Transitions can be difficult without the right expert resources and guidance to smooth the process,” Di Biasi said. “In this case, we went through both an affiliation move and a merger at the same time, and we could not have done it without the teams at Advisor Group and Woodbury empowering all of us to stay focused on our clients and businesses from start to finish.”
Earlier this week, Advisor Group announced it would be merging three of the broker/dealers it acquired from its Nov. 2019 purchase of Ladenburg Thalmann into Securities America, one of the other b/ds brought over in the $1.3 billion deal. The move would leave Securities and Triad Advisors as the only remaining broker/dealers that were formerly under Ladenburg Thalmann. Advisor Group CEO Jamie Price said the integration would help Advisor Group introduce its shared-services capabilities and tech platform to all Securities America advisors by the end of this year.