Joe Duran, who sold his company, United Capital, to Goldman Sachs in 2019, has revealed details about his new venture, Rise Growth Partners, which will launch in early 2024. The website for the company, which Duran calls a “synergistic financial partner,” is now live. Rise Growth Partners will take minority investments in next generation RIAs with between $1 billion and $5 billion in AUM, and help them become national RIA platforms with $10 billion or more in assets.
“There’s a segment of advisors that are being completely ignored, which are advisors who have got 10-15 years of runway left, who have a lot of upside left, who need help building a scalable business in both the way they practice and business management, how they’re setting up their enterprise platform and lastly how they’re structured for growth—both organic and inorganic,” Duran said in an interview with WealthManagement.com. “We can help that next wave of advisory firms be competitive and national and then be able to do that without giving up all of their upside to their buyers.”
Duran said his firm is currently in discussions with 30 RIA firms encompassing over $60 billion in AUM. They will whittle that down to a smaller list to launch with early next year.
He’s also in discussions with several private equity firms to fund the new venture.
Duran has started to build out his leadership team, which includes Darius Mirshahzadeh, a podcaster, serial entrepreneur and former CEO of TMS, who will be a managing principal; Managing Partner and Chief Revenue Officer Mike Mirshahzadeh, founder of Unisource; Managing Partner Dan Newhall, former chief business development officer at Perigon Wealth Management; Ashley Ward, who will serve as director of strategic partnerships; and Phil Jacobson, a former United Capital employee. Other employees include Brian Shenson, Tiffany Burgess and Hannah Birchard.
Duran and his team will provide each RIA with an “enterprise readiness assessment,” a report identifying gaps in their business and measure them across three key areas: business management, which encompasses the service model, leadership and how the RIA tracks and measures results; the enterprise platform, meaning the technology used for clients and advisors and the back-office; and the growth strategy—both organic and inorganic.
“We compare you to your peers, and then compare you to where you need to be in order to be an enterprise,” Duran said. “And then give you a roadmap that says, ‘here’s the sequence and the order you should follow if you want to become a $10 billion firm.’”
The goal, he said, is to become their growth partner for the next five years and help these firms become the next generation of United Capitals. One way they will do so is to help these firms build out their niche.
“Most of the larger advisory practices, their clients are baby boomers—baby boomers who, by the way, are using their money now to live and really care about geography," Duran said. "But the Gen Xers and younger—they don’t care about geography. They care about being understood and working with advisors who work with people just like them.”
Duran left Goldman Sachs in February after 3 1/2 years of integrating his advisory business into the organization. Goldman announced late last month that it has agreed to sell its Personal Financial Management unit, the rebranded United Capital, to Kansas-based RIA Creative Planning.