Wealth Enhancement Group’s Jim Cahn has a new title.
WEG announced Monday that Cahn, the firm’s well-known chief investments and business development officer, has been named chief strategy officer and chair of investments. He will oversee a new chief investment officer from BlackRock, while a former Empower executive has stepped into the newly created role of chief product officer.
The firm intends the moves to improve and expand services available to the tens of thousands of clients served by the $81 billion RIA, including more than 15,500 ultra-wealthy households with an average of $3.2 million invested.
As WEG’s new CIO, Michael Fredericks is responsible for leading investment processes, identifying opportunities and implementing “competitive solutions.” Before leaving BlackRock in July after more than 12 years, he headed up income investing and helped to create and grow the firm’s multi-asset strategies and solutions platform to more than $30 billion in assets.
“We wanted to bring in someone who could really elevate some of the things we’re doing on the investment side,” Cahn told WealthManagement.com. “As chair of the investment committee, I’ll be asking the hard questions instead of answering them, so that’s kind of a new role, and we’ll have someone to lead the day-to-day on the investment style, which I’m really excited about.”
In the newly created role of chief product officer, Dan Stampf has been working since September to improve and coordinate ancillary family office services, including advanced financial and estate planning, tax and trust services, employer retirement and benefits, and individual insurance. Following its 2020 acquisition of Personal Capital at Empower, he served as vice president of wealth services. Before joining Personal Capital in 2012, he spent more than eight years in various marketing and operations roles for Fisher Investments. He reports directly to Chief Growth Officer Eric Weiss.
In addition to leading overall strategy, Cahn will work to “accelerate” inorganic growth at WEG, which is already one of the nation’s most prolific buyers of independent RIAs. In a notable shift, the firm has begun reaching into wirehouses, banks and other RIAs to find breakaway advisory talent.
“M&A, for us, is really a talent strategy,” Cahn said. “The limit on our growth is not our ability to find prospects for our advisors. It’s really on the number of great advisors.
“The other thing that you’re going to see out of us from a strategy perspective is the work we’re doing on our platform to really strengthen the ability of advisors to bring more offense as opposed to playing defense,” he added. “We’re really working on strengthening the platform to try and reduce the amount of time that advisors and their teams spend on administrative work and increase the capacity to bring great solutions to clients. And I think that will be a real differentiator as we move forward.”
Founded in 1997, WEG has grown assets from around $4 billion to more than $81 billion since selling a majority stake to Lightyear Capital in 2015. The firm oversaw some $12 billion when TA Associates bought out Lightyear’s investment in 2019. When Onex Partners came on board as a majority owner in 2021, WEG advisors managed close to $40 billion.
According to Cahn, after completing 18 acquisitions last year, Wealth Enhancement Group is on track to reach $100 billion in the next few years.
“We’ll get to a hundred billion without M&A,” he said, noting a 22% annual growth rate. “But our data shows that we buy firms and are able to accelerate their growth in a material way, which means that we can keep growing faster, and so we can keep bending that growth curve up. And so, I think the sky’s the limit.”
After announcing two deals in 2024, Cahn said WEG is on track to close another five and has more deals under confidentiality agreements than at any other time in its history.
“There’s not really a market in this country that’s not a great market,” he said. “We’re working on deals from coast to coast. We do happen to like the parts of the country that are growing faster. We’re seeing population flows to the southeast and the southwest, so those are areas where we’re looking to expand our presence. But the reality is, when we get down to it, there’s really not a market in this country that’s not an attractive market to be in.”