Elevation Point, an investment firm launched last year that oversees $3.4 billion in client assets, has taken a minority stake in newly established registered investment advisor Fortage Capital Advisors in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
Elevation Point CEO Jim Dickson, who founded and led Sanctuary Wealth until 2023, said his relationship with Fortage founder and managing partner Andrew Moss spurred his interest in partnering and made it an easy choice.
“I’ve always known and appreciated the quality of his practice,” said Dickson, who worked for years with Moss at Merrill. “He has been a multi-million-dollar producer for many, many years …. his team has been together for 15 to 20 years, so their relationships with their clients are some of the best we’ve ever seen.”
Before launching Fortage, Moss had been with Transcend Capital Advisors for five years, after about 25 years at Merrill. He left Merrill for Transcend in 2020 with partners Matthew Harbarcuk and Carrie Angott, now with him at Fortage as director and client service associate, respectively.
“We were drawn to Elevation Point’s partnership model for its innovative tools, talent, and infrastructure, which will help us optimize our service offering and amplify business growth,” Moss said in a statement.
Moss will join Elevation Point’s Form ADV and is in the process of transferring over clients. The firms did not provide an exact client asset figure for Fortage’s book of business.
The stake comes after Elevation Point made two investments earlier this year. One was a 30% stake in Triton Wealth, an Aitkin, Minn.-based registered investment advisor with over $225 million in assets under management, and another was an investment in Stonebrook Private, a Northville, Mich.-based firm with over $750 million in AUM.
Dickson said Elevation Point usually takes a 20% to 40% stake in firms, with some joining its Form ADV, and others remaining on their own. He said Elevation Point sits down with a potential partner and identifies “one or two things we can do with them to really help them grow.”
In Fortage’s case, one of those growth areas was providing the RIA with Elevation Point’s proprietary private market investment options.
“We’ve created quite a platform that is substantial,” Dickson said. “For [Moss], it was not only being able to take the back and the middle office off of his plate, but also what we could do to help him offer more for his clients.”
Dickson said Elevation Point has recently prioritized working with clients through tax season, but now, the market should expect a “regular cadence through the year” of investment announcements.
The CEO said “two specific ecosystems” are interested in getting a minority stake from Elevation Point: large breakaway wirehouse teams and RIAs with client assets of about $750 to $1 billion who are looking to grow.
Regarding the wirehouse breakaways, those advisors are “frustrated with the bureaucracy and the restrictedness of being in a wirehouse,” Dickson said. “They’re looking at the advantages of the economics, but they’re also saying, ‘Hey, look, I’m not sure we want to build this on our own, so let’s look for a partner that can help us stake it.’”
On the RIA side, Dickson said some larger advisories are struggling to “get to the next level.”
“They’re saying, ‘Look, we know how to grow, but we don’t know how to scale,’” he said. “‘Can you help us come in and scale this thing from a billion-dollar practice to a $3 billion practice?’ That’s when we can bring in our technology and our expertise.”
Listen to Jim Dickson speak about the next move after a deal is signed at Wealth Management EDGE, June 10-12 at The Boca Raton Resort. Register Now.
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