John Wernz, an executive-in-residence at Great Hill Partners, the Boston-based private equity firm, has joined Mission Wealth as a strategic advisor and partner. This follows Great Hill’s minority investment in Mission Wealth, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-headquartered RIA with about $11 billion in assets, in May.
Great Hill hired Wernz in 2023 to help the firm identify investment opportunities in the wealth management and wealthtech industries. Now that the private equity firm has invested in a wealth management firm, it will focus on wealthtech opportunities. Wernz will split his time between the two firms.
“I will be spending a large portion of my time working directly with the Mission management team, specifically around growth initiatives—both organic and inorganic,” he said. “The other part of my time, I will continue to work with Great Hill Partners to continue to identify opportunities, specifically within wealthtech.”
Prior to joining Great Hill, Wernz spent 13 years at Wealth Enhancement, one of the fastest-growing RIAs, as chief marketing officer and interim chief growth officer. He’ll apply many of the lessons from his time at Wealth Enhancement to ramp up Mission Wealth’s organic and inorganic growth. During his time at Wealth Enhancement, the RIA grew from $2 billion to $60 billion in total assets.
“Mission is already fairly strong in organic growth, and they’re leaders in a number of areas that we want to build out even more. As they grow from $11 billion to much larger, we have several working organic channels right now. We’d really like to have five to 10,” he said. “Digital marketing, offline marketing, referral programs, COI—you name it. Those are all things that we’re leaning in and accelerating on.”
He will also help the firm increase the size and number of acquisitions.
“As they become larger, the size of deals and how they’re willing to approach them will increase commensurate to a larger size,” Wernz said.
Mission Wealth was founded in 2000 and now has over 35 offices across the country, serving over 4,100 high-net-worth individuals and families.
#John #Wernz #Joins #Mission #Wealth #Strategic #Advisor #Partner