Merchant Investment Management, a New York-based investment firm that provides growth capital and other support to independent financial services firms, has hired Candice Carlton as a managing director in a new role focused on connecting partner firms to collaborate on best practices and growth strategies.
Carlton joins Merchant from a role as executive vice president and head of strategy at Ficomm, an RIA marketing firm co-founded and run by CEO Megan Carpenter. In that role, she created and led growth programs for wealth management firms that included digital campaigns.
At Merchant, Carlton will design and run programs to connect leaders across the more than 100 registered investment advisors and other financial firms in which it holds a minority stake. This includes creating peer strategy groups, digital engagement programs, and information sharing groups in areas ranging from tech stacks to second-generation training and succession planning to affinity groups for women to COOs.
“It will be an opportunity [for firms] to contribute in their areas of mastery and learn from peers,” Carlton said of what she will be building. “We’ll be focused on all the areas we know businesses are working on to improve the end client experience.”
The work will build upon Merchant’s role supporting its partner firms with growth strategies and services, said Merchant Managing Director Matt Brinker.
“We’ve evolved into a true lifecycle equity partner supporting well over 100 firms globally, which means through every stage of their growth from launch to legacy and continuity planning,” Brinker said. “We have to have an ability to engage with our partner firms at high degrees of scale and bring all of the resources to bear to help [them] execute on their strategies.”
He added that the decision to hire Carlton came from a combination of Merchant’s larger portfolio of partnered firms requiring the dedicated role and his experience seeing her work at United Capital, where they overlapped when Brinker was head of business development and acquisitions.
“I had front row seats to watch Candice build a network and a really dynamic engagement with our partner firms,” Brinker said. “We needed somebody with Candice’s experience and expertise to really organize and formally build out an engagement team to leverage all of the intellectual power across the entirety of the Merchant global ecosystem.”
Carlton had also previously been head of growth marketing for United Capital, the registered investment advisor eventually bought and then sold by Goldman Sachs, and a project manager at Mercer Advisors.
Carlton recalled that United Capital had been growing so rapidly in the mid-to-late-2010s that the firm felt disconnected, which potentially crimped growth. Her role had been to bring them together to coordinate more and get better results for clients.
“We would bring in such incredible experts, and they would be helpful for all of the firms—where they got juice and impact was learning from their peers,” she said. “It also gave us the ability to ensure that if UC did a strategic shift, our firms were aligned and connected so they could pivot quickly.”
Carlton said that Merchant’s current needs for its firms, which collectively manage about $230 billion in client assets, are similar to those of a similar problem set but for a different kind of partner model.
“Merchant is evolving the definition of what partnership looks like,” she said. “My role is designing the tissue that will help [the partner firms] grow smarter, and more intentionally together.”
Carlton’s hire comes a little over a month after Merchant hired Rich Policastro, former head of M&A at Hightower, as managing director focused on expanding the investment firm’s network of service providers offering RIA-adjacent services.
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