Sanctuary Wealth provides property, M&A and advertising and marketing leaders to spice up companion help
The breakaway-focused platform’s senior hires from Wells Fargo, Bluespring and Hightower deepen its bench for progress and succession planning.
As the river of advisor motion continues to circulate from the wirehouse to the impartial channel, Sanctuary Wealth is including depth to 3 of the areas indie advisors say matter most proper now: property planning for rich households, mergers and acquisitions, and advertising and marketing muscle.
The Miami-based hybrid RIA platform stated Wednesday it has employed Harry Drozdowski as managing director of superior property and wealth planning, Reilly Cornell as vp of mergers and acquisitions, and Kelly LaPalio as vp of advisor progress advertising and marketing.
“We are constructing for the place our companion corporations are going, not merely the place they’re in the present day,” stated Adam Malamed, chief govt officer of Sanctuary Wealth.
Drozdowski joins after almost twenty years in wealth planning and personal authorized follow serving ultra-high-net-worth households and household workplaces. A Harvard Law School graduate, he most just lately served as govt director and personal wealth strategist at Wells Fargo, the place he suggested the agency’s largest relationships on property, tax and wealth planning methods. At Sanctuary, he’ll work immediately with companion corporations on belief, property and succession questions and join advisors with specialists in tax planning, philanthropic planning and business-owner options.
Cornell arrives from Bluespring Wealth Partners, Kestra’s fee-only RIA channel, the place she served as a principal on the M&A group and evaluated greater than 100 acquisition alternatives, executing greater than 15 transactions throughout the wealth administration business. Earlier in her profession she labored in Citi’s capital allocation banking division, advising vitality firms on mergers, strategic transactions and capital raises. She’s coming to Sanctuary to supply and execute offers alongside Josef Rogers, who was promoted to director of company growth earlier this 12 months after becoming a member of the agency in 2024.
LaPalio, who brings greater than twenty years of expertise from FocusPoint Solutions, Avantax and Hightower, will design natural progress packages throughout Sanctuary’s nationwide community, working with advisors on positioning, digital advertising and marketing and lead technology.
Malamed stated the brand new hires “carry the expertise and perspective to assist advisors deal with extra complicated consumer wants, pursue new avenues for progress and put together their companies for what comes subsequent,” he stated.
Sanctuary, which just lately posted a record year as a hybrid RIA platform for elite wirehouse breakaways, is deepening its bench as advisor progress tendencies proceed to favor the impartial channel. Cerulli tasks headcount within the wirehouse channel will decline 5.7% from 2025 by 2028, in comparison with 12% progress for impartial RIAs and 4.7% at impartial broker-dealers. Separately, it discovered roughly seven-tenths of advisors would hop to an impartial channel in the event that they had been to modify corporations.
The hires additionally land as impartial advisory corporations face rising stress to formalize their service choices and enterprise enlargement fashions, not merely depend on exchanges to hold progress. Schwab’s 2026 RIA Benchmarking Study discovered that over the previous decade, corporations have expanded their providers to incorporate monetary planning (cited by 96% of corporations), tax planning (88%), and property planning (73%).
The survey additionally discovered 24% of corporations over $250 million are actively searching for to purchase one other RIA, whereas 44% wish to carry on an advisor with a e book of enterprise. Among the motivations for inorganic progress, corporations pointed to elevated AUM, turnover, and consumer progress (91%), expertise acquisition (65%), and attaining scale (55%).
When it involves advertising and marketing, Schwab discovered 69% of top-performing corporations have a documented advertising and marketing plan, which by no less than one measure drove 127% extra new consumer belongings in comparison with these with no codified advertising and marketing technique.
Research from Cerulli highlights the urgency of bringing new shoppers by the door, with RIAs going through annual attrition between 2% and 5% of complete belongings underneath administration – even earlier than counting consumer departures – as aging clients move into decumulation and withdrawal mode.
“Without a devoted enterprise growth focus, RIAs instantly put themselves at a drawback, as consumer belongings naturally have a tendency to say no all year long,” stated Stephen Caruso, director at Cerulli. “In many regards, this could dampen a agency’s capacity to increase.”
