BKFi, a $700 million registered investment advisor based in Brooklyn, N.Y., has acquired Wealth With Options, a San Diego, Calif.-based advisory team with about $225 million in assets. This represents BKFi’s first deal since inception in 2018 and first since selling a minority stake to Accelerated Wealth Partners earlier this year.
Wealth With Options was founded in 2019 by Jackie Lewis and Ryan Goldenhar, who left Wells Fargo Private Bank after recognizing a gap in serving tech professionals with equity compensation. Most recently, they were affiliated with Mariner Independent, but they’ve dropped that affiliation with this deal.
Ally Jane (AJ) Ayers, CEO and co-founder of BKFi, says this deal levels up her firm, with Wealth With Options bringing private-banking-caliber clients and a more sophisticated investment program. Lewis and Goldenhar also bring many years of experience in the wealth space, compared to the existing BKFi team. They will lead BKFi’s West Coast efforts.
“I spent years at private banks serving families with significant wealth,” Lewis said in a statement. “The people BKFi works with deserve that same level of care and sophistication much earlier in their lives, when the decisions they make about their equity shape everything that comes after.”
BKFi was founded in 2018 by Ayers and Shane Mason, with a focus on helping tech employees, founders and creatives through IPOs, business sales, major life changes, and other complex planning needs. The firm works with executives and employees from Palantir, Anthropic, Spotify, SpaceX and others.
The firm was born out of Mason’s CPA practice; Ayers was coming out of a career in journalism and tech.
“We had never worked in financial services before, but we just saw this gap that our 27- to 35-year-old friends were not going to go to a skyscraper in Midtown. They wanted someone who could speak their language, could actually give them tax advice,” Ayers said. “Our thesis that young people needed complex advice and no one was out there serving them was proved true very quickly and continues to be proven true.”
The firm has seen double-digit organic growth over the past several years, but it wanted help with its inorganic strategy. While they spoke to a couple dozen different capital partners, Accelerated Wealth stood out for its M&A expertise, Ayers said.
There are more M&A deals in the pipeline, she added.
“What I just loved about the AWP philosophy was, ‘We’re not interested in taking $10 billion firms and mashing them all together.’ It was, ‘Let’s find really exciting firms at the beginning of their growth curve and let’s pump them full of great ideas, great talent and more experience and let’s find other like-minded firms that are also smaller and are also at the beginning of that growth curve,’” Ayers said.
Ayers’ first book, “Creative Money: New Financial Rules for Artists, Innovators and Misfits,” comes out next week. The book is a guide for managing money for artists, freelancers, tech workers, influencers and innovators, and draws on her experiences with clients at BKFi and building an RIA over the last eight years.
This follows news this week that Accelerated Wealth has taken a minority stake in Pallas Capital Advisors, a Massachusetts-based RIA with about $5 billion in client assets.