Mariner Wealth Advisors, the $37 billion powerhouse advisory firm and voracious acquirer founded in Leawood, Kan., in 2006, has expanded its power, influence and brand to four new cities, in part by snagging a nine-person $460 million AUM advisory team from Moneta Group.

Mariner, which has made several East Coast acquisitions in the past year, will soon also fly its flag in St. Louis, where the Moneta team is based, as well as in Scottsdale, Ariz.; San Francisco; and Oklahoma City.

In St. Louis, the firm nabbed the Moneta team of nine that includes Patrick J. Howley III and Betsy Dow, former colleagues of Mariner chief Marty Bicknell, who worked alongside them at the storied advisory firm A.G. Edwards. The advisors fled to Moneta in 2010 after A.G. Edwards was absorbed by Wells Fargo, and they bring, besides assets, a focus on wealthy clients. Bicknell says he has worked with Howley for close to 15 years.

Bicknell, scion to a pizza fortune, founded Mariner after leaving Edwards. His plan was to make a consultancy to high-net-worth individuals. Instead, Mariner found itself in the doldrums of the financial crisis with a huge war chest for buying hurting firms on the cheap in a giddy discount atmosphere. Its shopping spree helped it assemble a diverse financial services company of alternative asset managers, an investment bank, insurance services, trust services and accounting as well as RIA wealth managers. It now handles $14 billion in assets at its RIA firms and $23 billion at its asset managers.

The large footprint Mariner is creating is tougher to maintain, Bicknell says, considering the deep culture he has worked to cultivate and protect—a firm with no client asset minimums that has an emotional proximity to clients similar to that of the late, lamented A.G. Edwards. Last year, Bill Greiner, the company’s chief investment strategist, said the firm likes entrepreneurial people who created their own wealth rather than third-generation wealth holders.

The recruiting of other Edwards’ vets like Howley’s team means that Mariner is trying to hold onto the late company’s style even as the new company vastly increases its national brand and ubiquity. In addition to the offices it’s opening, Mariner also has outlets in New York, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Omaha and San Diego, as well as two offices in New Jersey and others in Kansas and California. Bicknell says that the strategy for offices isn’t based on a need to “invade” new regions so much as a search for cultural fits with smaller firms. Mariner’s strategy is to buy slight majority stakes, then let the firms run the way they always have with the help of Mariner’s back office and IT help, as well as the trust, insurance and investment bank services offered by Mariner’s other companies.

“We don’t go put pins on a map and say we want to be in city X,” Bicknell says. “We tried that strategy before and it really didn’t work very well for us. So we took a step back and took a bigger picture approach. We broadly look for the right individuals, and once we find them we make a determination if that’s the market we want to be in.”

Because that culture fit is so key, he expects the merger pace to slow down a bit (Mariner’s largest purchase in the last year was a stake in Pennsylvania’s Vantage Investment Advisors, a 14-member team located in State College, Pa., with $1 billion in AUM.) Instead, the company will shift from acquiring to hiring, focusing on recruiting people to fill out the new offices it has leased in Scottsdale, San Francisco and Oklahoma City. In Scottsdale, the company already had clients and it made sense to lease an office and open shop there, Bicknell says. In San Francisco, the firm found an individual it wanted to hire and decided to open shop there as well.

“We’ve added probably 50-ish advisors and probably 150 total employees in the last 12 months, and we’ll probably do at least that if not more in the next 12 months,” Bicknell says. “Ultimately, we believe each of our offices in these four locations will be in the 15 to 20 people range in a two-to-three-year period.”

“I would love to kind of fill out the country,” he says. “That is our strategy and that would be a great outcome. However, it doesn’t quite work that way. Chicago, for example, I’d love to be in Chicago, but we’ve had no luck finding the right individuals there.”

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