Atlanta-based ACG Wealth, a $1.8 billion hybrid firm, has named Greg Fink as chief executive, the company announced Thursday.

Fink, who started last week, was most recently a vice president at Fidelity Investments’ Clearing & Custody Services unit, where he was responsible for working with Fidelity’s largest RIA firms in the Southeast.

“I’ve worked with ACG for over six years,” Fink said, “so I’m very familiar with the owners, the team, the culture, the training—everything.”
 
“There becomes a tipping point for a firm as to how far the owners can take it before it should be professionally managed,” he added, and ACG (formerly Atlanta Capital Group), with 25 employees and eight advisors, has reached that point.

David Millican, Jeff Shaver and Joseph “Jody” Young founded the firm in 2002 as partners and equal owners in the firm. Millican and Shaver are veterans of A.G. Edwards and Morgan Keegan; Young is also a former Morgan Keegan rep.

With Fink running the overall operation, the goal is to free up the three founders to focus on their respective areas of the business. Millican will focus on ACG’s own broker-dealer, Arkadios Capital. Young handles  mergers and acquisitions, and Shaver has responsibility for wealth management.

Since its founding, ACG has merged with or acquired more than a dozen practices, most of them smaller RIA firms.

That activity will continue, Fink said. “We have four more in the pipeline right now.”

ACG wants to focus its growth on the Southeast region, although it has made opportunistic additions in New York City and Houston. In addition to its Atlanta headquarters, the firm has offices in St. Simons, Ga., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

Fink says ACG can compete with the national rollup firms by offering more flexibility in how deals are structured and competitive financing from local community banks.

He credits Millican with developing those banking relationships, which isn’t always easy for small businesses with no hard assets to collateralize.

“But once [banks] do one [RIA] deal, they get it,” Fink said.

ACG’s growth has not been without some bumps in the road.

In 2015, a dispute arose between ACG and its broker-dealer at the time, Triad Advisors, over a hedge fund ACG was forming. The spat led Millican to form his own B-D and leave Triad in October. At the time ACG was Triad’s biggest RIA client.

In an arbitration filing, ACG claims it received approval from Triad to start the fund but that Triad recanted. Triad asserts that ACG violated terms of a promissory note that required ACG to stay with Triad for five years after the note was paid off. The arbitration case is still pending.