RIA aggregator Focus Financial has once again consolidated two constituent firms, this time merging Atlanta firm Gratus Capital into the Colony Group.

Gratus, which joined Focus as a partner firm in 2014, has $3.8 billion in regulatory assets under management. The firm was founded by Hank McLarty, its CEO, and has its roots in a firm dating back to 2005. It serves high-net-worth families with investment management and business owner strategies, according to Focus, which announced the consolidation in a press release yesterday.

The new pairing is the latest of a wave of huge streamlining structural changes announced by Focus, which was taken private last year by private equity.

In early May, Focus said it was melding Buckingham Strategic Wealth, a firm with $30 billion in assets, with another giant partner firm, the Colony Group. At the time, it was reported that Buckingham and Colony, two of the big jewels in the Focus crown, had $110 billion in combined assets. Buckingham was run by CEO Adam Birenbaum, who took over as chief of Colony.

Colony’s previous CEO, Michael Nathanson, ascended to the chief executive officer role of Focus on April 30. He said in an interview with Financial Advisor last month that Focus, an aggregator with a voracious appetite that had bought some 90 firms, wanted to foster best practice ideas among its partner firms, including the idea that some would combine their businesses. However, he stressed that future consolidations would be voluntary, not forced, and be respectful of the partner firms’ original arrangements. Nathanson said future internal mergers would represent "a coalition of the willing."

In the past, the firm was famous for its voracious appetite for acquiring partner firms and for letting them stay independent, an arrangement that some considered to be unwieldy. Buckingham and Colony, two of the bigger and more influential partner firms, were described as “hubs” for some of these future business combinations, as were the partner firms Kovitz Investment Group and SCS Financial.

Some of these internal business combinations were announced earlier this month: Illinois firm Relative Value Partners Group agreed to join  Chicago-based Kovitz, creating a $24 billion AUM entity. Meanwhile, the $8.7 billion AUM business of Greenwich, Conn., partner firm Connectus Wealth Advisers was divided up among Colony and Kovitz. 

Last month, Focus announced a series of executive appointments: It hired David Lang as chief operating officer after he came over from Apollo Global Management, and hired Lawrence Frers, a Morgan Stanley alumnus, as chief human resources officer. The new appointments also included two veterans of Focus firm Connectus: its former CEO Molly Bennard, who is taking over as president of international operations at Focus, and Kathleen Alcorn, who is coming on board as chief marketing and communications officer.

Private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice took Focus private in a $7 billion all-cash deal completed last August, and Focus’s longtime CEO, Rudy Adolf, stepped down in October. Investment bankers who observed the deal said that private equity has been giving giant RIA aggregators higher valuations than the public markets do, but also noted that in the private equity space, there’s been a race to add leverage.

Correction: Focus's recent executive appointments were announced in June, not in early July, as stated in an early version of this article.