“My senior leadership teams came to me and said, ‘Listen, I really want to be a financial advisor with our clients. But now I have to do marketing. I have to do meeting planning. I have to do some tax preparation. And so with the 30 people we have, we’re not big enough to have departments. We do have a full-time marketing person, but we don’t have a chief marketing officer. The vision still has to be directed from the leadership team. And so our planners are getting overwhelmed. Tired. And they love this idea of going somewhere where they literally have a marketing team,” he said.
Haught said Sequoia started in 1991 but started growing through mergers in its third decade because it had developed talent in the first 20 years that was ready to take on more responsibilities. It’s done eight total transactions since 2009, he said.
The firm now has offices in Michigan, Florida and South Carolina.
Kudu Investment Management made an equity investment in Sequoia in 2020 to help the RIA firm with its expansion plans. Haught said that Kudu is backed by White Mountains Insurance Group and doesn’t operate like a private equity firm. “It’s more long-dated insurance capital,” he said.