Truinvest founder Mark Smith expects his entrant consolidator to double in size by next year, but he is not chasing numerous deals.
Speaking to FTAdviser, the former Mattioli Woods chief operating officer said he hopes for the firm’s assets to double in size from their current £1.2bn within the next year. Within the next few years the aim is to grow to £5bn.
But the firm will not make more than about three deals a year, he said.
“We won't be doing 20 transactions a year - that's not the type of business we are. We tend to go for larger, more established businesses rather than retirees, as they tend to scale themselves.
“We'll typically do two or three a year but they will be more substantial.”
He added: “It’s easy to bring together a small number of large businesses. But the whole process is the same whether it was one adviser or whether it's ten advisers so that's our strategy.”
“We could easily go and find 20 businesses next year, but how many people would stay with us? We go to the right ones for the right reasons.
“I doubt we’ll do anything this calendar year but we hope to double our size by next year.”
Truinvest was founded by directors Smith and Micky Johal in 2019, who previously worked together at wealth manager Mattioli Woods as chief operating officer and director of mergers and acquisitions respectively.
At the time, they had ambitions to manage £1bn worth of assets in the firm's first year in the market, which they achieved after buying NLP Financial Management and Birchwood Investment Management in March.
Commenting on achieving the target, Smith said: “We talked about trying to get to £1bn of assets within our first year - we only had about two days to spare.
“[The assets] have really helped us because then it’s given us credibility as we set a target and then we delivered. Just in time.”
Smith explained that at the moment, Truinvest has assets of around £1.2bn and is focused on bringing together everything it has done so far.
“First of all we've got a good foundation to build out further so we’re making sure that we've got common compliance across a common investment platform and we want to make sure we're getting it right first before we start to move forward.
“It’s almost been a period of just taking since March, now we've taken a bit of a step back to make sure everything's the same.”
However, he said although the firm was taking a step back, it was still in talks with firms about potential deals.
He said there will always be about a dozen firms Truinvest is talking to at different stages.
'Leap of faith'
Truinvest’s first purchase was Group Rapport in March last year, followed by Bromwich Financial Planning in June.
Smith said: “We're always grateful for the guys at Group Rapport because they were the first people to come on to our group and we had no track record.
"It was a leap of faith but now, the transactions that we've started to get, [they] can see what we’ve done. In the next three to four years, we aspire to get £5bn.
“We're bringing together what we've got and just created our executive team across the group so we take people from each of those businesses.
"The Truinvest team isn't just me and Micky anymore, it’s people from across businesses with a wide range of experiences in advice, discretionary management, clients, whatever it might be.
"That's a great opportunity to give them the business because they can then grow with us as well. I love that.”
Last month, the consolidator launched a central mortgage desk to support its firms, alongside a joint venture with an insurance firm. Truinvest founded the mortgage service from the hub of Group Rapport.
Truinvest is also working on its discretionary proposition and is looking to roll that out to the wider group.
Meanwhile the firm is doing work on the investment platform which it expects to launch by the end of this year.
sonia.rach@ft.com
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