Succession planning remains the Achilles heel of the registered investment advisor industry, where founder-led models and client intimacy often collide with the need for orderly leadership transitions. Charles Schwab's latest RIA benchmarking survey underscores the gap: just 45 per cent of firms managing under $250 million in assets maintain a written succession plan, rising to 65 per cent for those above that threshold and 77 per cent among Schwab's top performers. Against that backdrop, Atlanta-based HB Wealth offers a rare counter-narrative — a deliberate, decade-plus handoff that preserved continuity, deepened employee ownership and unlocked institutional capital without surrendering control.
Founded in 1989 by two former CPAs who borrowed seed capital from a parent, HB Wealth today oversees approximately $32 billion in assets across 350 employees and thousands of clients. The firm's longevity, however, was tested early. In 2001, co-founder and then-CEO David Homrich departed to manage AMB Group, the investment and wealth arm of Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank. The move left remaining co-founder Andy Berg to steer the business solo for more than two decades, an experience that would shape the firm's approach to leadership continuity.
Berg's response was methodical. He constructed a 12-year succession framework divided into three four-year phases: identifying a successor, working closely with that person to transfer operational responsibility, and serving as board chair before full retirement. Thomas Carroll, who knew Berg through church and community ties, entered the firm around 2020 as president and presumptive heir. Over the next four years Carroll assumed increasing operational control, led growth initiatives and built a personal equity stake through direct transactions with Berg. In January 2024 he took the CEO title while Berg moved to board chair, marking the penultimate chapter of the blueprint.
The succession plan unfolded in parallel with a recapitalisation strategy designed to broaden ownership and finance growth. HB Wealth has long maintained a policy of distributing equity to partner advisors and senior leaders, but concentration risk remained high as long as a single Generation One founder held the majority. Carroll and Berg determined that internal share transfers alone — financed through advisor loans repaid from distributions — would starve the business of reinvestment capital and constrain geographic expansion. In September 2021 the firm sold its first minority stake to New Mountain Capital, a non-control transaction that provided liquidity for Berg's partial exit and seeded a capital pool for acquisitions.
Three years later, in the autumn of 2024, HB Wealth returned to the equity markets and secured a second minority investment from TPG Growth. The firm's current ownership structure now places 86 employees at the top of the capital stack, followed by TPG in second position and New Mountain in third. That arrangement preserves majority employee control while giving the business access to institutional balance sheets for deal flow and platform investments. Carroll characterised the dual-minority model as essential to sustaining both internal equity recycling and external growth ambitions at the firm's current scale.
The benefits of that capital became visible quickly. Last year HB Wealth completed its largest acquisition to date, a $6.4 billion multi-family office based in Tyson, Maryland, significantly expanding the firm's Mid-Atlantic footprint. The firm also rebranded from Homrich Berg Wealth Management to the shorter HB Wealth moniker, signalling a shift from founder identity to institutional permanence. This week it announced the launch of a dedicated institutional advisory division alongside a formal outsourced chief investment officer offering, services that extend the firm's reach beyond its traditional high-net-worth client base.
Carroll's tenure has thus far married founder-era continuity with platform-era ambition. The firm remains headquartered in Atlanta, where the vast majority of its team still resides, yet its geographic and service footprint has widened materially. The 12-year succession plan, conceived in response to early founder churn, appears to have delivered the stability Berg sought: a leadership transition that neither disrupted client relationships nor forced a distressed sale to an external buyer.
Schwab's benchmarking data identifies a series of 15 factors correlated with top RIA performance, and written succession planning ranks among them. HB Wealth's experience suggests that the plan itself matters less than the discipline to execute it over multiple election cycles, bear markets and tempting exit opportunities. Berg's willingness to commit to a phased handoff — and Carroll's patience in building equity and operational fluency before taking the helm — created the conditions for a non-disruptive transition at a firm approaching $32 billion in assets under management.
The challenge now is to ensure that the succession infrastructure outlasts its architects. With Berg nearing the final stage of his board tenure and Carroll firmly in the CEO seat, HB Wealth will need to demonstrate that its equity-sharing culture and multi-year planning discipline can survive the departure of the founder who designed them. The firm's ability to attract and retain next-generation leaders — and to equitise them without diluting employee control or exhausting cash flow — will determine whether the 12-year plan was a one-off solution or a repeatable playbook.
For an industry in which founder exits routinely trigger client attrition, team defections and hurried sales to consolidators, HB Wealth's trajectory offers a studied contrast. The firm began with a loan from a founder's father, weathered the early loss of a co-CEO, and emerged as a multi-billion-dollar platform majority-owned by its employees. That outcome did not require a majority buyout, a public listing or a distressed transaction. It required a plan, the capital to execute it and the discipline to see it through across more than a decade.