Baker Street's $21B run shows PE owners don't have to buy

Baker Street Advisors manages $21 billion today. Not a dollar of it came from buying another firm. For a private-equity-backed RIA, that is odd: the San Francisco firm accepted a majority owner in 2015 and then made no acquisitions. The cap table says private equity; the strategy says otherwise.

CEO Chris Wilkens calls the sale to AMG Wealth Partners a succession solution, not a growth mandate. The firm's partners — founder Jeff Colin, Mike van den Akker, and Wilkens — were roughly eight years apart in age. By 2013, they could see the exit question coming. For Wilkens, among the firm's first partners, the workable options were to sell to a bank or borrow from one. Neither appealed. 'Selling to a bank would conflict with what made us special to our clients,' he told WealthManagement.com.

AMG's majority stake let the partners 'pre-negotiate our future retirements while maintaining our independence,' and then the deal went quiet. Baker Street did not become a roll-up. Growth has averaged about 12% a year. That pace has now held for 15 years, built from new client relationships, expanded wallet share, referrals, and advisors hired and trained in-house. Client minimum is $10 million. Fees are low. Relationships run long; many clients are now working with their next Baker Street advisor, some with the one after that. That longevity is the organic version of a retention rate.

Location did real work in that growth. The firm started in the early 2000s in the center of the tech boom, and Wilkens concedes some of the growth was simply being in the right place at the right time. He expects more of the same: in his view, AI-driven wealth creation will exceed anything he has seen in more than two decades of advising tech workers.

Baker Street is a useful counterweight to the deal tape. WealthManagement.com ran the interview as part of a series on RIA ownership structures and notes that private equity increasingly dominates RIA M&A. The usual reading: sponsors buy RIAs to build platforms, platforms buy books, and the buyer's cost of capital becomes the seller's obligation to keep acquiring. Baker Street shows capital can serve a different purpose. The AMG transaction paid out a generation of owners and handled their retirement, and it did not have to be followed by a string of acquisitions.

The distinction matters to every RIA owner weighing a private-equity deal. Valuation talk usually centers on what a buyer can extract from a platform. The Baker Street version centers on what the firm does after the buyer arrives. Selling an ownership stake is not automatically a mandate to consolidate, and a platform that declines to buy is still a platform — just one that pays for itself through operations, not deals.

None of this argues for organic growth as the universally superior route. It is slower than buying a book, less certain, and it depends on a client base and a location willing to cooperate. But the arithmetic is straightforward. Grow a book at roughly 12% a year and it doubles. The doubling takes about six years. Baker Street's owners got liquidity in 2015 and held on to the operating model. That is the part of the private-equity RIA story that never shows up in deal announcement emails — the sale that changes the cap table but not the calendar. The 12% figure is the better measure of the firm. It came from client relationships, not from the M&A tape.