HB Wealth acquires $700M Texas RIA; Hightower Signature adds Sandy Cove

HB Wealth's acquisition of Wealth Care, an Austin-based registered investment advisor with about $700 million in client assets, takes the $33 billion Atlanta firm into Texas and gives it a seventh market alongside Georgia, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. On the arithmetic alone the deal barely registers: $700 million works out to a little over 2% of the book.

What the balance sheet does not show is what HB Wealth actually bought. Wealth Care is a family practice in the literal sense. Steven Podnos started the firm in 2002 and later brought in his daughters, Rachel Podnos O'Leary and Lauren Podnos-Garner, as co-owners, according to the firm's latest Form ADV, and all three are moving with the business, which keeps offices in Austin and Cocoa Beach, Fla. Podnos spent his first career as a physician specializing in pulmonary and critical care and kept practicing in the Air Force Reserve until 2023, a background that built the firm's specialty: advice for physicians and healthcare professionals.

"Joining HB Wealth ... allows us to preserve the independent, fiduciary approach that has always defined our work while expanding the depth of advice and resources we can bring to each relationship," Podnos said in a statement.

No price was disclosed, and the only intermediary named is Advisor Growth Strategies, which advised Wealth Care. HB Wealth is employee-owned, with New Mountain Capital and TPG Growth holding minority stakes. What $700 million of healthcare-heavy assets in Austin carries is a physician-founder's referral network, a second generation already inside the ownership structure, and a client base a generalist platform would struggle to rebuild from scratch. That is the part the 2% understates.

In September, Wilmington Trust's Marguerite Weese said she sees pandemic memories pulling owners toward exits, and BNY Wealth research shows just under half of sellers prepared for diligence. Wealth Care's ADV records a founder in a second career, two daughters installed as co-owners, and now a buyer with $33 billion and two minority institutional backers behind it — the family-continuity-plus-institutional-capital pitch platform buyers are making at this size, with the Podnos statement reading as that pitch accepted.

Hightower Advisors' announcement is larger in dollars and smaller against the buyer's scale. Sandy Cove Advisors, a Hingham, Mass., wealth manager with roughly $752 million in assets, has joined Hightower Signature Wealth, the firm's third external acquisition of 2026; the transaction is expected to close at the end of the third quarter and would take Signature past $40 billion.

Sandy Cove was founded by Deirdre Prescott, its president and chief wealth strategist, and is led alongside Chief Investment Officer Kate Saltonstall. The firm provides investment management, financial planning and family office services with a stated focus on family legacy planning and life transitions, including divorce. "Joining HTSW gives us broader resources to support that work while preserving the personal relationships, values and client-first philosophy that have always defined Sandy Cove," Prescott said in a statement. Rick Adler of Red Arrow Capital advised Sandy Cove, and Hightower remains majority-owned by Thomas H. Lee Partners, which first invested in 2018 and recapitalized the firm with other investors in 2020.

A $752 million practice is a fraction of a percent of Hightower, which reported $198.6 billion in regulatory assets across 220,222 accounts and 1,983 employees as of Sept. 26, per PWD's records. Set against that, Signature — just over $40 billion once Sandy Cove clears — amounts to roughly a fifth of the parent, which is why the unit is the part of Hightower worth watching. Doubling it from here would take 53 more Sandy Coves, so a deal of this size does not move the platform; it staffs one. The argument since September has been that platform buyers are paying for capacity rather than client lists, and buying in series rather than in bulk is the cheaper route to a unit that will eventually carry its own brand, which makes the roster the disclosure that matters more than the AUM.

The digest's smaller item carries a sharper edge: Carson Group is adding a women-led team from Commonwealth Financial Services to its 1099 advisor channel. Nikki Lude and Ciara Stewart left Commonwealth with about $120 million in client assets to launch Heritage Financial & Investment Services in southeastern Ohio, a departure reported Sept. 30. Read against Commonwealth's pending sale to LPL Financial, it is one line in a large ledger: LPL raised its run-rate cash flow target for the purchase by $25 million in August and projects advisor retention will climb to 90%. A 90% retention projection is a forecast about who stays, and the ones who go show up in someone else's announcement.

The same coverage notes Cerity Partners' third deal of the week and OnePoint BFG's expansion in Georgia and Florida, and gives no terms or counterparties for either. Three deals in one week is a different posture from the buyers above, who take on one firm at a time and staff it. What a firm on that cadence pays, and how much of the sub-$1 billion practice has become a line item rather than a negotiation, is the question left open.

Between them, Wealth Care and Sandy Cove hold about $1.45 billion in client assets, and neither announcement carried a price. The next seller at that size negotiates against two undisclosed benchmarks — and against a bid that now pairs succession planning with an institutional balance sheet.