SignatureFD carves out its ninth niche: franchise owners

SignatureFD has spent nearly three decades dividing itself into niches, and the Atlanta wealth manager's ninth, SignatureFRANCHISE, is built for franchise business owners — from the operator opening a first unit to multi-unit groups running sizable, complex operations. The practice will work across financing, tax strategy, asset protection, real estate, insurance, succession and exit preparation.

The client population has edges, and the International Franchise Association's 2026 outlook, produced with research firm FRANdata, projects US franchise establishments growing to roughly 845,000 units this year, supporting nearly 8.9 million jobs and more than $920 billion in economic output. A market that size, with franchisors, lenders and unit-level economics already in place, behaves less like a marketing theme than a corridor of owners who talk to one another.

The person running it matters more than the announcement, and Kenton "Kenny" Loar, a certified financial planner who has worked as a franchise banker and as an operator inside a brand he had previously helped finance, argues that a franchise owner's business plan and personal plan are two halves of the same document — that advice arriving only at a sale or liquidity event has missed the years when the decisions were still cheap to make.

Niche launches are cheap to announce and expensive to staff. SignatureFD runs nine of them now, against a base the firm said last October had passed $10 billion in assets managed or reported, a figure that arrived with a $1 billion asset milestone for its Charlotte office. Nine segments on that chassis is a bet that depth in a narrow population beats the national-brand pitch, and the hard-to-copy part is talent that has stood in the franchisor's chair, the lender's chair and the operator's chair. Those relationships sit closer to a franchisee's capital decisions than an advisor's does, which suggests a wealth manager is often third in line when a unit gets financed or refinanced.

This publication has argued that the estate file is becoming software, and that whoever owns the document layer reaches the next generation before the first gift clears. SignatureFD is wagering on the coordinating advisor instead, which is a defensible position in a niche where the franchise agreement and the unit economics live with the client rather than with a platform. Franchise units also turn over — bought, resold and handed to the next operator — and exit preparation is among the nine services the practice says it will sell.

The addressable list is roughly 845,000 units this year, and each of them already has a franchisor and a lender inside the balance sheet. The ninth practice earns its keep the day one of those owners calls the advisor first.