The $21B RIA that says no to every buyer

In a market where the RIA deal has become the default growth strategy, Baker Street Advisors has spent 22 years making the opposite case from San Francisco: $21 billion in assets under management, 70 people, and not one acquisition on its history. Chris Wilkens, its CEO and executive committee partner, told InvestmentNews that the firm fields regular inbound interest from potential buyers and is not interested at any valuation.

That posture puts Baker Street against the industry's prevailing current, in which consolidators are buying independent family offices to acquire ultra-high-net-worth capabilities and RIA transaction volume is running at a record pace. Wilkens' argument is that the fastest route to scale is also the riskiest when the asset being acquired is a client relationship: "You've got a sort of wider range of potential outcomes when you absorb other entities and institutions," he said, citing cultural alignment and client fit as the sticking points.

The patience shows in the numbers: Baker Street sold a majority stake in 2015, per PWD's records, and then compounded at roughly 12% a year without buying anything, its latest ADV listing 5,397 client accounts — close to $3.9 million on average against the $20.8 billion regulatory AUM figure. That is a family-office book.

Buyers say they understand the risk, and DeVoe's most recent RIA M&A Outlook Report gives them credit: 69% of acquirers named cultural fit as an important feature in deal targets, up more than 50 percentage points from the prior year's survey and ahead of talent strength, which topped the list in 2024. Set against historically high valuations at the top end of the deal market, that number is almost comic; the culture a buyer is paying for, Baker Street's strategy suggests, is the one that can be built but not purchased.

Wilkens draws the line at the fiduciary duty itself, which he says follows from the firm's SEC registration: "Valuations go up, valuations go down – it doesn't affect how we're thinking about the business." For a fiduciary, selling at the top of the market answers the principal's liquidity problem; the client's service problem is simply left to the new owner, a distinction easy to confuse when consolidators market sales as partnerships.

The cushion is Baker Street's 2015 majority sale. A private equity owner that took a majority position in 2015 operates on a different clock from a founder needing retirement liquidity; the firm can hold while the 12% compound growth does the work, and the retained stake's appreciation substitutes for the exit premium a seller would capture today. As this publication has argued with Coastline's debt-funded dozen, RIA M&A is increasingly a credit trade; Baker Street is the reminder that the trade is voluntary.

None of this means Baker Street will never sell. The test will arrive when its owner's fund cycle turns: if the private equity partner then chooses a sale, the firm will have proved only that independence is a luxury with a time limit; if it holds, it will have established something the current deal market is desperate to quantify — that a culture buyers say they are paying for can be worth more when it is not for sale.

Until then, Baker Street occupies a useful spot in the market: the deal every consolidator wants and the one that will not clear. A sale, if it ever happened, would carry a different shape from this market's recent purchases, because a $21 billion firm with 5,397 client accounts and no acquisition history is a different risk from a rollup of family offices; the first thing a buyer would pay for is the thing the buyer could most easily destroy. That gap between what the market says it values and what it can actually preserve is the spread this market keeps mispricing.