Waverly to buy a $1.7B Richmond RIA, its 36th deal since Aspire's 2021 stake

Waverly Advisors will acquire Heartwood Wealth Advisors, the Richmond manager with roughly $1.7 billion in client assets, in a transaction the Birmingham firm announced Tuesday. It is Waverly's 36th deal since Wealth Partners Capital Group and HGGC's Aspire Holdings took an equity stake in December 2021, and seven of those closings have come since late January — nearly a fifth of the partnership's entire deal count inside one stretch of 2026.

Heartwood was founded in 2013 and is run by Steve Clarke, Sid Martin, Ben Gurley and Wes Kaufman, with nine supporting professionals behind them. Thirteen people, then, against $1.7 billion, which works out to roughly $131 million apiece. That density is the deal's real arithmetic: the client assets come along with the four principals, not the other way around, and the consideration is, in substance, a price on four people continuing to do what they have been doing since 2013. Nine support staff to four principals is a lean back office for that much money under management, which suggests the operating load rides on systems rather than headcount.

Martin, whose nearly three-decade record includes stops at Wells Fargo and Merrill according to his IAPD filing, described the combination as putting more resources and deeper expertise behind Heartwood's clients, and said those clients would keep working with advisers they already know. Justin Russell, Waverly's president and CEO, pointed to principles the two firms hold in common and to the client relationships and working cultures built on them. The coverage does not give a purchase price, nor does it say how the four founders are being compensated or over what period.

InvestmentNews frames the deal as a Mid-Atlantic scale addition made just as the wider market for RIA acquisitions loses some momentum — a note of caution about the market rather than about Waverly, whose deal calendar the report describes as relatively steady. Waverly already had a Virginia presence before Heartwood; the coverage does not say how large it was.

Waverly's 2026 began with Pure Portfolios, a Lake Oswego, Oregon manager with roughly $437 million in assets, and reached the summer with Smithfield Trust, a roughly $3 billion Pittsburgh trust company that was the firm's first purchase of a state-chartered trust. Those two, plus Heartwood, describe a buyer working a range rather than a thesis: $437 million at the small end, $3 billion at the large, and a chartered trust in between, which is a different integration job from absorbing an advisory office. InvestmentNews also directed readers to its earlier report on Waverly's Pacific Northwest push with McBride Financial Advisors, another entry on a map that now runs from Oregon to Pennsylvania.

Echelon Partners counted three Waverly acquisitions in the second quarter totaling roughly $6.35 billion, two of them involving sellers with $1 billion or more. That tied Waverly with Hightower Advisors and Emigrant Partners on Echelon's billion-dollar-plus leaderboard for the quarter, behind Corient's four deals and the three each credited to Modern Wealth Management and Wealthspire Advisors. Averaged across three transactions, the second-quarter total works out to about $2.1 billion apiece, so Heartwood at $1.7 billion is a smaller check than Waverly has been writing — and still above the billion-dollar seller line that Echelon uses to sort buyers.

The leaderboard is short: six firms, three of them tied, with the order reshuffling on a single deal in either direction. That is what the top of this market looks like after a decade of consolidation — not hundreds of acquirers competing, but a handful transacting every quarter while the broader field, in InvestmentNews's account, loses momentum.

The case for reading Waverly's run as strategy is easy to make. Thirty-six transactions, a national footprint assembled from a Birmingham base, a Virginia presence that predates this deal, a Pennsylvania trust company, an Oregon manager. The financing read is simpler, and it explains more. Aspire's December 2021 stake is what turned a regional advisory firm into a serial acquirer, and a 36-deal record compiled since then is the output committed equity reliably produces.

The mechanics are familiar by now. An equity platform sets the timetable, the platform's backers expect capital to be put to work, and the operating company supplies integration capacity and a brand. The principles language in Tuesday's announcement is the part written for clients; the calendar of closings is the part that tells sellers what kind of buyer they are dealing with.

That calendar creates a two-speed market. Corient, Modern Wealth, Wealthspire, Waverly, Hightower and Emigrant are transacting at billion-dollar scale quarter after quarter, while the wider RIA acquisition market cools. The separation on this evidence looks like a function of committed capital rather than of conviction about any particular region. A firm with $1.7 billion and four principals can plausibly expect more than one approach in a market that clears deals every quarter, and a second bid is generally where price gets made.

Waverly reported roughly $35.6 billion in assets across 53 offices as of July 27, a figure that predates Heartwood's $1.7 billion. On the record since December 2021, it is unlikely to stand still for long.