Ken Kamen had already been through this before. He’d sold a brokerage firm years earlier, so when it came time to sell Mercadien Asset Management—the RIA he’d built aligned with a New Jersey accounting firm—he thought he knew the process.
But his first attempt, right before COVID hit, fell apart spectacularly. “We were offered a deal, but when COVID hit, the terms changed,” Ken recalls. “They wanted us to give them a call on our business—if the market comes back in two years, we’ll pay you what we told you. But if it doesn’t, we’re going to pay you half.”
By then, Ken was 65 and facing a familiar challenge many aging advisors confront: the firm’s growth was stalling. His partnership with the accounting firm, while initially advantageous, had limitations. “The younger accountants didn’t have the depth of bench to make the rain that the older ones did,” he explains. “And being aligned with an accounting firm sounds good, but no other accounting firm or attorney recommends business to you because they see you as competition.”
Most importantly, Ken worried about his team—including his daughter. “There’s nothing going to happen here that’s going to help them continue to grow. As clients get older and pass away, that’s only going to lead to attrition.”
The Solution
Mike Bilotta’s approach was fundamentally different from what Ken had experienced before.
Distinguishing What Matters: “Mike kept saying, ‘Ken, that’s minutiae,'” Ken shares. “He would give me examples of why certain things I thought were important would turn out to be minutiae, and other things I was kind of thinking past, he would go, ‘No, that’s where you want to spend more time.'” This guidance proved invaluable.
Diverse Buyer Options: Unlike Ken’s previous experience where all buyers “looked the same,” Mike presented genuine variety. “We met with about a dozen firms, and they were all different business plans. Some were large, some were small, some were related to banks, some were startups. He really gave me the landscape of acquirers out there.”
Experience-Based Wisdom: “Mike has a tremendous depth of experience from all the deals he’s done, so he knows how they blow up and why they succeed and why they don’t succeed,” Ken observes. “Working with Mike gave me a tremendous amount of confidence.”
The Impact
The sale to CW Advisors closed successfully, and Ken discovered something unexpected in the transition: opportunities he hadn’t anticipated.
“Once I got to the new place, I started seeing things in a different light,” he reflects. “It’s like they say the bumblebee sees ultraviolet light and we don’t. I started seeing things that made me feel differently about the way I felt. So be careful that you don’t anchor your future expectations in the myopic way you built your world.”
Ken’s team, including his daughter Emily, found new opportunities. “Emily’s in Boston today becoming part of another team where they’re assigning accounts to her because they realize she’s not your typical 31-year-old CFP. She worked at a very entrepreneurial small firm where it was all hands on deck.”
For Ken himself, the transition opened unexpected doors. “CW is actually making a path for me to continue doing what I like to do—public speaking, helping with sales initiatives, marketing initiatives. They keep putting those types of things in front of me. They heard me. They really understood what I was about.”
When asked about advice for others considering a sale, Ken doesn’t hesitate: “Every business owner knows that all the ducks will never be in a row. The best you can do is come out with your top 5 things that are the most important to you and make sure you don’t give up on those, because everything else will fall into place. And you might wind up realizing that the light in another spot is brighter in ways you don’t understand.”