Hap Perry's expansion plans continue to take shape under Lagomasino's team. Genspring has struck again. In its fourth acquisition in less than two years, the multifamily office is buying high-end family-service firm Epic Advisors. Along with Genspring's last two acquisitions -- Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Cymric Family Office Services earlier this year and Phoenix, Ariz.-based Inlign Wealth Management early in 2008 -- the addition of Colorado-based Epic helps establish the Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.-based firm as a formidable ultra-high-net-worth advisory for families west of the Mississippi.

"Epic's location in Denver accelerates our strategy of creating a national and international market leader that squarely sits on the family's side of the table and uses its collective power and resources solely for their benefit," says Genspring's CEO Maria Elena Lagomasino.

Gloria Higgins, Epic's CEO, and her staff of about 25 plan to stay on after the merger.

"This isn't at all about a succession strategy or an exit strategy," says Higgins, who founded Epic in 1991. "I love what I'm doing and I'm going to continue to do it -- but as the economy began to falter, I saw we needed a deeper bench and deeper investment capabilities to continue to serve our clients' best interests."

But simple expedience wasn't the only point of attraction between Epic and GenSpring, according to Higgins. Early in the seven- or eight-month process of feeling each other out, it became apparent that the firms share vital cultural affinities, she says.

Lagomasino agrees. "Gloria and her staff share our values and have a long, rich history of exclusively representing the interests of wealthy families," she says. "Like GenSpring, they are passionate about working with families on the issues that keep them awake at night."

Part of a plan

GenSpring, known as Asset Management Advisors until mid 2007, was founded in 1989. Between becoming a subsidiary of Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks early in 2001 and late 2003, it opened de novo offices in Miami, Orlando, Fla., Charlotte, N.C., Washington, D.C., Atlanta. In 2004 it opened a second office in Atlanta, and in mid 2005 it Orlando office to include a satellite branch in Tampa, Fla.

With the exception of its 2003 purchase of Greenwich, Conn.-based Eagle Capital International, with which established a bridgehead in New England as well as the Manhattan tri-state area, GenSpring in those years tended to hire teams to open offices in new locations -- and it tended to stay firmly within SunTrust's retail-banking footprint.

By mid 2004, GenSpring's co-founder and then-CEO Hap Perry was saying that a high-touch, narrow-margin business like GenSpring needed geographic breadth beyond the reach of its corporate parent and compelling economies of scale to make it to the next generation in terms of the firm's own leadership and of the multi-generational families it serves.

"We need to continue to get bigger," Perry, now GenSpring's chairman emeritus, said in 2005. "And any growth strategy we undertake will entail establishing a national footprint."

So, with a view to start acquiring smaller multifamily offices as the basis for establishing GenSpring as a national name in ultra-wealth advisory, Perry started looking for a younger leader to put this plan in motion. The serach culminated, late in 2005, with the hire of Lagomasino, formerly CEO JPMorgan Private Bank, along with her ex-JPMorgan colleagues Michael Holden as COO and Michael Zeuner as strategy chief.

GenSpring's first substantial move after those appointments -- other than opening an office in New York -- came in the summer of 2007 when it established GenSpring International by buying TBK Investments, a Miami-based financial and investment consultancy to wealthy families in Latin America and Europe. Then came the additions of Inlign, Cymric and now Epic.

Epic's year-old RIA subsidiary Epic Capital has about $44 million under management, but Higgins says that Epic Advisors -- the multifamily office -- has about $2.5 billion in assets "under influence."

GenSpring advises about 700 families on approximately $17 billion in assets. -FWR

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