Mega-RIA Mercer Advisors now has over half of its roughly 1,300 employee base serving as equity owners, announcing that 674 full-time employees are ownership shareholders in the firm.
As Mercer has grown to managing $72 billion in client assets, CEO Dave Welling says 2025 is expected to be Mercer’s “biggest M&A year ever” since its founding in 1985. Mercer’s employee ownership rate of over 50% has doubled since launching its Path to Partnership benefit for employees back in 2020.
“You have employees that are acting like owners because they are, they’re coming into work everyday feeling like they're building a better Mercer for our clients and the broader shareholder group,” Welling told InvestmentNews. “Technically, the issuing of new units to employees through the Path to Partnership program adds more units, but from a materiality perspective the enterprise value of the organization is several billion dollars. So we can have a very significant investment from employees and it's not mathematically material from the dilution perspective.”
Mercer says its equity given to full-time employees is at the “equivalent share class” of its four institutional investors, which include majority-owning private equity firms Atlas Partners, Genstar Capital and Oak Hill Capital, as well as Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC. At the time of Mercer’s recapitalization in 2023, it had a $3 billion valuation with over 300 employee owners.
The Path to Partnership program holds optional annual enrollment in which employees can purchase stock in Mercer for a minimum investment of $20,000 paid by the employee. Mercer offers to loan up to half ($10,000) to participating employees in the program.
Denver-based Mercer additionally offers profits interest grants to senior-level employees through its key contributor grant program. That program is provided to “individuals that are contributing meaningfully to growth, and we believe are going to be a key contributor to future growth of the organization,” Welling said.
Mercer began an inorganic growth campaign in 2016 that last month surpassed 100 total acquisitions as the firm now serves more than 35,000 family clients. Earlier this month, Mercer made its third-largest deal ever by acquiring the Oklahoma City-based Full Sail Capital with about $2 billion in assets.
“I think we find universal excitement from the partners that are joining us that we have programs to expand ownership very broadly,” Welling said. “When they're informing their employees about the change and decision to join Mercer, they're very excited to talk about how equity can be part of that journey for those employees, in a situation where it may not have been an opportunity for those employees in that firm. We've become the catalyst for employee ownership through M&A partnership.”
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