Salient Wealth Management and Friedman & Associates tie the knot

Two of the largest investment advisory firms in the San Francisco Bay Area — Salient Wealth Management LLC of San Rafael, Calif., and Friedman & Associates of Novato, Calif. — have merged. The new firm, Salient-Friedman Wealth Management LLC, will have approximately $600 million in assets under management and target clients in Northern California with at least $2 million in investible assets. The two firms began talking a year ago, said Theo Gallier, Salient’s chief investment officer. “Salient always wanted to get to $1 billion in assets under management,” he said, “but that’s hard to do for one firm adding one client at a time. Our business plan was to grow by obtaining clients with a larger asset base as well as by mergers and acquisitions.” “I was at a place where I needed to add, build or merge in order to grow, as was [Salient],” said Greg Friedman, chairman of Friedman & Associates, which he founded in 1991. He is also the founder of CRM Software Inc. of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., which markets Junxure customer relationship management software for advisers, and the founder of Your Silver Bullet, a Portola Valley, Calif.-based consortium of advisory-oriented software makers. Friedman & Associates has seven employees and 140 clients, and Salient has 13 employees and 240 clients, Mr. Friedman said. Both firms use The Charles Schwab Corp. of San Francisco as their custodian. The newly merged firm does not plan to expand beyond Northern California, Mr. Gallier said. Salient was founded by Richard Stone, currently the firm’s chairman, in 1983.