The MBO was completed last July, after Blevins Franks founders William Blevins and David Franks sold their stakes in the business that they founded 37 years earlier in London. The price of the deal was not disclosed.
Simmonds, who is chief executive, and Stone, the firm’s new chairman, said they have spent the last few months developing a business plan that they say will take Blevins Franks from a 20-adviser operation with around €1.5bn in assets under management, to one with 40 advisers, with €3bn AUM.
For now, though, they say they have no plans to add new countries to the ones they are in, which, at the moment, include the UK, France, Spain, Cyprus, Portugal and Malta, nor do they intend to touch the name, even though Mr Blevins and Mr Franks are no longer there. "It’s part of the value of the busines," Stone explains.
As part of their expansion plans, they have hired a number of key executives, including a new Malta-based chief operating officer named Nigel Green – who is unrelated to the founder and chief executive of deVere, another major advisory group, which, like Blevins Franks, also has an admin operation in Malta.
A new, London-based business development director, Wayne Sheridan, has also been hired, as has a new marketing director, Callum Girvan.
Prior to coming to Blevins Franks, Green most recently had been with Coutts & Co, while Sheridan’s most recent role was with Bluefin, and Girvan came from St James’s Place and Wesleyan.
Their next step, Simmonds and Stone say, will be to begin to recruit more advisers, although Stone insists that this will be done slowly, to ensure they get “only really high-quality people”.
‘Ambitious growth plan’
“We intend to build the business, and we have put together an ambitious growth plan in order to do so,” says Stone, who retired last year from Lombard International, the Luxembourg-based life company.
“Blevins Franks, when we took it over, was a very sound business, with an excellent reputation, but it had been sleeping just a bit during the last few years,” he adds.
“We’re convinced that the potential exists to double the size within five years, but without changing the name or the basic approach of the business, which we are very happy with. Obviously, or else we wouldn’t have got involved.”
Management-owned
Both Stone and Simmonds – who, prior to coming to Blevins Franks, had been chief executive of Bluefin Advisory Services Ltd, and before that, CEO of Towry Law – stress that a key strength of their plan for Blevins Franks is the fact that it is owned by its management and most of its advisers.
“We believe that it is better for clients if their advisers – who we call ‘partners’ – have a stake in the advisory business,” Simmonds says.
Among other changes, the company has opened an office in St James’s Square in London, which replaces two previous offices it had elsewhere in the city.
Blevins Franks currently has some 21 offices altogether, including 11 in Spain. The company was originally founded as a chartered accountancy practice, and Stone and Simmonds say that tax advice – tailored to the tax laws of the countries in which their clients live – continues to be a key area of expertise, and thus a major selling point in the eyes of clients, particularly at the moment, due to recent changes in the way many European governments are taxing individuals.
Why
Some might question why a man in his “mid-60s” (Stone) and another in his “mid-50s” (Simmonds) would take on, and seek to expand, a business like Blevins Franks, when they could, at the very least, settle for a less demanding staff advisory job on the Costa del Sol.
Both Stone and Simmonds, however, use the word “fun” to describe why running Blevins Franks is better than anything else they might be doing.
