Atria Adds Former LPL Exec to Push Indie Growth Strategy

"As we look to the future, we're really excited in our ability to capture a tremendous amount of the opportunity out there in wealth management," he said.

"Having the opportunity to bring somebody like Bill on our team and be part of already a world-class team and what he's accomplished in his career and his background" will help Atria "continue our thoughtful growth, not just growth for growth's sake," he said.

Ketterer added: "We have the scale to do what we want now. And, as we think about the future, it's very much quality over quantity" that the firm is looking for.

Atria's growth strategy is "very much trying to be the best, not the biggest," he said. "We are not a rollup and never embarked to just be an aggregator and just indiscriminately buy firms at all."

This continues to be a "consolidating industry" in which the "small to midsize firms don't have the scale that they need to provide their clients" with what they need from a "resources, platform and service perspective," he said, predicting "consolidation will continue for quite a while."

For Atria, "if there's opportunities for us from a cultural, from a strategic perspective, then we would pursue those," he said. "But we don't have to, nor would we ever just go out and buy things just because either they're for sale or they're just a scale play. They need to make sense for us, for our organization and our clients."

Noting that Atria is celebrating its fifth anniversary this month, Ketterer told ThinkAdvisor: "To say we've come a long way in a very short period of time is an incredible understatement."

He said: "The terms wirehouse, RIA, hybrid, IBD, I'm not quite sure honestly what they mean anymore because they've all melded together. [These] terms to me don't mean anything anymore. The way we describe ourselves [is] we're an independent wealth management firm."

(Pictured: Doug Ketterer, left, and Bill Morrissey)