Zenith adds planner on way to creating $1 billion in wealth

One of the largest Black-owned registered investment advisory firms picked up a new planner as the company pursues a goal that's much different from traditional industry asset metrics.

Philadelphia-based Zenith Wealth Partners acquired Cincinnati-based Alchemist Wealth last month — just in time for the incoming firm's co-founder, Andrew Tudor, to attend a staff retreat in the City of Brotherly Love alongside his 10 new colleagues, he and Zenith President Jason Ray said in an interview. Zenith was launched in 2019 by Ray and Chelsea Ransom-Cooper, Zenith's chief financial planning officer. It has now topped more than $100 million in client assets, but the company much more closely tracks how much their clients' net worth, business valuations and endowment investments have grown. So far, they've increased by $45 million.

"We want to create a billion dollars of wealth for our clients," Ray said. "We're really orienting around the ability to create that client success and generate that wealth for our builders."

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The addition of Tudor — who started Alchemist in 2020 with his brother and business partner Fred Tudor after spending his first four years in the industry with Northwestern Mutual — adds to Zenith's other office locations in New York and New Orleans and staff presence in Charlotte, North Carolina and Washington, D.C. The firm now has four advisors and a client service associate leading its services for individual and family clients, another spearheading its small business advisory team and two more — Tudor and Ray — in charge of its institutional customers and investment management.

"The vision of actually solving and measuring the racial wealth gap, the gender wealth gap, in a real way, not with semantics, was extremely enticing for me to learn about," Tudor said. "We are actually helping to close that gap for our clients. In aggregate, when we add those up, we can really start closing the racial wealth gap."

Both Zenith's mission and its approach (assigning planners and staff to specialty areas of the business) offer practice management ideas to other advisors, according to Emlen Miles-Mattingly, the founder of Madera, California-based RIA firm Gen Next Wealth and host of the "Hello Retirement" podcast.

"They run an incredible practice," Miles-Mattingly said in an interview about Ray and Ransom-Cooper. "I've made changes in my own business. The biggest change that I made was picking a segment of people that I wanted to work with."

Tudor first met Ray and Ransom-Cooper in 2020 at virtual meetings held among a group of independent fee-only planners. He later reached out to discuss potential collaboration after listening to Ray's appearance on the podcast run by RIA technology firm Altruist. As Tudor's planning practice at Alchemist merges into Zenith, his brother Fred is splitting off his financial coaching business as a separate standalone firm. As of the end of last year, Alchemist Wealth managed $3.6 million in client assets, according to its most recent annual disclosure.

"When I think about launching Alchemist Wealth, I launched it because what I thought should exist didn't exist," Tudor said. "This is an opportunity to really create impact at scale."

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Measuring that impact by tracking the rise in client wealth instead of assets under management represents an alternative metric to the industry standard. For example, one of Zenith's clients came to the firm with a net worth of negative $50,000 because of their debt at the time, Ray noted. As of March, the client is now worth $200,000, which means that Zenith has assisted them in generating $250,000 in wealth. Zenith is focusing on that metric and on qualitative measures of health and confidence more than on AUM or the total number of advisors. Along the way to the target of $1 billion in client wealth, both of the latter traditional counts will be going up as well, Ray noted.     

Last year, Zenith secured a strategic partnership with two large Philadelphia-based nonprofits to run their asset manager selection and private investments, and Financial Planning chose Ray and Ransom-Cooper as two of the "24 People Who Will Change Wealth Management in 2024." 

In October 2022, the firm held a fundraising round that reached $2.5 million in investments, Ray noted. The firm topped the business milestones that came with the investments by the time it had used just half of the capital and is now planning for another round in the future, he said. The expansion of the team could also help identify additional potential investors down the line.

"Good things happen at scale and with increased teamwork," Ray said. "We want to meet folks who want to team up and collaborate, because we know it creates better outcomes for people."