Elevation Point, an investment firm launched in June by former Sanctuary Wealth CEO Jim Dickson, has hired Caitlin Douglas, former managing director of transition services and co-head of service at Dynasty Financial Partners, as its chief operating officer.
“As we were ready to launch and start to transition teams, and invest in teams, it was really important for us to have a COO that could really do that at a high level and build a team at a high level,” Dickson said.
Douglas has nearly 20 years of experience in the wealth management industry. She spent the last six years at Dynasty, where she transitioned countless breakaway advisors as well as M&A tuck-ins to existing partner firms. Prior to that, she was director of client services at Keeney Financial Group in Columbia, Md., an RIA that was acquired by Beacon Pointe earlier this year.
The Elevation Point role represents the next stage in Douglas’s career, she said. She’ll lead the firm’s operations and service organization.
“I definitely have the track record of transitioning teams, but I think my biggest value-add is truly going to be in that COO role,” she said. “What I’m most excited about is the opportunity to take not only the learnings of transitioning teams and building out a client service model, but I also have been able to build these RIAs from the ground up, time over time. And that’s truly every single piece of the business, anything from compliance to investments to real estate. You name it; I’ve had my hands in it.”
Douglas said she will build the team over the coming months and conduct research into the technology systems the firm will use, with an emphasis on full integration.
Dickson announced the launch of Elevation Point in June. The firm will take minority stakes in RIAs with $200 million to $3 billion in client assets and contribute resources to help those firms grow. He partnered with Mark Penske, founder and chairman of United Atlantic Capital, a privately-owned financial services holding company, on the new venture.
In conjunction with the launch, the firm acquired Mount Yale Capital Group, an RIA and outsourced chief investment officer with $3.4 billion in assets under management, to provide the middle- and back-office business functions to support advisors.
Since then, Dickson has been building out his team. In July, he added Bradford Smithy and Robert B. Tamarkin, former UBS executives, as founding partners. They serve on the executive committee and focus on partnership development and Elevation’s growth and expansion efforts. That will include working to identify partnership opportunities, helping set the overall strategic vision for Elevation Point and talent acquisition.
The firm also hired Ryanne Gardner, a former BNY’s Pershing executive, as head of partner integration.
In August, Naomi Stein joined from Corient as director of platform.
Most recently, Kelly Berenbaum, founder and lead planner at Blue Tree Financial, came on as director of client experience.
Dickson said the pipeline of potential RIA partners is “overflowing.” He expects to close a few deals in the fourth quarter and see even more activity in the first quarter of 2025 as Elevation Point launches its breakaway business.
Elevation Point was launched through an oversubscribed funding round from a combination of family office investors and some debt capital.
Another industry publication recently reported that the firm was pursuing a sale of a minority stake, but Dickson said they are not looking to sell any part of the firm but only engaging in a normal process of vetting corporate financing options. The firm is, in fact, looking to augment its family office capital with some debt, as interest rates go lower.
“Like any large institution, you’re always looking at your source of capital, and with rates coming down, we’re looking at potentially using debt in our capital structure and seeing if that’s right,” Dickson said. “It’s just good corporate citizenship that you would always look at what’s out there, and when we started to look at the debt markets as a potential opportunity to overlay over our existing capital, we had a ton of interest. We’ve very simply asked somebody to coordinate that process.”
