In the last year HighTower had made significant acquisitions in the RIA and trust services worlds. Last year, HighTower emerged as the winning bidder for WealthTrust, perhaps the first consolidator in the RIA space. WealthTrust ran into financial trouble during the financial crisis and was owned by its creditors. No purchase price was reported, but it is believed that HighTower paid more than $60 million.

After years of speculation about how HighTower would finally pay off its longtime investors, including IPO rumors, the firm sold part of itself to private equity firm Thomas H. Lee last November—a recapitalization that allowed it to pay off old investors and obtain $100 million in growth capital that may be used for new acquisitions.

In April, it did just that, buying Salient Private Client in Houston, which brought in $4.5 billion in client assets as well as a trust company. The deal provided HighTower with a bigger footprint in Texas as well as more high-net-worth clients, says Weissbluth.

“Recap was a major piece of [the Thomas H. Lee deal]. Growth capital was a major piece of it,” Weissbluth told Financial Advisor at the time. “The reason why we were attracted to THL is that they put a proposal that included both of our objectives, which is to recapitalize our internal shareholder base and provide growth capital. And then we immediately went out into the marketplace and deployed that into Salient.”

He also stresses that an IPO has never been on the firm’s agenda—suggesting that the rumor has always existed only in the media echo chamber. However, many advisors at various consolidators, most notably Focus Financial, say the lure of a potential IPO was used as an inducement for firms to affiliate or sell themselves.

The Thomas Lee purchase has led to some changes at the top. Pottruck, the chairman of the board of directors, announced he was leaving the firm in April. He was recently replaced by Thomas H. Lee executive advisor Gurinder S. Ahluwalia.

Advisors who have made the jump to HighTower are diverse in structure and have a variegated set of reasons for pitching tent under the firm’s flag. They say that HighTower’s business model is working for them, whether the company is offering them a brand reputation as a client-centered business, taking back-office chores off their hands, or giving them the autonomy to run their practices their own way—unfettered by squeamish brokerages that don’t like unconventional investments, youthful internet marketing campaigns or controversial opinions.

David Bahnsen, a former Morgan Stanley advisor, decided to go independent and join HighTower in 2015. His firm now has $1.5 billion in assets. “Ours was a business model that required a great deal of freedom—thought freedom,” Bahnsen says. “We create an extraordinary amount of content.”

Bahnsen is not only an advisor but an author and sometime pundit who contributes to the National Review and appears on Fox Business. His desire to speak freely and boldly about investments and politics is part of the brand he wants to sell and the way he wants to communicate with clients. That wasn’t practical at Morgan.

“We had a pretty long leash at Morgan Stanley, as far as things go, based on the politics of where I was on the totem pole,” he explains. “But there was no way the leash was getting any longer.”