Ep 551 Cameron Passmore Sold Half an $8 Billion Firm—Then Acquired 5 More Businesses

**Colin Morgan** (0:01)
Hi there, and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, a podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in negotiation to sell your company. I'm the executive producer, Colin Morgan, and in today's episode, we're going to hear from Cameron Passmore, who spent 30 years building an independent wealth management firm, serving roughly 3,000 families with about $8 billion under management, and he owned half of it. Most founders in that seat sell the cash out and walk away.
Cameron did the opposite. He sold the OneDigital at 60, ruled a big chunk of the deal into equity, and used the new firepower to acquire 5 more firms and roughly double the business in under 2 years. And in this episode, he breaks down the 3 kinds of sellers, why he sold to build rather than build to sell, and how to read a buyer's real intentions from the structure of their offer. Without further ado, here is Cameron Passmore. Enjoy.

**John Warrillow** (1:03)
Cameron Passmore, welcome to Built to Sell Radio.

**Cameron Passmore** (1:05)
Hey, great to see you, John. Thanks for having me.

**John Warrillow** (1:07)
So yeah, it's great to be with you as well. You're in a business that I think most people understand. I think, you know, a lot of times on this show, we talk to people who have really unique or idiosyncratic businesses, but yours is a business that most people understand.
You built a wealth management company. Walk me through this business. What did you guys do? Who was the ideal client? Maybe just kind of tell us the kind of founding story.

**Cameron Passmore** (1:33)
Sure, so we already just celebrated our 30th anniversary earlier this year.

**John Warrillow** (1:37)
Congrats.

**Cameron Passmore** (1:37)
Thank you. It's been an incredible three decades of building what is now, I believe, the largest scaled independent financial planning wealth management firm that believes in something, which is we believe that markets work, stock markets work, stock markets deliver great returns. So call it indexing, call it just capture what the market has to offer. You combine that with high quality, caring financial planning. To put those two together, that is effectively wealth management. So we've been working on our craft for 30 years. And then what attracted me to join PWL shortly after it was founded in 96, was that we believed to be paid by the client, not by the product.
That might sound kind of vanilla these days, but back in the mid 90s, that was not normal. Then this was just on the cusp of the index fund revolution. ETFs were created, the whole notion of indexing and vanguard markets work, which is an incredibly powerful and compelling force, and has become very popular in the US. We thought it would become much more popular much sooner in Canada. It's just an incredible opportunity to get great investment experience, low fees, wrapped up with a great financial planning advisor that works in one team. And that's the key, we are one team. So we started out very modest 30 years ago, to now we're about 140 people helping around 3,000 families. Overall, assets under management, which is a metric that's common in our industry, is around $8 billion or so. We're still a small firm by the traditional banking standards, of course, in Canada. And we are a boutique type firm that offers high service to people right down the middle. They know they have to do retirement. They know they want to delegate. They've got important things to do in their life. They're usually pretty smart. They usually made money either in their profession or their business that they owned. So that's the kind of people we're helping. And we've had the ability to help a lot of technology people.

**John Warrillow** (3:28)
Yeah, I imagine. We go back to the beginning, though.
You said you did not start the business, but you joined it. Just walk me through that.

**Cameron Passmore** (3:35)
I qualify myself as a near founder. I joined about a year after I was founded. So I was a near founder, then just kind of, I mean, I was part of the ownership, a small percentage ownership group, and then just over time, ended up now where I've been a CEO or executive chairman for the past six years now. And as by virtue of being here so long, like as an age, I don't profess to be the greatest CEO. That's not my point. I've just been here so long.

**John Warrillow** (4:01)
The equity work. So a lot of our listeners would be in partnerships of some sort where there's an opportunity to earn equity over time.