The company plans to nearly double its local workforce.
Dallas — Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Featured in the Dallas Business Journal.
Nearly five years after entering the Dallas-Fort Worth market, Allworth Financial LP plans to expand in Addison and nearly double its local employee base while also considering the possibility of relocating its headquarters from California to Texas.
The asset management company, based in Folsom, near Sacramento, is building a 21,000-square-foot space with seating for 90 people on the sixth floor of Two Addison Circle, Vice Chairman Scott Hanson told the Dallas Business Journal in an interview. Allworth plans to lease about 50 percent more space in the building than it currently occupies, doubling its seating, he said. Currently, Allworth has about 55 employees in Addison, but seats just 45.
Allworth’s new office will include individual offices and open workstations, as well as a dedicated client meeting space, and the company will have signage on the top floor of the building.
Hanson said Allworth plans to continue hiring with the additional space and he doesn’t expect it will be long before the company needs more space. The possibility of additional space becoming available in the future was one of the reasons Allworth decided to remain at Two Addison Circle, Hanson said. Overall, the growth of Texas is why the company decided to expand into Addison.
“Texas as a whole is growing dramatically,” Hanson said. “We’re constantly growing by bringing on new clients, and as people move to the region, we love the opportunity to be their wealth manager. We want to continue to expand in the Dallas area. It makes sense from a business standpoint. It makes sense from a geographic standpoint, the business climate and people seem to want to live in Texas.”
Allworth expanded into North Texas in 2019 with the acquisition of RAA, a $2.8 billion financial advisory firm specializing in airline pilots. At the time, Allworth had about 125 employees, and the RAA deal boosted assets under management to $7.5 billion. The fast-growing firm now has about $20 billion in assets under management and more than 400 employees across its operations, about half of them in California, Hanson said.
Since acquiring RAA, the Dallas-Fort Worth area has become Allworth’s home base due to its “deep financial services talent base” and its central location in the U.S. The Dallas-Fort Worth area has the second-largest number of financial workers among U.S. metropolitan areas, behind New York City.
Mr. Hanson said the company has held several meetings in Plano because it’s a “convenient, easy place to hold meetings.” Allworth executives also tend to meet with potential partners from other companies in Addison, rather than Sacramento, when discussing potential mergers or acquisitions, because Addison is centrally located.
Some of Allworth’s top executives also live in the area: The company’s general counsel, Barry Greenberg, has lived in the Dallas area for decades, while Chief Financial Officer Chris O’Dea and Executive Vice President of Marketing Brad Bourkestein both moved to Texas from California.
Allworth executives already view the Dallas area as a “second headquarters, so to speak,” and while there are no imminent plans, Hanson said Allworth could become the latest in a long list of companies to move their headquarters from California to Dallas-Fort Worth.
“That’s certainly a possibility,” Hanson said. “There’s a reason companies are continuing to leave California every year, every month.”
According to a February report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, more than 25,000 companies relocated to Texas from other states between 2010 and 2019, bringing more than 281,000 jobs with them. During the same period, more than 44,400 jobs came to Texas from California, about 16% of all jobs that moved to the state.
Firms that have relocated in recent years include Charles Schwab & Co., CBRE Group Inc. and AECOM Inc. Fisher Investments, a wealth adviser with $236 billion in assets under management, moved its headquarters from Washington state to Plano last year.
“We love living in California, but the business climate here is not great,” Hanson said. “It’s almost like they want us to leave.”
