Legacy Capital Group

The folks at Legacy Capital Group don’t name client names, but if they did, the names would certainly be well known. Legacy’s business is holistic wealth management for high-net-worth individuals, including high-end life insurance, and benefit plans for corporations — often those owned by their wealth management clients.
“We truly, for the ultra-affluent, can integrate those services and do it seamlessly,” CEO Matt Jones said.
Legacy Capital Group was founded in 1982 by Frank McGehee, who died suddenly in the office in 2005. In 1999, it was acquired by National Financial Partners of New York, a publicly traded financial services corporation, and was operated as a wholly owned subsidiary until 2009, when its local management completed a buy-back.
In between, its wealth management division’s assets under management grew to almost $140 million, and its insurance side writes more than $40 million in annual insurance premiums.
Legacy Capital is navigating a very strange time in its industry, Jones said. Asset management and corporate benefits have been relatively steady. “The biggest variance in our business is the high-end life insurance business — very wealthy families buying life insurance policies of $10 million and up — and that was down in 2009 because that’s more of a discretionary purchase.”
At the same time, the business and its clients are facing an issue that has been on the horizon for almost a decade yet no one expected it to actually come.
“We’re in this quandary today, which is we have no estate tax right now,” Jones said. “We never expected to get to 2010 without something being done to fix the expiration, but now it’s here and nothing’s been done.”
Now that Legacy is back in private hands, Jones said, the firm will try to grow slowly by luring top producers with the prospect of having an equity interest in the company.
“You’ll never see us try to be a Stephens, having 50 producers in the state of Arkansas. But I do desire to grow with one or two new people each year.”

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