Joe Duran declares United Capital means little to him now beyond money and how relieved he is to pass its underdeveloped business model to Goldman Sachs

Joe Duran fell out of love with United Capital, its brand, its autonomy and the excitement of having a company that he could call his baby, writes the roll-up's co-founder in the one-month postmortem of his sale to Goldman Sachs. 

When Goldman Sachs' $750-million check cleared after the New York investment bank's July 16 purchase, the former entrepreneur, now middle manager, questions, in an InvestmentNews column, whether United Capital was ever his baby to begin with.

"The truth is that if you run a company the right way, it's never really yours," he says in the column. See: Joe Duran's sale to Goldman Sachs achieves impressive goal but at the expense of his far grander dream; Will Goldman leave him outside looking in?

"It belongs to the investors, the employees and the clients. The second time around, you aren't as attached. You learn that despite what people say, it's not your baby. It doesn't love you back the way your real babies do. It's just this thing you created."

Indeed, these are hardly words out of a parent's guide to child rearing.

United Capital was born in 2005 with the precocious idea of disrupting Wall Street by purchasing IBD reps and turning them one big branded national RIA with all the fiduciary qualities of smaller firms but with the marketing power, technology and scale of the giants.

RIA classic killer

Over the years, Duran expanded his mission and vision to proclaim that what he also planned to disrupt classic RIAs. See: Joe Duran lays out his latest case for why wirehouses -- and classic RIAs -- risk losing out to a coming oligopoly of new-model holistic firms

“I suspect 10 years from now, there will be a lot of advisors as employees in brokerages and independent advisors who don’t differentiate themselves,” Duran wrote presciently in a whitepaper published in May of 2011.

“Unless they have billions of dollars, they won’t be able to compete.”

He saw RIA firms as brandless, under-capitalized, under-organized bumblers who were having their day in the sun because of an anomaly of business history.

Ultimately, he believed RIA were practices destined to go the way of travel agents and the hapless independent coffee shops vanquished by Starbucks.

In the long run, so the argument goes, order would be restored, and RIAs would succumb to a golden rule of business enterprise: Bigger is better.

Duran is a gifted, high-spirited speaker and his talk on the topic of RIA death became a favorite on the RIA conference circuit.

Not that everyone believed his message, but Duran never failed to bring energy, polish and Harvard Business School-level intellectualism to the game.

He is slated to speak at Josh Brown's upcoming WealthStack conference in Phoenix, Ariz. and, rightly, nobody expects a dud event.

But in the speech, he will likely admit that United Capital itself was overcome by the same forces Duran augured would take down his more Lilliputian RIA competitors.

"To win in the future, United Capital would need to go beyond building financial plans and managing assets," he writes. 

"Advisors may offer banking services, refer clients for tax preparation and deliver it all on an elegant, integrated platform." See: What's wrong with this branding picture? Goldman Sachs takes a limo ride to the mass affluent market by flashing big cash for United Capital

Nobody would bat an eye if any banker in America uttered the latter line.

This raises  the question of what ever became of FinLife, the United Capital software that Duran touted as a way to get past all the banking and advice clutter. See: Framing it as a wildly disruptive 3,300-basis-point fee on de novo revenues, Joe Duran's United Capital digital reboot is apparently raking in RIA assets and revenues 

He paid it faint mention amid a vague claim.

Whither FinLife?

"We could become the standard against which others are measured — not just for the affluent clients we work with directly at United Capital, but for the independent advisory firms that serve them through our white-labeled FinLife platform."

FinLife's bright prospects aside, Duran found that his "failure" demons got the better of his inner sunny entrepreneur.

"I never forget that I would always be the only one responsible for its failure. That has been a lot of responsibility to carry for 14 years."

He adds gravely: "I have thought about every person I would let down if we failed in any way: Every adviser that has sold us their life's work, and every employee who joined us and received equity. Every investor who put millions of dollars into our company. Every client who had entrusted us with their life's savings."

With that anvil hanging over his head, Duran concedes that a big cash check from an asset-rich firm carried its own 'creative' powers.

"Everyone would also be paid in cash. ... Ultimately, Goldman tipped the scales in their favor with the creativity they brought into the transaction to make a sale more economically interesting for our advisers, our employees and our clients."

The big question asked but...

In the bottom third of his Investment news column, Duran, like a good reporter, delivered the hard question to himself: 

"One of the more amusing parts of this transaction has been the speculation about what will happen with me and the firm I founded. Will I be able to play along with a large institution? Will the firm disappear?" he asks.

Yet as the ex-United Capital CEO -- like a well-schooled PR client -- deftly explained, you never really own anything, as if to say the question itself has no pertinence.

Duran then added two more cryptic lines that leave in question whether he will remain at Goldman Sachs, at all.

"When we started the firm, we wanted to shake up an industry that we felt was staid, unimaginative and not helping people to really live better lives," he wrote. 

"We're turning the page on United Capital as an independent firm, but the future is still unwritten. We all intend to keep shaping the industry for years to come as indispensable advisors."