Founder Bill McAfee, is a financial services professional with a background in lending, wealth management and private banking at larger institutions. Early in his career, Bill became restless because he realized that while most wealth managers focused on the liquid assets of affluent families, most of the wealth was actually in the illiquid assets these families owned.
Early in 2002, Bill left banking and began independently calling on families in the Southeast with whom he had built relationships over the last decade offering comprehensive wealth management advice. Most of the first clients hired him to manage liquid portfolios because that was the immediate need that they recognized but their main concerns often revolved around the family business.
In managing portfolios, Bill continued to consistently explore the concepts associated with business valuation as a tool for tracking the risk and return of the private business asset just as one would do with stock in a publicly traded company. In 2003, in response to client scenarios requiring an understanding of the correlations between the business and portfolio assets, Bill began to build spreadsheet models. Since the formulas Bill was building were monitoring and measuring the assets that were unsupervised by a portfolio manager (yet far more crucial to the wealth of the family) he began to refer to the process as Analysis of Quantitative factors for Unsupervised Assets, or A.Q.U.A. ®. Clients began to tell Bill that while other financial advisors were only interested in the liquid asset portion of their wealth, they appreciated the approach that provided advice on the illiquid asset that represented the largest portion of their wealth.
By 2006, the process had become the primary driver of new business for WHM Capital Advisors, Bill’s firm. Business owners asked Bill for help in assessing their ability to create value in their companies sufficient to offset the risks they were taking, and if they weren’t to help plan an exit strategy. Bill and his associates were able to use A.Q.U.A. ® as a tool for showing business owners when business value was at the top, when it was projected to be at a value to achieve their financial objectives, and what the optimal capital structure was for maximizing the value, all while billing retainer fees for their work and building relationships by addressing issues other advisors had overlooked. As these business owners sold their companies, WHM Capital Advisors was often selected to advise the owners on the liquidity event for an additional fee and then had no competition in managing the sale proceeds for these families because they had been involved as a trusted advisor usually for a 2-5 year period prior to the sale.
Bill realized that the opportunity to help more families with the investment analysis of their biggest asset lay in moving the A.Q.U.A. ® tool to a web-based platform, where business owners and their advisors could measure and monitor the illiquid asset from period-to-period for better strategic consulting and financial planning decisions. In November, 2008, Bill and his team began work in earnest on the project and AQUA Capital Technologies was created to offer the tools to individual companies and third party users.