VisionQuest Wealth Management seizes opportunity "to go where the money is". Raleigh, N.C.-based VisionQuest Wealth Management has launched VisionQuest Capital, a creative-financing firm that specializes in providing advice on sourcing and structuring capital raises between $2 million to $50 million for financing, re-financing, M&A transactions and corporate growth -- with real-estate and property-development deals figuring prominently.

"This is a huge opportunity for us," says VisionQuest's founder and CEO Steve Peters. "Nearly three quarters of our clients are business owners -- including a lot of developers and builders -- and 90% of them believe that real estate is a key to portfolio growth."

Evolution

VisionQuest got into the creative-financing business as a client service in the face of traditional lenders' increasingly stringent requirements.

"Lenders are tightening their belts, but our clients are still doing deals that require capital raises," says Peters. "Some wealth-management firms are looking at this tightening and saying 'the sky is falling;' we're looking at it and saying 'this is a chance to go where the money is.'"

Some of the groundwork for VisionQuest's move into creative financing was laid over the last two years as it evolved into the role of outsourced CFO to closely held businesses, in addition to its role as a goals-based advisory to high-net-worth individuals and families.

As with its CFO-like offerings, VisionQuest's newer role in aspects of investment banking comes in response to an emerging trend: clients who own businesses are looking for advice that takes in enterprise development as well as purely personal wealth, says Peters -- though such involvement between advisor and client is predicated on a deep rapport and even deeper trust, he adds. -FWR

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