Saling Simms Associates

Saling Simms Associates

Saling Simms Associates was founded in 1983 by John Saling and Timothy Simms, two advisors who began their partnership inside the trust department of a Columbus financial institution. Over the next four decades, the firm built a client base spanning individual households, corporate retirement plans, and institutional accounts across the Midwest. The practice joined Steward Partners Global Advisory in 2021, an employee-owned RIA platform that had launched in 2013 and by 2023 reported over $30 billion in advisor-managed assets across its network (per Steward Partners, 2023). Saling Simms manages portfolios across multiple asset classes, including domestic and international equities, investment-grade and high-yield fixed income, real estate investment trusts, and private-market funds sourced through institutional gatekeepers. The firm runs separate-account equity strategies, model-based fixed-income ladders, and a curated roster of third-party alternative-investment vehicles — the typical architecture of a bank-origin RIA serving mass-affluent and high-net-worth clients. Its geographic concentration remains the Columbus metropolitan area and broader central Ohio, with select relationships extending into Florida and the Southeast. The firm does not originate direct deals, instead selecting managers and constructing multi-asset, goal-oriented portfolios. The practice operates without a distinct brand separate from the Steward Partners platform. Steward Partners' corporate headquarters are in New York and Washington, D.C., with approximately 200 advisors nationally as of 2024. Saling Simms itself maintains its Columbus office, and while specific team headcounts are not disclosed, the structure of a branch office within a large RIA platform is well established. The firm's client-facing investment committee — historically led by the founding partners — shapes asset-allocation models and manager selection. The 2021 move to Steward Partners represented a succession-oriented and growth-oriented transaction, placing the Columbus office inside a partnership with operational scale for compliance, technology, and investment-platform support (per Steward Partners announcement, 2021). Unlike many Ohio-based wealth managers that trace ownership to insurance-company broker-dealers or independent roll-ups, Saling Simms operates as an employee-owned partnership node inside a national RIA platform — a structure that preserves local decision authority over client portfolios and investment-committee governance while accessing institutional-grade due diligence on alternative managers.