Dividends. Double Digits. Decade or More.

Marc Saurborn, Chief Executive Officer of Dividend Assets Capital, says of the firm he now leads: “There is a 50-plus-year legacy here of dividend growth… Our clients have benefited tremendously from this long-standing investment methodology.”

That methodology began with Tom Cameron, who had started making a name for himself by doing dividend investing since the 60s. In the early 90s, a dividend-growth fund managed by Tom Cameron had become the flagship fund at John Hancock, where Troy Shaver also worked.

In the early 2000s, John Hancock had changed the investment objective of the fund, and both Cameron and Shaver had moved on. Cameron was living in South Carolina running the advisory business of a broker-dealer along with his assistant, Jane Cogswell. Shaver moved to Spring Island, South Carolina after Cameron recommended the area.

And that’s when Cameron revealed that he’d been further honing his dividend-focused investment strategy. The three formed their own company and called it Dividend Growth Advisors, and hired Jere Estes as their Chief Investment Officer. DGA was formed to serve friends and family, and to help protect and grow wealth by investing their clients’ funds in companies with strong fundamentals, and that generate reinvestable income via dividends.

Their flagship fund grew and so did their client base. Word spread far beyond the Low Country. In 2010 Goldman Sachs approached the firm about buying it out. Fearing that such a large firm would not be able to give the same level of personalized, dedicated service to their clients, DGA negotiated a different deal: it would sell their fund, but remain the fund’s manager, while retaining all of its wealth management business. In 2011, the deal was finalized and as part of it, the firm rebranded to Dividend Assets Capital, and managed the fund for nearly ten more years.

Following the rebrand and sale of the fund, the firm did something else quite extraordinary for a small wealth management firm: it entered into an ESOP (employee stock-ownership plan), making DAC entirely employee-owned. Such an arrangement gives every employee some level of ownership in the firm, which means they have a personal stake in its success.

As the firm has continued to serve and grow its client base, managing their investments, they have recognized a growing appetite within the investment community. Investors and RIAs are seeking ways to access strategies such as DAC’s as part of their portfolios. And so DAC has launched the DAC 3D Dividend Growth—its first ETF, which uses a similar strategy to the firm’s Equity A strategy, utilizing DAC’s highly valued and carefully honed “three dimensional” methodology—investing only in companies that have delivered dividends and double-digit growth for a decade.