The Beginning…
I was raised in Kansas City, Missouri by my two loving parents, Vicki and Joe. My family has had a long tradition of good businesspeople for generations and I was clearly inspired early on to follow in their footsteps. My parents would call me a “budding” entrepreneur when they noticed my fascination with business and making money at such a young age. I’d always be creating something and trying to show others its necessary, “cant live without” value to their lives. The energy I gained from the raw challenge of it all kept me heavily involved in all sorts of business and leadership activities throughout my younger years. I later realized this strong business appeal came from the many “adult” conversations I overheard about investing and making money. I just knew I’d be doing both some day.

It was this vision that led me to study business, marketing and finance at college. Because I always dreamed of living somewhere on a beach and being in warm weather all year round, I turned down local scholarship opportunities to travel 1,500 miles to attend Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL.

Business Career Takes Off
It didn’t take but a few hours after my first class in business to immediately begin pursuing real world experience at a high level. While many of my older friends did local internships at small businesses so they could get college credit; I instead volunteered myself as a first semester sophomore for a national internship program that was very challenging to get accepted into and wouldn’t provide any college credit because I wasn’t a senior.

The lack of credit hours didn’t bother me a bit – my goal was totally different. I wanted to feel what it was like to do business on the front lines with people 20-30 years older than I was. And I wanted it so bad, they hired me after only a few interviews. (Probably to get me to stop calling them)

The internship program was with Northwestern Mutual and had been ranked by Princeton Review for the last 20 years as a “Top 10” Internship in the United States – probably the #1 financial internship in the country. They promised to have me fully licensed in insurance and investment securities and out in the field working with clients in only 6 months to begin in the summer. And that’s exactly how it worked out.

At the age of 20, I began working alongside some of the best financial professionals in the industry and learned a lot. For almost three years in Tampa Bay, I worked with attorneys, business owners and individual families, helping them design and implement financial roadmaps for the future including all kinds of investment and insurance recommendations. I absolutely fell in love with what I was doing. It was a dream come true – business, finance and marketing all wrapped together and with a very respected company and excellent training program – and I was just getting warmed up.

I spent most of my college career running my financial services business around my class schedule and other campus activities I was involved in. I even took 9th out of 2,000 college students in the company program and was featured in USA TODAY my junior year for my client achievements.

In fact, things went so well, I was promoted to Director of the College Agent Program and actually ran the internship program the summer after my junior year. I recruited, trained, mentored and supervised my internship team of 10 and we broke nearly every production record for the Tampa office that year.

This experience was critical for my growth and taught me several important things:

• I learned the conventional world of investments inside and out – including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, annuities, life and disability insurance products and retirement plans.
• I saw hundreds of appointments and spent many hours learning how to effectively build client relationships, many of which I have and cherish to this day.
• Because we were independent contractors and running our own businesses, I learned the blueprint of how to effectively run and manage a business.

Transition to Independent Financial Planner
Although the Northwestern Mutual experience was incredible, I decided to leave the company after graduation and continue building my client base more as a business owner than a “company man”. I couldn’t get away from my entrepreneurial roots and I was really excited to take what I learned and build a financial planning company that better aligned with my vision to serve my clients. By running my own business, I had the complete freedom and flexibility to offer the best investments and insurance programs to my clients, without any bias. I knew the close mentoring and accountability I got at Northwestern had positioned me perfectly for the important transition.

My clients took very well to the new approach and quickly opened the door for more referrals. My new investment line-up included all the best investment and insurance companies across the globe with no restrictions or quotas. I began to develop “reverse marketing”, where my clients were doing the majority of my marketing for me by telling others about their positive experience. Things seemed like they couldn’t get much better, I remember thinking. By 2005, I was earning a nice income and my client base was growing rapidly. Because of the growth and opportunities, I began thinking critically about where I wanted to see things develop in the future and surprisingly, I began to discover some unexpected realities.

Waking Up To a New World of Investments & Planning
Since the beginning of 2005, I had been spending a lot of time with other successful businessmen and investors and began hearing investment success stories that were absolutely foreign to me. These stories included a whole new world of investments that I had heard very little about. These investments offered better than average returns and attractive security positions and were very popular in more educated investment circles but weren’t talked about commonly on television or in magazines or newspapers. At first I was a little offended and skeptical. (I was the financial planner with hundreds of training hours under my belt and years of experience, what could they know that I didn’t?)

These successful investors I was spending time with claimed that these “traditional” investments had been around for centuries and what I had been helping my clients with were products created from a relatively new industry, the “financial services industry” which promotes among other things – mutual funds, annuities and CD’s.

After just a few weeks of research and to my surprise, I discovered just how right these successful businessmen were. These other investments were, in fact, making these educated investors great returns but were largely unknown by most average investors and there was a very good reason why, I would soon find out.

The fact that these other secure investments actually existed came as a big shock to me. I had been reading and studying for hours per day, always trying to stay in tune with the best quality information for my clients and had heard virtually nothing about these “traditional investments” that had been serving their investors for centuries. My knowledge of investments had only come from the things I had read, studied and been taught by others in the financial services industry – and that was exactly the problem.

My Discovery About the Financial Services Industry & Its Supporters
Over the next several months, what occurred to me was that these trade journals, industry periodicals, newspapers, magazines, financial television shows and even investment books I had been reading and watching were all primarily originating from sources supporting the financial services industry and their spectrum of investments. In fact, the very exams and licensing manuals I had spent so much time studying…were supporting the same industry with all the same investments. The investments they weren’t talking about were what really caught my attention and became a source of short-term pain and long-term opportunity.

This new information was painfully difficult for me to discover because I immediately felt like my clients may not have been getting the “truly objective” investment advice I had been so adamant about offering. And based on what I was hearing from other successful investors, my clients may not have been getting access to the very best investments either. And I knew my clients weren’t alone.

A Career Changing Crossroad…
After thousands of service hours to my clients and watching first hand the frustration, uncertainty and limitations that come with the majority of “industry” investment products (that I had settled for and accepted as truth), I began to seriously question if these products were truly the “end all” of superior investments or if industry trained financial advisors, like myself, were just missing key information about better investments. After feeling irritated and discouraged by all of this…

I came to a major crossroads in my career several years ago and had an important decision to make…

The decision was this. I could turn my head “the other way” to these new discoveries about better investments and continue making a nice living selling products that I was personally losing faith in quickly, products that were unfit for the majority of my clients and for the economic season we were entering into (but for some reason deemed “ok” by many in my advisor peer group, the media and the profit driven financial services industry)…OR,

…I could embark on a dedicated exploration into exactly what the most successful investors and financial institutions actually invested in and successfully focus on bringing those same investments to my client base so they too could experience the benefits and truly achieve their financial goals in the safest, quickest way possible.

My Clients and I Are Experiencing Fantastic Results Today!
As you might have guessed, I took the road less traveled – the faith based road that didn’t have the visible, clear path and certainly didn’t have advisors lining up to rethink everything they had been taught for 20 and 30 years. My experience up until this point had taught me that I would have to do “extraordinary things’ to accomplish “extraordinary results” for my clients and just offering the same limiting products as thousands of other advisors did, just wasn’t going to cut it for my career goals or my clients.

After years of study, personal investment into these proven strategies and successful implementation…

Today, my clients and I are happier than ever to see our vision coming to pass.

The results speak for themselves: