I bought my first stock when I was seven. It was Kodak, chosen with my dad's help back in the early eighties, and I have followed the market closely every day since. That early fascination never faded, and it still shapes how I spend a large part of my week, tracking public companies, sitting in on earnings calls, and reading economic news as it breaks. I follow it about as closely as a devoted fan follows a season, which is probably why it has never felt much like a chore.
My route into financial services ran through corporate America first. After accounting at the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA in finance from Thunderbird, I spent years as a financial analyst and in the tax department at Texas Instruments, Raytheon, and Electronic Data Systems. Seeing how large companies manage tax exposure and long-range planning with whole teams built for it made something plain to me. Business owners and families wrestle with many of the same tax, planning, and risk questions, only without an internal department to handle them. In 1997, I left to bring that skill set straight to the people who needed it.
What turned a career into something closer to a mission was seeing how much poor advice went unchecked. Every day, clients were getting misled, and families with serious wealth were paying for expertise and getting something well short of it, which convinced me people deserved better. Investment advice and tax work almost always sit in separate offices, so a client shuttles between two specialists and hopes they coordinate. Because I handle both sides myself, a client's taxes and investments sit with one person, and tax strategy gets built into an investment decision from the start instead of surfacing as an afterthought at filing time. For high-net-worth families, that seam is often where real value is created or lost.
Technical depth only counts if a client can act on it, so the part I work hardest at is taking something complicated, whether tax law or a turn in the market, and putting it in plain terms a person can actually use. That matters to me because a family's wealth is never only a balance sheet. It pays for a grandchild's education, it keeps people close, and it gives a family the standing to matter in its community, so handling it badly does damage that runs well past the dollars. The moment I look forward to most is when a client finally sees how the pieces fit together, and I get to watch it land.
Home is Rockwall, Texas, where I grew up and once swore I would never return. Priorities changed, and in 2015, around the time our fourth child arrived, my wife and I moved back to be close to my parents. The town has grown almost beyond recognition since I left, and I have made my peace with that, since growth is what gives the next generation reasons to stay. Between the four kids, a Dachshund-hound mix that keeps everyone moving, and a Persian cat who runs the house on her own terms, home stays full. I serve as a Deacon at First Baptist Church of Rockwall, the same church I sat in as a boy, speak often at tax and investment conferences and back at McCombs, and have written a best-selling book on tax and financial planning. When I step away, it is usually for family, a round of golf I will make no claims about, Cowboys and Longhorns football, or a trip through Europe, which I am now learning Italian to enjoy a bit more.
Credentials:
- CPA (Certified Public Accountant)
- EA (Enrolled Agent)
- Series 7 and Series 66 registrations, held as a fiduciary Investment Adviser Representative