While earning an economics degree and pursuing a football dream in college, I enrolled in a personal finance class that sparked a genuine interest in investing — and a deliberate decision to build my career around it. After graduating, I joined a highly successful financial planning firm.
The firm was impressive by any measure: an elegant building with expansive offices, multiple boardrooms, fireplaces, and a basketball court on the lower level. Its founder was a top-producing representative and a gifted salesman, consistently earning incentive trips through the broker-dealer and recognition among the industry’s top advisors. I admired him as a mentor and respected the thriving business he had built.
Some of my earliest clients were the people closest to me — my parents, my family, and former teammates. Being asked to manage their money was a tremendous compliment, an honor I took deeply to heart, and still do. That responsibility motivated me to understand every corner of this business and how “wall street” operated.
It was during this period that I began to understand how differently people define success — and that the trips, awards, and recognition I had admired came at a cost ultimately borne by clients. The more I learned, the more I saw that this wasn’t about any one person or firm. It was about the structure everyone in that world operated within.
I realized that giving my clients the best chance at investment success meant protecting them from all of it — the corporate overhead, the manufactured products, the sales tactics — and getting them direct access to the markets themselves.
So I set out to build something different: an organization designed around my clients’ interests first. Rather than operating within the constraints, inefficiencies, and sales tactics of a broker-dealer relationship, I chose to found and build my own Registered Investment Advisory firm. That firm, MWM Wealth Advisory, manages every client investment in-house and is built to deliver real value by removing the layers of people and overhead tied to a broker-dealer — or to the publicly traded firms known as wirehouses. That value begins with a foundation of efficiency, paired with practical, thoughtful strategies tailored to each client’s individual circumstances. My standard is a simple one: if an investment isn’t good enough for my own money, my family’s, or my closest friends’, it has no place in your portfolio.
