I work primarily with entrepreneurs, landowners, and multigenerational families whose financial lives have become increasingly complex. Sometimes that complexity comes from a successful business. Sometimes it is inherited wealth, family land, competing estate-planning objectives, charitable interests, or simply the accumulation of a lifetime of decisions.

What interests me is how all of those pieces fit together.

I have always been drawn to economics because I tend to see things as systems. Change one variable and something else moves with it. Financial planning works much the same way. An investment decision can affect taxes. A business decision can change an estate plan. A charitable idea can create opportunities that reach well beyond the gift itself. My job is to help clients see those connections, understand their choices, and determine which ones actually matter.

That means my work tends to exist in two worlds at the same time. There is the technical world—investments, retirement plans, businesses, taxes, estate structures, charitable strategies and economic modeling. And then there is the human world—family, uncertainty, ambition, responsibility, emotion and the things people hope their wealth will ultimately accomplish.

I don’t believe you can do good planning while paying attention to only one of them.

My goal is to take something that may be technically complicated and make the decision itself understandable. I want clients to know what their choices are, why we are considering them, what the tradeoffs may be, and how each decision fits into the larger picture. From there, we can establish priorities, act on them, measure the results and make changes as life inevitably changes around us.

I also believe that wealth is most useful when it has a mission.

That is where the idea of abundance has become increasingly important to me. Abundance isn’t simply having more. It is having enough clarity and confidence to create greater possibilities—for yourself, for your family, for a business, for a community, or for causes you care about. Part of my role is helping clients think through what they want their wealth to do, not simply how much of it they want to accumulate or preserve.

The more complicated the situation becomes, the less I believe any one professional should pretend to have all the answers. I regularly work alongside attorneys, CPAs, investment bankers, insurance professionals, charitable-planning specialists and other advisors. I enjoy that process. Some of the best solutions I have seen have come from getting talented people around the same table, giving them a common objective and allowing each of them to contribute what they do best.

I began my college education at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, continuing a family tradition shared by my grandfather and father. I later earned a B.A. in Germanic Language and Literature from the University of Kansas, where I also studied economics. It may seem like an unusual combination, but in retrospect it makes considerable sense to me. Economics taught me to think about systems and consequences; studying language taught me to pay attention to meaning. Both remain important to the way I work today.

My connection to Lawrence and northeast Kansas is also an important part of who I am. I have had the privilege of working with families whose stories here stretch back generations, as well as entrepreneurs, academics, professionals, farmers and landowners whose circumstances could not be more different from one another. That variety is one of the things I value most about my work.

Outside of my advisory practice, I am a co-founder of the Lakeview Conservation Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the cultural, historical and natural resources of the greater Lakeview area and Lawrence. I also co-founded the Abundance Alliance, which brings together professionals from finance, accounting, law, philanthropy, coaching and other disciplines around a shared idea: helping people use their wealth, leadership and influence to create greater abundance for their families, businesses, communities and charitable causes.

After more than three decades in financial services, what continues to make the work interesting to me is remarkably simple: every client presents a different set of circumstances, and behind every financial problem is a human being trying to make a good decision. My job is to help them see the bigger picture—and then help turn that perspective into action.