Brian Hammersley, CFP®, CRPS®

My interest in financial services began in junior high at Career Day. I listened to three speakers, the most interesting of which was my uncle, the financial advisor. I was captivated by what my uncle, his brother, and his dad (my grandfather) did for work. They had the greatest job in the world: helping clients prepare for retirement and invest their money wisely. This also afforded them the opportunity to talk to many people and engage in economic and market research.

I knew that I wanted to be a financial advisor that day and so I decided to learn more from my family working summers through high school and college in their family office. It was apparent that my passion for helping others, building relationships, and designing investment portfolios fit perfectly into this career path. I graduated from Indiana University in 2002 and went right to work at UBS Financial Services in August of 2002. I was mentored by grandfather and uncles for a few years until my grandfather retired in 2004 and my other uncle decided to leave UBS for another institution. My uncle and I built and grew the business from 2004-2012 until we had come to fork in the road on how we served our clients.

This led to my departure and launching my own practice at Morgan Stanley in March of 2013. My focus was to build generational client relationships with entrepreneurs, business leaders, and other wealthy families. My mission was to help my clients protect, grow, and transfer their wealth to their loved ones and loved causes. As the practice grew and evolved I joined forces with my now partners, Brian Enns and Richard Owen, and Ty Robben.

Our practice continues to focus on generational family wealth management as our core clients. We’ve refined our practice to help clients clearly define their values and purpose, steward their wealth, and ultimately design strategies their legacy plan to transfer their assets to the loved ones and causes. We take a considerable effort on the front end of a relationship to make sure the wealth complexities are simplified into key areas of digestible action.

We begin with financial organization into a few key categories: asset and liability management, risk management (especially focusing on insurance), estate and legacy planning, and other outside initiatives.

Our primary efforts are surrounded with investment management that focuses on strategic long term allocations with the use of alternative investments as a key component. We believe there is great opportunity in risk management and diversification within the alternative and private investment landscape. We also focus our portfolios on fee compression, tax efficiency, and investment location.

Diversification does not guarantee a profit or protect against loss in a declining financial market.

Alternative investments are often speculative and include a high degree of risk. Investors can lose all or a substantial amount of their investment. They may be highly illiquid, can engage in leverage, short-selling and other speculative practices that may increase volatility and the risk of loss, and may be subject to large investment minimums and initial lock-ups. They may involve complex tax structures, tax inefficient investing and delays in distributing important tax information. They may have higher fees and expenses that traditional investments, and such fees and expenses can lower the returns achieved by investors.