When the young Big 8 accounting firm veteran Mark Griege founded a Dallas-area planning venture in 1985, he had the entrepreneurial itch. He thought he had the goods to start his own business, but chuckles now that it might have been youthful enthusiasm talking.

His plan was simple enough: He wanted to fill the gaps he saw in financial advice given disparately by estate planners, insurance agents, tax preparers and stock brokers. His timing was very poor or very rich, depending on how you look at it. 

In the beginning, the price for following his muse was a few years of knocking on doors and having them slammed in his face. He was still in his late 20s, after all, and despite a law degree and a gilded resume with the name of Ernst & Whinney on it (precursor to Ernst & Young), many moneyed people likely saw a kid, he says. 

Also, this was Texas circa 1986. Just mention that year in the Lone Star State, and it gives some people the shakes. 

It was right before an oil glut caused the crash of crude prices, while real estate values plunged in a vicious cycle amid tax reform on the eve of the savings and loan crisis. Most of Griege’s business relationships, he says, were in industries that were about to get a major shellacking—land and energy. These two tornadoes met on the plains of Texas and, according to some historians, practically destroyed the state’s banking industry.

Yet here it is, 30 years later, and Griege and his partner Chuck Thoele just threw their 30th anniversary party for the firm, now dubbed RGT Wealth Advisors.

How they negotiated this path partly tells the story of the macroeconomics of the 1980s and the economic history of Texas. For his efforts, he and Thoele, another Ernst veteran, not only survived but thrived. The firm now lists both top executives and pro football quarterbacks among its clientele and some $3.5 billion in assets under management.

It was not a straight path.

Restless Hearts

Griege met Thoele in 1981 when both labored at the proto-Ernst as tax accountants. They spent their late nights during tax season dreaming up their own firm.

“We found a love of golf and sports and crazy ideas in common,” Griege says. “So we had a crazy thought that it would be great to be in business together one day and not necessarily be doing tax accounting work but to be doing something that serves people more directly on helping them achieve financial goals.” 

Griege’s early resume betrays his ebullient restlessness: After graduating high school in 1977, the son of a doctor, he worked through high school and college at Rich & Charlie’s Italian restaurant and the Pasta House, doing everything from waiting on customers to dishwashing and busing tables until he worked his way up to assistant manager. He also formed his own business operating ski tours (renting the buses and lift tickets and boasting 150 tourists on the last trip out). He invested in (and lost money on) South African gold stocks. A Missouri native, he was drawn to Texas (he went to Southern Methodist University) because it was still growing and full of young entrepreneurial types. 

He wrenched himself out of Ernst after a year or so to go to law school in ’82, but didn’t practice. “I wasn’t passionate about accounting, and I probably wasn’t passionate about law.” No, it was business that held all the charms. Following his instincts, he launched the prototype Robertson, Griege (with former partner Rex Robertson). 

After noticing a couple of local firms doing holistic planning work, his idea was to bring on portfolio management, garnering clients who could grow organically in promising careers, while he charged them a fee for services. It was a pretty compelling business model back in the ’80s, he says. It was strategic and long-term in nature and not transactional. You didn’t have to rebuild it every year with seasonal tax work. The revenue was sticky.

What he found at first was rejection. The business wouldn’t turn profitable for about five years, somewhere around ’89 or ’90, as the Dallas-like land and oil soap opera played out. By the turn of the decade, the Dallas/Fort Worth landscape was littered with see-through skyscrapers. 

Many of the firm’s clients were in those industries, and suddenly their assets were distressed. “Whatever liquidity they had was aiding other investments that required capital because of the swamp in those two markets.” So he was, on the one hand, charging a fee for assets that were plunging in value. “Then ’87 came along [when the stock market crashed] and they declined even further.” 

But there were signs the fledgling firm was winning some clients with big futures in Dallas. In 1989, it landed rookie Cowboy quarterback Troy Aikman, who would go on to win three Super Bowls and become a Hall of Famer.

Before Thoele joined in 1991, Griege’s largest client had $5 million and there weren’t very many of those. Most had between $250,000 and $1 million, he says. His hope was to hang out a shingle and build one client at a time, networking as best he could. In the beginning he remembers accounts as small as $20,000.

Youthful confidence didn’t help, he says. “I was 27, 28, 29 years old in these years,” he says. “So we had a lot of doors shut in our face simply because we thought we had the goods, and the reality was we just weren’t experienced enough. Our client base at that time was largely comprised of people that were within five or 10 years of our age chronologically.”

He needed savings and key loans from family members to help in the leaner years. He cut costs by working in a cheaper part of town (and became a landlord when the previous one walked out on the lease on the suite). 

First « 1 2 » Next