About five and a half years ago, Jeffrey Bland found himself in an anguished position-he had to calm investors who'd just found out they were stuck in high-commission annuities they say they never asked for. The immediate problem: He himself was involved with the entity that had sold them, and though he and three clients who followed him say now he had nothing to do with it, a cloud of suspicion plunged over him at the time.

Leatha Trigg, a retired BP employee in Evanston, Wyo., about 75 miles from Salt Lake City, was one of those who got the startling news: She opened her mail to find that she was the owner of an annuity she never knew she'd bought, with at least $30,000 of her assets frozen in it.
A new company had taken the account over and sent a friendly hello, but it was more like the portals of hell opened. She and her partner Russ McLaughlin, a lead operator at BP's overthrust natural gas facility in Evanston, both found themselves with annuities it took a few years to get out of, she says.

Sometime after she found out, she got a visit from Bland on her doorstep one night looking "contrite and forlorn" in the cold, wearing a business overcoat. He had one message: He wanted to put things right. He said he was not the person who had put her in the annuity. She put him through the mangle for a couple of hours, but she listened.

Two other clients also recall that they gave him a beating: Bland let them vent and curse at him, taking the abuse. He then asked their forgiveness and worked to win back their trust.

"Poor Jeff had to win a lot of us over because we were all suspicious, but the more he talked it over, the more I'm glad we [stayed with him]," says client Alice Sears, who also had her liquidity locked up in the unwanted annuity. The product was very bad for Sears and her husband, Bill, because they dealt in a very cash-sensitive ranching business, commodity livestock, that needed access to funds.

"Needless to say, when I sat down with Jeff to go through all that, he took quite a beating," says another client, Kathy Ventura, a mortgage consultant who says that she was divorced and raising two daughters at the time and needed her funds for other things like retirement. "But you know I believed him. He apologized for somebody else's work that wasn't his own."

As one client says: Bland "had the balls to plead his case."

With the old firm collapsing, in any event, Bland says he started from scratch, and struck out on his own in mid-2005, moving into an attic above a bicycle shop near the University of Utah. The alarm clocks of college students could be heard through the walls in the back. There was a dip under the carpet where the floorboard had broken, and there were funny crawl spaces where gifts from clients piled up. His new wife Tina was helping out (he says they met when she was also a client of the old firm), and he recalls her typing with one hand while holding their new baby with the other. In that attic, he christened his new firm: Burrus Institutional Wealth Services.

The firm, in Salt Lake City, has now grown into one with 175 clients in Montana, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, North Dakota and California with some $70 million in assets.

The turmoil had at least one positive effect on Bland, in that he was now able to run a firm geared to the people he knew growing up back in Billings, Mont.-earthier people who ran farms and worked the oil patch.

"We started from bare wood," he says of his firm. "We had to do it all over again start from scratch and we're completely fee only." A few years later, he turned to an old friend who'd harbored similar aspirations.

School Chums
Theirs seem like the parallel lives of two Dickens characters: Bland and his new partner Tim Randak both had roots in Billings. Bland was delivered by Randak's pediatrician grandfather, they say. The two boys went through school together from the first grade through the 12th in Billings, and their two older brothers, both in medicine, work together, too.

After high school, they had parted ways for several years. Randak, after an early stint with Oppenheimer in Denver, struck out for the bright lights of New York City, where he labored at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in the heady risk analytics space. Bland, meanwhile, did a stint at UBS Paine Webber before striking out with his smaller firms.

Even though they were thousands of miles apart, Randak and Bland found themselves motivated by the same desires, and each had been uncomfortable with aspects of the financial services world. Bland disliked the emphasis on product at UBS at the expense of prudent allocation for his clients. Randak was a mover and shaker in risk analytics, headed for a promotion at Goldman, he says, but he had become estranged from clients.

So it might have been logic (or fate) that brought them back together. Randak, itching to leave New York and missing the West, found his friend's business proposition to come work with him too good to ignore. He joined Bland's start-up in Salt Lake City as an investment manager a year and a half ago. At some point, the firm left the attic and moved into nicer digs on the 14th floor of an office building in downtown Salt Lake City.
Trigg and her partner McLaughlin were a big help. Bland says he worked very hard to win them over after her bad experience with his former firm, and when he did, her vouchsafe for his ethics was a major watershed.
Word spread among her former co-workers, and helped his new firm in five years carve out a huge niche among BP employees, who now represent some 70% of their current assets. Some came because of Bland's persistence and seminars, but in a lot of cases it was simply the sweet grapevine.
"We work with BP employees," says Bland, "because the type of people that work in the oil fields are the type of people that we grew up around. I think it's really that basic thing. We understand their lives better."
That means everything from their values to their dress code. His previous firm had a large client clique in Scottsdale, for example, a group Bland says he had little affinity for. He describes a world of high-end golf courses where people wore what he calls "resort casual"-Tommy Bahama shirts, Maui Jim sunglasses, and brightly colored shorts covering very white legs. It was a world of entitlement where material things were valued a bit too much for his taste.
It's a stark contrast with clients like Bill Sears, who with his wife Alice is a rancher who sells calves on video auction. Bland describes taking a two and a half hour drive to see the Searses in Wyoming, traveling over dirt roads in hazardous winter treks and visiting the couple at their ranch, a home where Remington and Winchester rifles hang off the walls, where the couple sometimes have to scare the moose away from the trees and their cars with shotgun blasts overhead. These weren't the kind of people giving the gimlet eye to his designer clothes and watches, Bland says. They had different worries.
"The largest ranches in Wyoming and that kind of land up there is in the millions and millions of dollars, but that's not liquid money, it's just land."
Alice Sears says that despite the perception that ranchers are rich, her business is much more volatile than people expect. When they take truckloads of calves to auction they may have paid expenses of $1.12 a pound-and they're out of luck if the market bids only 98 cents. These are costs they can't pass through, one of the reasons her surprise annuity was so painful.

Blues For A Green Company
In BP, many of Bland's clients had found an employee-friendly oil company that offered rich benefits and a good culture, not to mention one that was known for being environmentally friendly.

That image all went up in smoke earlier this year, of course, when the Deepwater Horizon rig the company was leasing exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and sending almost 5 million barrels of oil gushing into the waters. As the environmental catastrophe unfolded on television, suddenly BP employees in some parts of the country were hiding the logos on their shirts and hats or taking them off their company cars altogether.

As part of its strategy to raise money for the legal costs and clean-up, BP has shed offshore gas assets in Vietnam; joint ventures in Venezuela; oil and gas exploration, production and transportation business in Colombia; and other deepwater fields in the Gulf. In the United States, it sold its Permian Basin assets in Texas and New Mexico and its Western Canadian upstream gas assets to the Apache Corporation. Proceeds from these sales are sought to offset the Gulf Coast burden. The plan is to dispose of $30 billion in assets by the end of 2011, according to the company's third quarter report.

Up in Wyoming, in what it calls an unrelated maneuver, BP sold some natural gas facilities that had already started to make less attractive profits (though it kept an offshore natural gas field in Wamsutter and relocated employees there who wanted to go). Between the Permian Basin and Wyoming sales, Bland's clients are having to decide whether to take a good compensation package and leave, move around to places where BP is still deploying labor, or, if they are old enough, retire early. It can be difficult choice for people who might have had different plans.

"My wife is a psychologist," says Bland, "and she has all this interesting stuff about [what happens] if you disrupt somebody financially. [People] identify themselves through their work, and if you remove that from their life, it's a real big deal to them. There's more than just numbers that we deal with."

Vicki Martin is one of those BP employees that dodged a couple of bullets, partly with Bland's help. She's been a construction manager with the company for 30 years, and was recently asked to relocate to Rock Springs, Wyo., to work at the Wamsutter facility. After selling a cabin to raise funds for a move, she thought of putting some money into the market. Bland could have made money off that, she says. Yet he told her instead to bank it in her new house and save on interest.

"He gave me guidance and saved me quite a bit of money," she says. "You would assume most financial advisors would tell you to put it in a 401(k)."

She also says that before she worked with Bland, her 401(k) was 100% invested in BP company stock, and he diversified her out of it-just in time to miss the stock's horrible plunge by more than half its value to $27 a share after the Gulf disaster. She and Bland say many other BP employees were not so lucky and continued to have all their retirement money tied up in the floundering stock.

"Several of my co-workers had recommended Jeff to them and now they are sorry they didn't go with him sooner," Martin says. "They realize they are in a position they wouldn't be in now."

Randak says, "Especially today with BP selling all these plants, a lot of these people are [wondering] do they have enough to retire, which means financial planning comes into place. Do they need to go out and get another job? Receiving a severance and a year and a half worth of salary in one fell swoop, what can they do to lessen taxes for the year? If they want to leave, what do they do with their 401(k)?"

As for the ultimate payoff for Trigg when she joined Bland, she tells people, "We've lost some money but we didn't lose a lot." More important, she says is that she is getting calls one a month, as well as letters. Plus Bland makes the drive up to Wyoming from Salt Lake City every two months.

"People out here in Wyoming have just as much a need for investment as people everywhere else," says Randak, "But for some reason the advisors aren't willing to drive out and meet them. I think it's an opportunity to help somebody who needs it but probably isn't getting it."
He adds that it's not just the he and his partner's willingness to fly to Texas and meet with those in the gas fields, but also the clients' sense of trust they get from Bland.

"I've heard him on the phone," Randak says. "He will maintain a friendship with a person if they work with us or not. It can be a brand new person he's met in cold call, but he'll maintain a friendship with them. If they don't' want to do business he won't hang up."