As a young boy growing up in Washington, D.C., LeCount Davis was inspired by “Mr. Payne," the neighborhood financial and tax guru who helped people solve their pressing problems.
“The people in the neighborhood didn’t know anything about investing at the time, but they knew they had to pay taxes, and I saw the impression Mr. Payne was making on the neighborhood and how the people just swore by him,” said the 85-year-old Davis. “He was a very honest man, and he did a lot of pro bono work.”
Years later when Davis began to ponder on a career, he thought about Mr. Payne and the impact that he had on the community. He wanted to work in a field where he would be helping people and giving back to the community. While researching careers, Davis said he came across an article in Kiplinger magazine that talked about financial planning and how it was the profession of the future. “It sounded good to me,” he said.
In 1978, Davis earned the certified financial planner designation, the first Black person to do so, and he has been practicing since then. But he said he would not have been able to build the successful career he did had it not been for the care and guidance of a few people, one whom he calls his “good samaritan,’’ and God, whom he refers to as his first client. “He invested his blessings and favors in me, but he wanted a return on his investments,” Davis said.
Davis continues to work with some of his long-time clients, some of whom have been with him for 40 years, and he only takes on new clients on occasions from his church and activities that he is involved with. “I am preparing for succession. You can’t do it forever,” he said.
Throughout his 50-plus-year career as an advisor, Davis said he has focused on servicing the underserved population and “inspiring, motivating and preparing the next generation of financial planners.”
In 2001, he founded the Association of African American Financial Advisors (Quad-A) to address the needs and concerns of Black financial professionals. For six years, he published a quarterly financial education newsletter called “Finance and the African American Family.” And in 2020, he published his autobiography, “One Step Back – Two Steps Forward: The Dance of My Ultimate Plan.”
Davis said that as his career progressed, he adopted the theme “lifting while climbing. So, as I am climbing the ladder of success, I am trying to pull somebody up with me.,” he said. “That’s what I really wanted to do and that’s what my mission calls for.”
It was in that spirit that the CFP Board Center for Financial Planning in August created its first endowed scholarship program in honor of Davis. The LeCount R. Davis Scholarship program will award up to $5,000 to qualified Black students at historical Black colleges or professional who are seeking to attain the CFP certification and to practice financial planning.
“I feel very humbled … because it helps me achieve my vision that was given to me. I feel like I am doing what I was told to do by God. He blessed me so that I can bless somebody else,” Davis said, adding that while the endowed scholarship is a step forward, there is still work to be done to involve more Black people in the profession. “We still need to make some movements and so I have to make sure that whatever my name is involved in, it has to be in pursuit of the mission and vision that I have always had."
Davis said he was skeptical when CFP Board CEO Kevin Keller reached out to him two years ago to get his ideas on strengthening the board’s efforts to get more people of color involved in financial planning because over the years he had been through that exercise many times with many company leaders. Previously, he said, such discussions usually never led to any results. “They all talked a certain game, and they never did anything,” he said.
He said he told Keller that people in the industry have been talking about this for some time, but nothing ever happens. “And, in order for you to get something started, you have to make something happen. You have to bring something to the table to let us know that you are really serious about what we are talking about,” Davis said.
‘Evidently, he took that back to the board because the next thing I know Keller called me two years later asking for permission to use my name for the endowed scholarship,” Davis said. “I said I have got to have the details because I don’t know exactly what you’re asking for. So, they came up with a memorandum of understanding.”
Keller recalls Davis wanting to make sure the board was committed to its racial diversity efforts. The scholarship “recognizes the trailblazing role that LeCount has played in the evolution of the financial planning profession,” he said. “He has been quite an inspiration for a number of people, and we thought at CFP Board that this would be a way for his good work in his trailblazing record to be remembered in perpetuity.”
Keller said the scholarship is the latest effort since the launch of the CFP Board Center for Financial Planning in 2015. He said while the LeCourt Davis scholarship program is the first endowed scholarship for the board, they have 13 different scholarship programs and have awarded more than $1 million to people practicing financial planning as a CFP professional or on their way.
“We have been at this a long time, and we are starting to have an impact,” he said, noting that their growth rate of underrepresented groups is now four times the overall growth rate. Of the 93,940 professionals, 1.8% are Black. “This is all an outgrowth of the commitment that we made back in the middle of the last decade to take this head-on to address the lack of diversity,” he said.
Before Davis settled on a career in financial planning, he had carved out an impressive resume that paved his way to becoming a financial planner. After graduating from high school in 1954, he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, both in accounting from Southeastern University. His first job was at a small accounting firm, King/Reynolds in Baltimore, working for his “role models,” Benjamin King Sr. and Arthur M. Reynolds Sr., Maryland’s first and second Black CPAs.
He taught accounting as an adjunct professor at Howard University and hosted a local financial TV program called "Common Cents." And he worked for the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, where he did economic development and financial consulting in the Caribbean and South America, namely Brazil, Bahamas and Ecuador.
He returned from abroad in 1969 and a year later established a consulting firm, specializing in financial planning, tax planning and financial management. Reynolds, his former boss, had become a tax attorney and Davis inherited those clients. “And so, I had a book of work when I started. I didn’t have to create clients,” he said, noting that most of the clients were Black professionals in the D.C. area.
“I said now that I am an entrepreneur, the job now is how can I fit this into what I would want to do in life and help people,” he said. “I didn’t want to fall in love with balance sheets and profit and loss statements and that type of thing because I wouldn’t necessarily be helping anybody,” he added.
Davis explained that it was after he read the Kiplinger piece that he joined the International Association for Financial Planning (IAFP), which had chapters throughout the country. The D.C. chapter, which he joined, was the national chapter. The IAFP in 2000 became the Financial Planning Association.
“I went to my first symposium, and I was the only Black person there. So, therefore, I was a deer in the headlights,” he said. “And then I ran into who I call my ‘Good Samaritan’ who has helped me until as of today. She has been helping me all the way. Her name is Alexandra Armstrong.”
Armstrong, who was president of the chapter, “came up to me and welcomed me with open arms,” he said. “She said you have done everything you need to be a part of his chapter and I am going to put you on all the committees that fit your background,” Davis said. “So, I was on every committee of the IAFP.”
A year later in 1987, Armstrong’s term as president ended and Davis was elected president of the chapter. “I had only been there a year, but they had seen enough of me to know that I knew what I was talking about. It was a unanimous vote.”
Armstrong, principal of Armstrong Fleming & Moore Inc. in Washington, D.C., was one of the first woman in 1977 to get the CFP designation (the first in Washington D.C.). She had worked in the stock brokerage industry prior to becoming a financial planner and creating her firm in 1983.
She described that first encounter with Davis: “I was in the meeting and into the room strode this very attractive African-America man, impeccably dressed and looking around because he didn’t know anybody,” she recalled. “So, I went over and started talking to him and I thought he was so interesting, and I introduced him around."
Armstrong said she “sort of maneuvered it” so that Davis would be the next president of the organization because she thought the Washington, D.C., chapter should have an African American president. “If I was looking for a better person to promote, I couldn’t think of anybody else,” she said. She added that Davis has been a good spokesperson for the industry. “And I know he has inspired multiple people as well to follow his example. So, as they say, it takes a village,” she said.
Davis said Armstrong has opened doors and backed him every step of the way of his career. “She just took me under her wings," Davis said, adding that as a woman in male-dominated industry, Armstrong knew he would face some of the same pushback she faced in the industry. “She said, ‘I know if I experienced it as a white woman, then you are going to experience it and it probably will be worse’ so you are going to different need somebody to lean on."
He also credits the late Robert Ginsburgh, a retired Air Force major general who was on the National Security Council staff during the Johnson administration, for helping to guide his career. After retiring from the Army, Ginsburgh headed Neville Associates, a financial planning and portfolio management firm in Washington, D.C.
Davis recalled Ginsburgh inviting him to lunch at the exclusive University Club in Washington at a “time when they would not service Black people.” And one of the first things he said Ginsburgh told him was, “You passed the examination, and you are a CFP and that got you to the table, but that won’t get you anything off the table,” Davis said. “And he went right into telling me how to take money and how to make a living in financial planning.”
As he plans for succession, Davis has chosen to transition his clients to one of his mentees, Daphne Wright. “She is well qualified,” he said. Wright, a financial advisor with LPL Financial, also operates an independent tax practice in Sterling Va., as a CPA.
Wright said she has “high regard and respect” for Davis’s commitment to the profession. “He exhibits the highest degree of integrity in working with clients, in supporting and working to open doors of opportunity for African American financial advisors, and to [bringing] knowledge and financial education to those that he can reach in the Black community,” she said.
"He doesn’t try to turn out clones of himself,” she said. Instead, she said he has always encouraged her and his other mentees “to be students of their profession and learn all that they can and excel in the areas that they most want to develop as their focus.”
Wright also noted that Davis, who is referred to as the “Godfather” by advisors who know him, has never been impressed with the fanfare that comes with his reputation and notoriety as the first African American CFP. “He has a great deal of humility and just sees his purpose as a God-given directive to do unto others as others have done unto him in supporting him, believing in him, and helping him launch his career,” she said.
When asked what has surprised him the most about the industry, Davis, after much thought, said, “how I was accepted to the dance. I got that invitation and the call to the dance,” adding that he does not believe he could have done it if he had not had “the helping hand early in the game to at least show the people that I could do certain things."
But there were many other people of color who never had the opportunity to progress in the industry because they were never given the chance, Davis said. “We had to pass the same examinations and do everything that other people did, and every time we get an opportunity to do something, we do it well. But we have to get the opportunity to do well,” he said.