In the mid-1980s, John Ulrich was a young broker at Merrill Lynch when he was handed a client that one of his colleagues didn’t want deal with. That client ultimately sent Ulrich down a path that has helped define his career.
Ulrich, 64, is founder and CEO of Ulrich Investment Consultants, a registered investment advisor in Albuquerque, N.M., with assets under management of roughly $1.8 billion. In recent years the firm has expanded with offices in San Antonio and Spokane, Wash., and its staff includes three certified financial planners, a charted financial analyst and a certified public accountant. Its customer base includes the types of clients one would expect an RIA to serve, including high-net-worth individuals, business entities and institutional clients such as retirement plan sponsors, endowments and foundations. Perhaps its most distinctive client segment involves Native American tribes, which comprise about 40% of the firm’s overall business.
Ulrich describes working with native tribes as a niche with many challenges—and rewards. Some of the six tribes in four states he works with are small, others are large. Some operate casinos, which provides a huge leg up. Others are more economically challenged. Ulrich’s work is mainly focused on overseeing projects aimed at improving aspects of a tribe’s social and/or economic well-being. And like any client, the tribes have their own dynamics and needs that require a flexible approach to customer service.
“They all have unique things they want to preserve, so I have to make sure I don’t do anything that destroys something that’s important to them whether it’s the land, the culture, the people,” Ulrich said.
He recalled a time he was working with a tribe on a project and he said to someone, “We have to fix this and fix that.” The person he spoke to gave him a gentle rebuke.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You have to understand that you look at things around you and say it all needs to be fixed, but sometimes it doesn’t need to be fixed because that’s the way people want it,’” Ulrich said. “In this case, you’re talking about people with a high degree of spirituality and a much higher connection in their history with the roots of the land. They’re steeped in that tradition.
“The tribes are often torn in that they have their old ways and customs, and not all tribes want to get rid of that,” he continued. “It’s a struggle in how hard you go in trying to make everything in a way we think is better.”
Tribal Economics
There are 574 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior. The BIA says there are roughly 56.2 million acres that are held in trust by the U.S. for various Indian tribes and individuals. These comprise 326 land areas administered as federal Indian reservations, pueblos, rancherias, missions, villages and communities.
Federally recognized tribes are sovereign entities that can form their own governments, make and enforce laws on their lands, and license and regulate activities within their jurisdiction, among other functions.
The often-fraught historical relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. has created tremendous levels of socio-economic disenfranchisement for tribal nations on the whole. Statistics abound showing the high levels of unemployment and poverty—coupled with low education rates and a lower health status—in native tribal communities versus other demographic groups.
But the development of casinos and a growing hospitality industry on tribal lands has been a boon to many tribes. And a smaller number of reservations receive royalty checks from the development of natural resources on their land. While economic conditions have improved in many regards during the past three decades in what is collectively known as Indian Country, there’s obviously much room for improvement.
And that’s something Ulrich is trying to accomplish with his tribal clients. He said he had no first-hand interaction with Native American tribes until that day long ago at Merrill Lynch when folks from the Pueblo of Laguna, a tribe located 45 miles west of Albuquerque, walked into the office.
“The person who was assigned to them said to me, ‘I’m not sure what they want, but why don’t you deal with them because I’m busy.’ And I’m like, ‘OK,’” he recalled.
“I greeted these people, who were absolutely delightful and wanted some help,” he added. “They didn’t want to make trades; they wanted to talk about strategy and ideas.”
This conversation lasted a couple of hours, and it was Ulrich’s introduction to the world of sovereign native tribes.
“During our conversation I learned that they are governments, and it’s like having a small city in that they have to take care of their people and do all of these different things, and they have limited resources,” he explained. “They have to rely on what they can get from mineral extraction on their land, or anything that happens on the pueblo. I found all of this to be interesting.
“Eventually, I got them as a client because they told the office manager they thought it was better that I service their account rather than the other gentleman,” he said.
Ulrich said his Pueblo of Laguna client viewed him more as an advisor than a broker who was trying to sell them products. That prompted him to leave Merrill in 1992 and, with a couple of partners, start his own RIA firm called Medallion Investment Management Co.
They eventually sold Medallion to Loomis Sayles, where Ulrich became a portfolio manager and worked on a team. During that time, he acquired another native tribe as a client. Ultimately, both the new tribal client and the Pueblo of Laguna tribe got into the casino business.
“Gaming had come into the equation, and my clients became more than just smaller clients we helped with planning; they became significant clients because of gaming,” Ulrich said. “And they stuck with me. The more meaningful work I was doing was helping them set up funds as they were gaining wealth. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t be a money manager here; I’m much better off being a consultant.”
At that point he left Loomis Sayles and started doing consulting work for a different firm in 2000. “I decided I liked working with tribes and it was a significant part of my business and I wanted to focus on that,” Ulrich said. He eventually went out on his own and in 2007 formed what today is Ulrich Investment Consultants.
Team Approach
Ulrich’s work with native tribes requires him to apply his financial planning skills on a more macro level.
“We don’t deal with many individual tribal clients,” he explained. “When we deal with tribes it’s at an institutional level. But they’re very unique in that it’s a family. It’s almost like dealing with a very large family office.”
Ulrich says his role is that of a fiduciary consultant, which he says differs from the work performed by big investment banks and brokerages that work in Indian Country.
“Let’s be frank about what those in the broker-dealer space can do,” he stated. “Most won’t act as fiduciaries, which we do. They’re primarily involved with investing the money. They have nothing to do with the tribal budget or coordinating the investment with the budget. No one is doing the level of consulting work that we do with the tribes.”