A little over a year ago, financial advisor Christopher Bentley was ready to leave for a long-prepared for ski trip when he received a life-changing phone call.
Bentley, a private wealth advisor and vice president of Bentley, Kroyer & Associates, an advisory practice of Ameriprise Financial Services in Wayzata, Minn., had planned for nearly a year to visit Montana’s Big Sky Resort with family and friends.
Then a client, Travis, called him, telling him that his wife Katie had died. Bentley immediately realized that his ski vacation would conflict with Katie’s memorial and life celebration.
“Losing Katie was hard enough. The thought of not being able to attend the service was inconceivable,” said Bentley. “I wanted to be there to honor her amazing life, with her huge posse of amazing friends, and to be there for Travis and the boys. I couldn’t cancel the trip because we were hosting our friends; I decided I would simply bow out and leave the hosting duties to my wife. What else could I do?”
A few days later, when Bentley explained to Travis over lunch that he was canceling his ski trip to come to Katie’s memorial, the response took him by surprise. Big Sky was one of Katie’s favorite places on the planet.
“He said, 'I don’t want you to miss your trip: I want you to take Katie with you,’” said Bentley. “As I realized what Travis wanted me to do, tears welled and my heart beat faster. I had to catch my breath. Travis wanted me to take Katie’s ashes to the top of the mountain.”
The Right Stuff
Travis and Katie weren’t just any clients, said Bentley, who became an advisor in 2008 after careers in the military and various food and beverage industries. They came to him in 2012 as young 30-somethings working for Target (whose corporate offices are in the Minneapolis area) while he was with RBC Wealth Management, and later followed him to Ameriprise.
“They were young and had two young children, and she was healthy at the time,” he said, describing his first meeting with them. ”There was a fire alarm two minutes after our meeting started – the worst timing – and at that point, they were just prospects, they hadn’t moved anything to me. I said that we should go to a coffee shop, and we did, and we just talked.”
The couple had some rollovers from previous jobs—but not much, said Bentley—and wanted to talk about 529s for their children’s education. “I’ll never forget one thing that they asked, 'We don’t have much, why would you want to work with us?'"
“I could tell in one hour that they had the right mindset, the right attitude, and at their age they were asking very mature questions, and that meant that I could provide them and their family value over the years. They just got it. We were a good fit.”