Randy Garcia

Cutting-edge wealth management helps Randy Garcia serve his corporate and private clients.

Randy A. Garcia is the founder and chief executive officer of the oldest and largest Nevada-based investment management consulting firm, The Investment Counsel Company. He manages some $600 million for more than 100 clients from a variety of categories—including high­net-worth families, qualified retirement plans and eleemosynaries.

What has helped with Garcia's success? Innovation accompanied by discipline is a key factor. "We believe in taking advantage of current industry trends," explains Garcia. "But we rethink, re-engineer and systemize them." Discipline and innovation are very much at the core of the firm, which Garcia founded in 1978. Making a life-changing commitment from the brokerage industry to the newly developing wealth management industry took hard work and an aspiration to be the very best. The foundation for this was Garcia's academic career. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with honors, Garcia attended the University of Santa Clara School of Law as a scholarship recipient. He then completed postgraduate classes at Harvard University and the Wharton School of Business and later became Nevada's first Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA). Today, he holds seven National Securities Industry professional licenses and has also received the Accredited Investment Fiduciary Analyst (AIFA) designation from the Center for Fiduciary Studies.

Garcia's professional career has seen several "firsts." During a ten-year tenure at UBS Paine Webber, prior to establishing The Investment Counsel Company, he was recognized by Money as one of the nation's best investment advisors. Paine Webber recognized Mr. Garcia every year for outstanding service and utilized his expertise to provide best-practice information to the firm's brokers. Garcia was recently recognized in Forbes as one of the Most Dependable™ Wealth Managers of the Southwest by Goldline Research.

One best practice that Garcia has paid close attention to is prudent wealth management. While wealth management is the latest financial discipline to be adopted by leading financial advisors—and thus of interest to Garcia as an industry leader—it also likely marks an endgame in the financial industry's current philosophical and technological construct. That evolution began in the 19th century with the evolution of Wall Street wirehouses and continued after the computer revolution of the late 20th century with financial planning. Wealth management goes beyond financial planning. It seeks to align investors' values with wealth via a chief financial officer's due diligence approach by establishing a procedurally prudent process for coordinating and implementing numerous investment, legal, and accounting issues to support investors' beliefs, attitudes, and objectives. By helping the client align wealth with values and then implementing the strategy, the financial advisor helps the client utilize wealth to its best advantage.

"I've been involved in wealth management as a discipline for 30 years," Garcia says. "As the industry progressed, we've observed that most wealth advisors still don't apply the concepts in a disciplined fashion. The term is fashionable now, but that doesn't mean it is any better understood."

For Garcia, many who use the term "wealth management" are simply latching on to a buzzword, much as some did in the late 20th century with financial planning. But while financial planning may be seen as supporting the growth of wealth management, Garcia does not see anything superseding the latter. The concepts of wealth management will be further refined over time, he says, but the idea of providing a service that aligns wealth with values has become a fundamental one. "There will be further areas of advancement as technology improves and as more advisors provide real wealth management services," Garcia points out. "But like law or accounting, I think wealth management provides the industry with a building block that is not apt to be replaced. The fundamentals of the practice and the discipline to implement it will stand the test of time and not be unseeded by future developments or trends created within the industry."

Garcia says that his approach to wealth management was influenced greatly by the advisor coaching firm CEG Worldwide. "This is not an industry where you want to go it alone, especially when it comes to a concept as complex as wealth management," he says. "While we understood wealth management, we knew we could immediately benefit from CEG's recommendations on best practice implementation steps."

Garcia had been aware of CEG Worldwide throughout much of the 2000s and was impressed by the similarities between its philosophy and his approach to the financial services industry. "They have a strong focus on innovation and installing internal systems that give the client a successful experience on an ongoing basis. Equally important, they are able to integrate best practices within wealth management into a larger business methodology and help us apply it in a disciplined manner. Their approach is the one I've used while building the firm, and having CEG Worldwide on board from a coaching perspective has only enhanced what I set out to accomplish."

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