Tell me a little bit about yourself. 

Born, Chicago, Ill.  Moved to Los Angeles at age 3.  Grew up and went to school there.  Graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in accounting.  Received

a JD from Boalt Hall of Law at Cal; and an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Was a lawyer for the SEC in Washington DC; then served as counsel to the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives. See pages 125-132 in People’s Warrior by Michael Lemov (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011) for a description of what I did. I then worked as a management consultant to financial institutions with Stanford Research Institute (today SRI International) in Menlo Park, CA; then returned to the East Coast to run strategic planning for Merrill Lynch and became President of the Merrill Lynch Bank & Trust Company; then became President of the Charles Schwab Trust Company in San Francisco; which is where I started Starmont Asset Management, www.starmont.com.  

I have served on the Dean’s Advisory Board at the Haas School of

Business at Cal; and on the Board of the Berkeley Center for Law,

Business and the Economy at Boalt Hall.  I recently completed my term as Chairman of the Investment Monitoring Committee of the Jewish Foundation of the East Bay.   

My wife has three children, I have three children (yes, we are the Brady Bunch), and they have started to give us grandchildren.

How did you get started in your business?  

Having started the Merrill Lynch Bank & Trust Company and the Charles Schwab Trust Company I decided to start Starmont, a wealth advisory and investment management firm, with Todd Conover (now retired), former Comptroller of the Currency of the United States in the Reagan Administration, and the author of The Art of Astute Investing. We started out in executive space in San Francisco in 1998, and now are in nicer (Servcorp) space, as well as an office in Bishop Ranch in the East Bay where I live.

What do you enjoy the most about what you do?  

Helping people cope with the very difficult economic environment we have been in since the tech bubble burst in March 2000.  We have been able to preserve and grow our Clients’ net worth’s in these tough times, and our Clients are very appreciative.

What separates you and/ or your company from the competition? 

The way we treat our Clients.  At Starmont we treat our Clients like they

were family.  We give them lots of time and attention.  We listen to them and we communicate with them regularly.  We are responsive to their needs and we give them on-going advice about all of the things in their lives that effect their finances and financial well being.  Treating them like family fits in with our Client base, which is multi-generational.  Our oldest Client is 93-we are working with her and her family and their estate planning attorney to maximize her estate tax exemption before it is lowered in 2012; our youngest Client (that we know about) will be born in May or June-we are already

setting up a 529 Plan for that new Client.

If there was anything about your business or industry you could change what would it be? 

The tremendous volatility we have seen in the stock and bond markets since the financial crisis and market crash in 2008-2009.  It makes our job of preserving and growing our Clients’ net worth’s more difficult, and wears on our Clients psychologically a great deal.

Given your business expertise and the nature of what you do, what advice (whether general or specific) can you offer to those whom are interested in hiring a financial advisor?

Use one that can utilize any financial product or instrument to serve you, and is not tied only to those of his/her employer. Use one that charges fee-not commissions.  The fee should be tied to the value of your portfolio.  When your portfolio goes up, the fee goes up.  When your portfolio goes down, your fee goes down.  This puts your advisor on the same side of the table with you.  That is important.

What is the next big thing coming up for you? 

My wife and I celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary in 2012 and we hope

to celebrate it by taking a cruise down the French and Spanish coasts and ending up in Monaco and then perhaps Spain (where we have not traveled yet).

What is your biggest challenge at the moment? 

Helping our Clients deal with the huge volatility in the stock and bond markets, and convincing them to not give up and go to all cash and/or gold-which we believe will not be good for them in the long run.

How has Servcorp helped your business?  

Starmont has Clients from San Francisco to San Diego, as well as on the East Coast. Having access to Servcorp offices in the cities in which we have Clients, staffed by outstanding staffs that are very attentive to our and our Clients’ needs, and has made it much easier to service our Clients and to obtain new ones.

What type of customer are you looking for?  

Starmont serves affluent individuals and families, and the defined benefit retirement plans that their companies may offer.  We define affluent as those that have $1 million or more in liquid investible assets.  We also serve the Near Affluent-those who do not have $1 million in liquid assets as yet, but who will be given where they are in life.  In those categories, we want people who welcome our investment style-broadly diversified portfolios of domestic and international stock and bond funds, managed by people our research convinces us are among the best portfolio managers in the business, and designed to meet our Clients’ needs as those needs change over our Clients’ lifetimes.

 Anything else you’d like us to know about you? 

 I called the 2008 downturn. I wrote an article in the December edition of the East Bay Business Times where I said that the economy was softening and that investors should lighten up on stocks. Then Starmont did exactly that from January 2008 through June 2008. So when Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy in September 2008, and the stock market went down 57% over the next seven months, our Clients did not lose anywhere near that amount. In April 2009 we decided that March had been the bottom (which turned out to be right), and we started buying back into the stock market, and our Clients rode the bull market back up again. Starmont’s philosophy is to buy and manage our Clients’ investment positions, not to just buy and hold them.