My father was a hippie, so naturally I became a CPA. Being a hippie criminal defense attorney, my father fought “the man” and defended the wrongly accused. He was a defender of the Constitution and an enthusiastic revolutionary. He also didn’t like following rules, like the tax code.

When I was 18, studying theater at the local community college, my father had an unfortunate misunderstanding with the IRS. We ended up losing our 4,000-square-foot house by the beach and moving to a much smaller home where privacy was hard to find and secrets were difficult to keep. That’s when I started to see through the cracks and learned about how your relationship to money can hurt you.

When I was 20, still a theater student, I steeled myself and asked my father if he had filed his taxes that year. “I’ll get to it” he said, which I knew meant, “I won’t get to it anytime soon, if at all.” So, being a computer geek, I drove to the local CompUSA and looked for a box that had the word tax on it. I sat my father down, armed with my shiny copy of TurboTax, and filed my first tax return.

The next day, my best friend said, “Wait, you can do taxes…?” That day, I became a financial advisor, but didn’t yet know that was what it was called.

The path from there to here was filled with twists. It pulled out from UCLA and made a switchback from theater to accounting. It passed through Price Waterhouse with a ponytail. It went up the mountains of IPOs and down the valleys of liquidation. It made a stop in advertising and did the express train through consulting. It stayed at a large RIA firm for sixteen years and stopped to acquire a dozen other firms. It then took the scenic route back into consulting to look back and help all the friends I met along the way.

Whether you’re an old friend or about to become a new one, let’s sit down, have a coffee, play a insanely complicated board game, and find out how I can help you.