Focus : Banking & Finance From the court room to the board room Attorney-turned-financial adviser finds room to grow in Ridgefield By BOB CHUVALA

Focus : Banking & Finance
From the court room to the board room
Attorney-turned-financial adviser finds room to grow in Ridgefield
By BOB CHUVALA

Rand Guffey sort of meandered his way into being a lawyer three of his four uncles were lawyers and as an undergraduate “I ran with a pack of people at Harvard who mostly went to law school” and did that for 30 years. Then, because he was tired of commuting from Westchester County to Manhattan, he decided to move into financial planning.

It wasn’t that big a move, really. At the University of Texas Law School “I wasn’t accepted at Harvard; Harvard’s tough” “I trended toward things that involved litigation and securities and investment law, corporate taxes, things like that,” he said.

After three years as an assistant district attorney in Dallas “to get courtroom experience,” he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1977 to be part of Jimmy Carter’s new Energy Department as a litigator for three years. He met his wife, Mary Jane, moved to Annapolis and joined the corporate finance department of Thomson McKinnon, “essentially putting deals together in the areas of real estate and oil and gas.”

The Guffeys moved to Harrison, N.Y., in 1986; he stayed with Thomson for another five years, commuting to The Battery. “By that time we had a child and I thought I could do something in Westchester and not have to commute so far,” he said. “At Thomson, we could tell that the whole turn to investment management for a fee was going to happen,” Guffey said. “The whole notion of working with clients without having to charge a commission to make a living attracted me. I thought it would be a growing business, which it certainly has been.”

Guffey “made a turn to not practice as an attorney but strictly as a financial planner.” In 1991, he joined AllAmerica Financial as part of the insurance company’s Tarrytown, N.Y., financial planning offices. “We were the largest financial planning firm in Westchester; we had about 40 planners and an equal number of support people creating written financial plans for a fee.

“People would come in and talk to you about what they wanted to do, and to get an idea about what they really could do,” he said. “We would use assumptions about what the future will be like and see if their money would last until they were 95.”

Competitive advantage

Guffey stayed at AllAmerica until the end of 2003, when the company was bought out and the new owners, essentially, closed the Tarrytown office. “I decided to move to Connecticut,” he said. “It seemed like I got along better with clients in Connecticut than those in New York. I didn’t see it at the time; I thought it was just me. But it seemed like people in Connecticut were more like people in the rest of the country than those in New York.”

In addition, the Guffeys “liked the way it looked over here and the way things happen.” They moved to Redding in 2004 and “Vern Hayden, a well-known financial planner in Westport, invited me to come in and work with him,” he said. Guffey stayed with the Hayden Financial Group for two years, “and I decided I wanted to start my own office.”

“I realized that all my working life I worked in somebody else’s office. I wanted to do my own thing,” he said about opening his Topstone Advisers, “and moved my office to Wilton in 2006, then to Ridgefield at the beginning of this year.”

The reasons for the move to Ridgefield, he said, are that “I really liked the idea of having an office within 6 miles of my house, and I was also bothered by the highway construction on Route 7 that goes on and on.”

The Guffeys “always admired Ridgefield from afar when we were in Westchester,” he said. “We would drive around and wonder what it would be like to live there. And we liked the notion of being close to Danbury. We knew that was going to be growing in a major way, so we just felt Ridgefield would be a good place to be.”

In addition, “I was struck by the number of financial people in Westport, and thought I might have some competitive advantage being further up in the county.”

Worthwhile business

In the short time he’s been on his own, Guffey has built up $30 million in assets that he manages. “That’s a medium-sized company, I would say. There are many people across the country who do what I do and handle $100 million or more. I would like to grow the business, but I haven’t put a number on it. I’d like to triple the number of people and bring on additional people to service that.”

Currently, Guffey manages the assets himself, taking his clients through a formal planning process “to determine how far their money will go, and then talk about products or accounts that will help them meet their goals.”

The average age of Guffey’s clients is about 65 “because that’s where the money is,” he said. “For the most part, younger people who have children and college costs and so on have more issues than investing. People who are thinking about retirement tend to be well beyond their 50s.”

Topstone’s bread-and-butter accounts range between $200,000 and $600,000, but “we do handle a number of $10,000 or $20,000 accounts,” he said. “My experience is that if we do a good job with a smaller investor, they know people we don’t that they’ll send to us. It’s been a worthwhile business for us.”

Guffey sees two major influences on his financial planning business during the next several years. “The boomers are going to retire within 10 to 20 years, and the older generation is passing away and passing wealth down,” he said. “The combination of those two things means there will be a tremendous amount of wealth to be managed.

“Fairfield County is one of the wealthiest counties in the United States,” he said. “It’s a desirable place to live and retire, so the future is bright for people who work in the business I do in Fairfield County.”

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