The ‘Why’ Matters

Michael Brown

I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of meaningful things over the years.

I started in banking as a teller in college. My first job out of school was with the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, in their Management Development Program. With no offense to the Fed, I absolutely hated that job. I had energy and passion for new ideas and growth, and those simply weren’t part of the DNA of that institution.

I made the jump to a regional bank in Kansas City and worked in the lower levels of the Capital Markets group. It wasn’t long before a bond trader there recruited me to be his partner. I remember sitting at that recruitment dinner, hearing all the upside of the business, and wondering, “Are there any downsides to doing this?” There were, of course — but the upsides set the stage for a long career of growth, travel, and remarkable opportunities. I’m forever grateful for the invitation into more.

A few years in, a super-regional bank saw something in me. They believed I was the right person to build a trading floor for an institution that, at the time, didn’t have a single location in Kansas City. Not one. The next decade was a whirlwind of building. I built the KC trading floor and three more in other states during my tenure with them.

After a lot of success and a lot of work, I found myself in 2013 — recovering on a couch after a skiing accident and surgery — watching my wife and kids as if they lived in a different world from the one I was inhabiting day to day. It began a season of soul-searching that ended with me abruptly stepping away from a very successful banking career to ask God, Am I missing it? Is there more to this world than winning at the money game?

Indeed, there was much more.

The following year, at the prompting of God, my wife and I started a retail concept. We grew it into four retail locations and a national online presence, and in 2022 we sold the company to a private Christian equity firm. It was a decade of entrepreneurial pursuit, and what I learned was this: it is a very different thing to use your own money to build something than to operate inside the large, sometimes seemingly endless pools of money you have at your disposal in a bank. The phrase “blood, sweat, and tears” — which we used to hear muttered in connection with big jobs — felt like three small words that couldn’t begin to encompass what we actually experienced in that decade. Risk and reward were giant mountains we seemed to traverse every day.

After a decade in the most brutal of business schools — growing a business from scratch — we decided to “retire” for the second time in our lives.

Retirement. I’m failing at it.

It wasn’t long before a partnership with the man who had helped us sell our business resulted in an investment banking firm in Southlake, Texas. At first I was a fairly passive contributor; we were loosely developing out a full firm, and I was only half in.

Then something tragic brought the why into focus, in the way only God can pull good from ashes.

A friend of decades reached out to me from his veterinary clinic in Kansas City. He was having great success and wanted to grow his practice. He was considering opening a second location and, given what we had learned scaling our retail business to four sites, he asked me to advise him. We signed a business advisory agreement on Friday, and he put a check in the mailbox that same day.

On Saturday, at a rodeo with his young daughter, he was struck by lightning and killed instantly.

In a single moment, a family we had loved for decades was changed forever. His wife had little involvement with the practice. His father had retired. We knew immediately that this would be a sale — but not a simple one. It would be a sale that would shape and define this widow’s life for all the days to come.

For a time such as this, I had been forged: through the fires of business, through the M&A process, through a lifetime of banking experience — to execute a sale that would carry a grieving family through an emotional season into a stable future. Six months later, the day we closed the sale of the clinic, we had secured that family’s long-term future and given a hard-earned practice another chance to thrive under a new owner.

That was the day I found my why — the day I fully left retirement and began a new mission, with both God and my wife alongside.

I often tell my wife that if I had woken up with my head sewn to the carpet I could not be more surprised by this turn of events — and yet it has come into view as God’s clear next step for us. My wife joined the firm at the beginning of this year as a Managing Partner, and once again we get the privilege of building something together. She runs our Church Advisory vertical; I oversee our Mergers & Acquisitions and Business Advisory practices.

We stand out in this space as boldly and unapologetically grounded in faith. You don’t have to be a Christian for us to work with your business — many of our clients aren’t — but many are faith-driven and faith-based. That shared lens gives us an extra edge in understanding how deeply emotional it can be to sell a life’s work that truly did require blood, sweat, and tears.

It gives us our why.