I was born in Los Angeles, California but was raised in the Midwest. My father, a marketing and advertising executive, accepted various positions in Iowa, Kansas,
and Minnesota before our family finally settled in Omaha, Nebraska in 1964. I attended Westside High School in Omaha and then graduated from Creighton University’s business school with a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration in 1975. Even though I worked over 30 hours a week at a retail golf shop during college, I was still active in student activities. In addition to being a member of a social fraternity, I was elected Vice President of Finance for the student body, selected as the student representative to the university’s financial committee, and named as one of only a handful of Creighton students honored in Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities.
I spent the next six years working as a certified public accountant in Omaha and Dallas before Wall Street beckoned. I launched my career in the investment industry as a stockbroker in 1982. Even though I started out with no clients, I eschewed the traditional cold-calling protocol followed by new stockbrokers and put my CPA experience to work. I began dissecting company financial statements in search of profitable investment opportunities, and trusted that word of my results would spread. The strategy worked, and my reputation and roster of clients steadily grew.
For family reasons, I moved to Las Vegas in 1987 and continued working as a stockbroker. Building on the client base established in Dallas, I continued managing client portfolios and became one of the pioneers within the brokerage industry who charged a flat fee for services rather than commissions. I left the brokerage side of the securities industry in 1994 to create Crescent Capital Management Company, a registered investment advisory firm where I continue managing investment portfolios.
I developed a passion for writing in the late 1990s. I attended workshops, and read and studied everything about the ins and outs of becoming a successful novelist. Certainly balancing my writing with a successful career and a family has been a challenge (that 4 am alarm clock can be really annoying), yet I’m quite proud of my children and the results I’ve achieved for Crescent Capital Management’s clients. Moreover, like one of Joe’s lessons in A Dedication,I never gave up my dream of publishing a novel.
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