How curiosity, service, and resilience shaped the career of Kimery Wealth Management’s founder—and what the next generation can learn from his playbook
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In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Kevin D. Kimery, Founder & CEO of Kimery Wealth Management, about how asking the right questions—and having a servant’s heart—can shape a successful career in financial services. Kevin shares insights from his 36-year journey, starting as a mailroom clerk and rising to lead his own firm. He discusses the importance of curiosity, how financial planning is evolving with longer life expectancy, and why guiding clients through life’s toughest transitions is his true mission.
Kevin Kimery returns to Mission Matters to celebrate his authorship in Mission Matters Volume 11. He dives into the inspiration behind his chapter, “Question Your Way to Success”, and discusses his path from grocery store employee to founder of a thriving wealth management firm.
💡 What You’ll Learn:
- The importance of curiosity in career growth
- Why a “servant’s heart” is key in financial services
- How to plan financially for a longer life
- How asking better questions can open doors in any field
Watch Full Interview:
About Kimery Wealth Management
Kimery Wealth Management is a privately-owned investment advisory practice that specializes in family wealth advising and institutional consulting for individuals, family groups and nonprofits. They create highly personalized financial strategies that are designed to preserve and grow your wealth conservatively over time. Kimery Wealth Management delivers comprehensive insights and relevant expertise as they provide sophisticated investment strategies that match your most intricate goals and needs.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today is a very. Special episode, let me tell you, we’re bringing Kevin Kimery back onto the show and we are celebrating.
This is a celebration we just recently released our latest edition of Mission Matters Volume 11. And let me tell you, we’ve been working on this for maybe the last year and a half, maybe two years now, curating these amazing authors of which Kevin is one of ’em. First off, Kevin, I wanna say congrats. Newly published newly minted author in our bestselling business leaders book series.
How do you feel? Come on. Man, I feel great. Thank you. Thank you for everything you did helping us craft this story and bring it together. Well, it may only be you know, a handful of pages. There’s a lot of thought and process that goes into it, and you and your team did a great job. Thank you for including me.
Appreciate that and we got lots to talk about today. So we’re gonna get into your content end of the chapter and more. But just to get us kicked off, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Kevin, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives and experts.
That’s what we do. Kevin, what mission matters to you? You know, at ER Wealth Management our mission is to give people the confidence to boldly use their wealth. To create the life they envision. That’s more than just managing portfolios. It’s preparing our clients for calculating action that supports their long-term goals.
What sets us apart, how we guide and support our action is usually during life’s most challenging moments, volatile markets, divorce, helping clients make better decisions so that they can be ready for what they have coming ahead of them. Hmm. At the end of the day, we’re not just managing money, we are helping people navigate the unknown, really.
And that’s a mission that matters to me. Yeah. Well, great and great to have you on and we’ll, we’ll get into your, your, into your topic that was in the book and for everybody watching, just so you know, we’re not gonna go through the entire book. There’ll be some links in the, in the episode in show notes, so you can click on it.
We do sell books around here, so you know, it’s okay. Buy some books. It’s give, give ’em Away. We like to sell books. But your, your chapter question, your way to success I wanna get into that, but before we do it, we got a lot of new lists. Listeners, we’ve been very blessed and and by God’s grace and the show’s growing month over month.
And I wanna, for those new listeners, maybe let’s go a little bit more into your background and really why you do what you do. So how’d you get into finance originally? You know, I started my career very young. I was just about to turn 18 and the grocery store I was working for closed and I ended up.
Getting a job as a mail boy at EF Hutton, a name that not many people are old enough to actually even remember. But I was there doing basic operations and mail delivery and got my first exposure to the industry and fell in love with it and have spent the vast majority of my entire life doing this.
I think I’m at 36 years now, so it’s wow. It’s been a, a labor of love. It’s a lot of hard work, but I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s fascinating me today. Now, now when I can, I like to work in a pay it forward question, Kevin, because for, for my long-term listeners, they know I was in finance for a long time, almost 14 years in that business.
I’m a huge fan and advocate of financial services in general. I think it’s a great place for people to learn to grow and to build a life and help a lot of people. I don’t feel like it gets enough. Recognition on social media and other things. They think maybe the the next group of of entrepreneurs or, or individuals don’t even know, like the possibility or that it exists.
They maybe know, they see a guy, you know, in a suit and tie and they think maybe they don’t wanna wear a suit and tie, and so they don’t even give it a shot. But a lot of, some firms don’t do the suit and tie so. My point in asking this and bringing this up is ’cause I want the next group to know, like, financial services is an amazing place to be.
You can make a lot of money, you can help a lot of people, and you can live, you can live a really good life. So from your end of the spectrum, Kevin, obviously you’d like it, you enjoy, you wouldn’t be doing it for over three decades of going on four decades if you didn’t like it, but what kind of advice.
Would you give to that next group? Assuming they wanted to start learning and or consider that as a career path in financial services, I would tell them that first and foremost, you need to be, you need to have what we call a servant’s heart. That’s where it all begins. And if you’re blessed with the ability to, to get an education that will help develop you, then even better.
But that. The service piece of what I do is what’s the most important part because I actually do, we touch people’s lives? Yeah. So we have people actually crying in conference rooms, not because they’re sad, because they’re so happy. Occasionally. I was gonna say what you’re doing over there, man, no straight.
But the joy you get when someone goes, I cannot tell you how much better I’m sleeping at night now that all this is straightened out and I understand what’s going on. Are you health finance? Kids college that they didn’t think it was possible and we figured it out, or they move into the dream house or lots of things that are fairly stereotypical for commercial world.
But in reality, that is how this industry works. And you get to come to work every day and you have, you know, 75 of your best friends that you’re talking to all day. Wow. Not, it’s not a it’s not a hard. Job to do when you’re dealing with your friends and helping them, it makes it really easy. That’s great.
Let’s let’s dive into the book a bit. So then again, again, your, your, your chapter question, your way to success. So a lot of different things you could have wrote about. Give us a why this angle, why this topic? Why now? Well, you know, I think that I’m also a father of four daughters and. As I have, my last one was graduating in two weeks, but during my lifetime I was, I was not born into a family of wealth or privilege, but I was always told, Hey, you can do whatever you want to do.
And somewhere along the line, I learned that the best way to actually become something is to find somebody who has done that and start asking them how they did it. And it was something that came quite naturally to me. And then as I have aged and life has moved on, I’ll look back on it and find the advice I give people, especially young people that come in my office wanting career advice is, well, you know, have you been out talking to anybody that’s doing this?
How do they do it? Yeah, because I like it. Was it fun? Are they making enough money? And this type of questioning or. Curiosity that I try to to breed into my family or young people is something I think is you can’t really replace it with education or anything else, or even you’re stationed in life.
You need to be asking questions. Mm, people want to help you. I’m a firm believer that everybody wants to help to the very best of their ability, or most people do and they’re honored when you do ask them. So that is how I got into my. Field. And it was through a lot of people that I asked a lot of questions of, and they were very forthcoming on how to do it and why to do it.
And it was a. For me. Yeah. I like to, and, and to me, one of the things that stuck out is that, you know, as you’re on this process, I mean, you gotta make sure you’re talking to the right people, right? Like when, when my I’ll give you an example. So when I originally entered into finance, the reason I got into that business was because I remember, I remember pretty clearly talking to my mom and dad and just.
Been like asking, I always had questions about money, like questions about money, questions about business. And they were pretty straightforward letting me know they didn’t have the answers. My dad was a small business owner. He owned a autobody shop, painted cars, that kind of thing. I’m from Detroit, so from Michigan, so it’s very very Detroit.
And you know, he didn’t really, he told me he didn’t know what he didn’t know. So, so that being said, he they encouraged me to go out and seek and they, they would, they would bring other people into my life, like other business owners they knew or other things. And then eventually I got to work at Raymond James way back then in their IRA department and when I was 16.
And then from there I kind of rose up the ranks and fast forward, I just. My life, I feel like, has been a series of asking questions, but trying to find the right people to ask those questions too. ’cause you know, well-meaning people give some bad advice man. We know that. They genuinely do. And I think a lot of the answer to something that you’re speaking about very obviously is you have to also keep asking questions until you get a consensus.
You know, because you can get people that will just, well-intentioned people, give you. Advice is just incorrect. Yeah, it’s incorrect. And I have found that I don’t ask these questions just one time, but I’ll find five, 10 people have lunch with ’em over a course of a few years. I’m ’em, one particular topic in my life, then I keep after that one topic, you know, interesting time I decided to form my own company till we’re sitting here today.
Mm-hmm. There was a lot of conversations that were had with a lot of different people. Mm. They help me get here and, you know, do it without an enormous amount of pain. Mm-hmm. With a real sense of joy, and that is worth a. Do you think like being in the financial services area and, and like planning and financial planning, what you do and that, that concept of focus, I feel like when you work in that space that long and when you’re, and when you see like the, you know, the graph and a longer, you’re looking at five years, 10 years, 30 years and you’re planning entire lives do you think that gives you kind of a competitive edge on staying focused?
Especially on something like that. It absolutely does. I mean, you’re talking about tying into a long-term project. Yeah, I have sometimes I have three generations of people that I’m actually talking to. Mm-hmm. And that is amazing. But no, you do have to stay focused. You gotta stay focused on this.
You’re focused on somebody else’s needs a hundred percent of the time. Yeah. And but if you enjoy that type of service it’s not. Hard to do. Mm-hmm. But I do agree with you on that. You do have to stay focused and practicing is really the only way to do it. I was telling somebody the other day, I was like, ’cause they were, they were talking to me like, Adam, what is, somebody asked me that question on a, on a, on a show I was being interviewed on.
Yeah. From time to time people want me on their shows and I, and they were asking me that question, like, what does focus mean to you? And I just paused for a minute and I was like. Well, I’ve already put it out in the universe that, you know, if it’s God’s will and if I get to live a life’s, you know, healthy, long life, that I’m gonna be a arian podcaster.
I said, so that’s, you know, that’s gonna put me out 60 more years. So I’m like, at that point, how many episodes have I done? I don’t know. But I said, I’m gonna be able to look back at me way back when. And they’re gonna be like, is that guy AI or what? Hold on. Yeah, his son was here. That’s focus. I planned 60 years of interviews.
We’re good. Good. That long, long term handling longevity. And speaking of, I, I, I say that as a joke and I say that, but it’s true. Like I did actually have this conversation and I do actually mean it. So that’s not the joke. But but speaking of longevity, especially in what you do on a day-to-day basis, like people are living longer, right?
Healthcare, changing other things, like how does all of that kind of play into what you do? Well a, I think it, it’s obviously very helpful to our, to the whole industry. They were now coming into the first generation of people that really must have it. Financial advisors. Yeah. Our parents and the people before them, they had pension, they had their CDs.
That was really all they had to do. There was no, no investing that was left for the very wealthy. Now we’re going to be in a position where everyone will need a financial advisor at some point. Mm-hmm. And I’m speaking of longevity, you know, I have my friends coming in, retiring and they’ll, I’ll look at it and say, you sure you wanna retire?
I’m like, what? You’re 58, 63. I was in, you know, you’ve got a long, these are best years. And I have no, you know, I’m much like you. I’d love to be a Centurion planner, so look, no, I was there when that happened 81 years ago. I remember. But I’ve, I enjoy this stage of my career. I enjoy this stage of my maturity, my professional maturity, and you know, I’m really happy to see people living longer because when the average age was 53, there wasn’t a lot of retirement planning to be done.
Yeah. And looking at, and speaking of like people, I feel like a big, so, because people are living longer too, that concept of maybe running outta money, that was a fear back then what you’re talking about. But now, even going forward, I think it’s got, it’s taken on maybe a new complexion. Not, not that the math is different, or not the, but the table.
Like I, I haven’t looked at a table or like a financial plan in years other than my own. I’m just curious, like from your, from your seat, how long are we planning out now? Like what is kind of like some of the practice or standards. You know, I am encouraging clients to plan, plan out 92 to 95. Yeah, I think that’s realistic.
Generally our clients are fortunate enough that either one of those ages, you know, we’re not taking the last penny outta the jar and typically under care. You know, none of that. But I think it’s very realistic. If you’re in my office right now and you’re still working, you should plan on living to be at least 90.
Yeah. Which in the past, that was like an outlier, right? Yeah. Yeah. That, that meant you had good DNA. That means a lot of other things now that could be the norm. Yes, very much so. And I think you’re also, that’s one of the reasons why you’re seeing such big pieces of wealth. Get transferred down because you gotta think if you only worked 10 more years, what would that have meant?
Well, it’s best because those are probably, depending on what your career is, those are probably your biggest earning years. So those 10 years in getting that type of pay for that 10 years compounding and, and investing and possibly beefing, beefing up what you’re saving, like all of those things, they make a big difference.
Yeah. And it makes for a much more relaxing and enjoyable retirement. Yeah. Nobody wants to retire and sit home and pinch pennies. That’s no fun. Yeah. We always tell clients, you know, when you’re talking about your budget, it’s not a conservation exercise, but more of an exercise in you deciding how much money you would like to live on.
Mm-hmm. And what type of life do you want to have? Yeah. That’s how you do proper visualization of retirement. That’s great. Well, Kevin, man, first off, it’s been great having you back on. I gotta ask what’s next? What’s next for you? What’s next for Kimery Wealth Management? Other than of course, promoting this book.
We got a lot more to talk about because we got yeah, we got a lot, lot, lot more to talk about on that one because we’re gonna have some book launch events and some other things happening. Hopefully we can get you out to LA man. We haven’t met in person.
I was there two weeks ago. I should have dropped by to see you. Nobody. Oh, see, see how that is. I’m glad the, I’m glad we’re live and this is recording. You see how people do me? Yeah. Just take, they don’t care. They just come, come on my show, whatever. It’s fine. No, it’s, yeah. Yeah. So what, seriously, Kevin, what’s next for you?
What, tell me about your plans next. So, at the firm? Mm-hmm. The firm is doing well. We’re continuing to grow. We’re adding new services and. New types of ways to invest as the investing landscape changes. You know, we’re hearing words that 20 years ago we didn’t know anything about, you know, what was a bitcoin, what is going on with this type of new synthetic product that’s being involved.
Humanoids, you know, we’ve got a whole world at us. I think maybe the most exciting time. The last 50 years is gonna be the next 10 years. Mm-hmm. So I want to keep in the center of it, keep doing what I’m doing, helping people, letting them enjoy their lives, and not worry about this. And grow our firm.
We don’t have any you know, have any plans of slowing down. So. I guess when the gurney comes in, that’s when I’ll slow down. Same here. Take care of me outta the studio, baby. It’s fine. Ready to go? Oh, why do we have this on recording, Kevin? Whatever. It’s How do, how do people follow up? How do they connect with you and your team if they wanna learn more about Kimery Wealth Management?
Well, you can go to kimery wealth management.com and you’ll see our website. Please fill out a form. We’ll respond to you immediately. We’d love to visit with you, talk to you about what’s going on. We don’t have any high pressure techniques or anything. We really are here just to talk. Yeah. And have conversations because I think that this is knowledge that the more people understand about it, the better we do collectively as a society.
Yeah. And you know, I think training and teaching and. Pushing it forward. As you were saying, paying it forward is how we all become more productive and lead better, healthier, emotional, and. Financial lives perfect for everybody watching. Just so you know. We’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so that you can just connect.
You can click on the link and head right on over and check out Kimery Wealth Management and speaking to the audience. If you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new in. Inspiration to help you along the way as well.
And don’t forget the link to the book is in the show notes. So go, go or on the blog post or wherever you’re watching. So go pick up a copy, give some copies away. We sell books around here and we’re happy to do so. So love, love, love for you to support us on that. And Kevin, man, until the next time, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Thank you. Enjoyed it.