.png)
A few weeks ago, Farther's co-founder and CTO Brad Genser sat down for a conversation on Inc.'s Business Model Podcast about transitioning out of the military and into founding a company. One detail stuck with me. He talked about bringing challenge coins into Farther's culture, the same recognition ritual that mattered to him during two deployments, handed out now for wins that have nothing to do with combat but everything to do with the same instinct to recognize people in the moments that matter.
I've noticed the same kind of carryover in my own path, from the Navy to leading our RIA team at Farther, most of all in how we make decisions confidently knowing what’s actually at stake for the clients.
Moving with conviction
The military taught me how to get comfortable in the unknown. It sharpened instincts I still rely on today. The industry we operate in is never static, but what remains a constant is how we choose to operate inside it. You train for it, trust the systems, and people around you, and back your judgement.
Wealth management runs on a version of the same problem, with lower physical stakes but real financial ones. Markets are dynamic and headlines change without notice. Clients don't need someone reacting to whatever is in the news cycle that week. They need an advisor whose judgment holds up over a decade. Part of my role leading our RIA team is making sure our advisors have exactly that: the insights, tools, support, and tech infrastructure to make that call confidently and stay the long-sighted partner their clients are counting on.
That training also shapes how we think about where decision-making authority should sit. A common misread of military leadership is that it's rigid and top-down. In well-run units, it's closer to the opposite: everyone understands the objective, and the people closest to the problem are trusted to execute. We built Farther the same way. When an advisor is working a complex client strategy, compliance, onboarding, and transition logistics still happen in full, they're just built into the platform ahead of time rather than requiring the advisor to manually loop in multiple teams mid-conversation and lose momentum. That's what lets the advisor closest to the client be the one making the call, ensuring their high-value time is spent where it actually matters.
Owning the call without holding every card
A recent trust and estate review for a client is a good example of what that looks like in practice. Working in a silo was never really an option. I set the objective, then stepped back to let our subject matter experts, Keith and Ashton, drive the tactical analysis. They didn't just review the paperwork, they pressure-tested every assumption and found tax efficiency gaps that a surface-level look would have missed. My role was to assemble the right people, trust what they knew that I didn't, and sign off on the final call once they'd done the work.
Different paths, same instinct
Brad's path and mine aren't the same, different branches, different roles, different years. But we've ended up running parts of this company the same way: push the decision down to whoever's closest to the problem, and trust them to move once they have enough to act on.
I don't think that's the only way to build good judgment, and some of the sharpest instincts I've watched at Farther belong to people who never served a day in uniform. Brad and I just happen to carry one version of it, shaped by a specific kind of pressure most people don't run into firsthand.
This Hire a Veteran Day, that's what felt worth naming: not that service made us better leaders in some general sense, but the specific instinct it left behind, to act, own the outcome, and trust in the people to make the best decisions. That's the standard we hold ourselves to here.
