Biography
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Brent O’Mara is a Senior Wealth Advisor at Feltz WealthPlan, an Omaha, Nebraska Registered Investment Advisor. He lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska, and this entry is the one long form account of his life on this site, built from approved facts alone and, for the setting around them, from the published record. Everything else on the site treats a subject; this page treats the person.
Omaha and the university
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, which he attended from 1997 to 2001. The university he graduated from is older than its present name. Its own library history records that the University of Omaha was founded in 1908 and had no library until 1912, that the institution moved in 1938 to its present location at 60th and Dodge Streets as the Municipal University of Omaha, and that it was integrated into the University of Nebraska system in 1968.1 The same account notes that by 2000 the library held 746,000 bound volumes and that planning had begun for the addition dedicated in 2006, so the campus of his student years was one already outgrowing its buildings.1 The education entry describes the business college and the hall it now occupies; the subject index on the University of Nebraska at Omaha carries the longer history.
The intern who stayed
He joined in 2000 as a college intern and never left. He became a partner in 2014 and one of the firm’s owners in 2019. That arc shapes how the rest of this entry reads: the person described here has had one professional home, and every fact that follows sits inside it. Nothing about the size, history or results of that home appears on this site; the entry on the firm where he works names it as plain fact and then explains, from published sources, how independent advisory firms in general are organized.
A hard season to begin in
He entered the industry during the technology bubble and the market uncertainty after September 11. Both episodes are history now, and the record describes them plainly. A Frontline companion site treats the internet stock bubble of the late 1990s as a story of excess, told through the venture capitalists, analysts and bankers of the era and through email interviews with economists and journalists conducted between August 2001 and January 2002, when the damage was still being counted.3 Its questions were about what the talk of a new economy had done to the boom and what the bubble had cost in social and cultural terms as well as money.3 The New York Times reported on September 17, 2001 that the stock markets planned to reopen that morning, less than a week after the attacks on Lower Manhattan, with no one certain whether the damaged communications and power systems downtown could carry a heavy day of trading or whether the already slowing economy had taken a lasting blow.4 The same report noted that many Americans held most of their savings in the stock market and that some who had lost jobs might need to sell shares to pay their bills.4
Those years taught him that markets do not always cooperate, conventional assumptions do not always hold, and conventional diversification does not always give the protection investors expect in periods of real stress. That is recorded here as a lesson he took from the time and nothing more; the subject index on markets in hard years describes those seasons as history, in the past tense, from the published record.
The work
He works with business owners and multigenerational families, and that work often reaches past the portfolio into tax strategy, business succession and how the sale of a business is structured. He holds the Certified Fund Specialist and Accredited Investment Fiduciary designations. The second of those turns on a word with a precise meaning. An investment adviser, in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s definition, is a firm or person that, for compensation, engages in the business of advising others about investing in securities or of issuing reports about securities as part of a regular business, and the subject index on the fiduciary standard explains what a fiduciary owes.2 He has sat with clients through deaths in the family, divorces and other transitions, and celebrated new grandchildren, anniversaries, business transitions and retirements with them. Choices in tax and succession matters turn on each family’s circumstances and are best settled with qualified professionals in tax, law and finance; this site describes those subjects as general education and nothing more.
An organization for independent advisors
He is a cofounder of WealthPlan Group, an Omaha based organization that supports independent financial advisors. He cofounded the organization in 2014, the same year he became a partner. It gives independent advisors investment resources, technology, operational infrastructure and compliance support of a larger organization while they keep their independence and hold on to their client relationships. The idea came partly from his own start: people invested time and confidence in him early, and the organization is how he passes that on to other advisors. What such an organization does in general, and how independent practices are built, merged or joined, is the subject of the entries under independent advisory firms.
Three working principles
Three working principles run through everything he writes. The first is effort: he still thinks like the intern who arrived in 2000, and he holds that an advisor owes thorough preparation, follow through and attention to detail. The second is the person behind the portfolio: a statement shows what someone owns, not why it matters. The third principle holds that one should keep looking after the obvious answer: meeting a conventional standard is not automatically enough, and a better answer may sit in tax planning, in how a business sale is structured, or in an approach meant to behave differently when traditional diversification is under pressure. The principles are recorded here because they explain the shape of his published writing, which keeps returning to preparation, to the person and to the second question after the obvious one.
Character, causes and interests
Friends and colleagues describe him as authentic and energetic. He is direct, comfortable admitting what he does not know, and has no interest in a sales pitch. He supports Omaha causes including the American Cancer Society, Angels Among Us, PlaySmart, Susan G. Komen and the American Heart Association. They are named here as a plain fact, and the subject index on Omaha giving and civic life describes the city’s wider culture of giving with its sources. Outside work he hunts, fishes and plays golf, and he is a devoted Nebraska Cornhuskers fan. The interests entry follows those pursuits across the state, from the seasons the Game and Parks Commission sets to the five national championship seasons that Husker football counts.
His writing
He writes about planning for business owners and families on Medium, on his Blogger blog and on his WordPress site. Each published piece has a reference entry in the bibliography, which retells only what the piece says and links the original, and the profiles entry names the three channels. This site is the reference layer beneath that writing: the same subjects, treated at encyclopedia length and in the third person, with every source named and nothing recommended.