Life Lessons for Success

Los Angeles, CA – As a fierce competitor, a 10-time marathoner and a triathlon participant, Richard Anthony Downer, a Morgan Stanley First Vice President and Wealth Advisor based in Los Angeles, brings a competitive drive as he helps clients.

Downer sees a clear connection between health and wealth, and he works to make the most from a little, starting with every day health. With what he calls a “sheer competitive nature,” Downer works with clients to achieve balance with wealth attainment and health maintenance.

“In 18 years of practice, I have come to realize that wealth without health is a different kind of poverty,” he said. “Life will come down to the quality of your health,” he said. “If all of your wealth is spent on medication – was the journey to wealth worth it?

“My passions lie in analyzing complex financial markets and in turn successfully distilling this information,” he said. “I believe that most of us are bright enough to understand this world – but, it’s the presentation, or lack thereof, that tends to be an issue.”

His striving for excellence was instilled in him in part during his summers in St. Lucia in the West Indies, where he received tutelage under the British education system. Aside from what he was taught growing up and in his college education at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he learned some key things from a veteran who kept asking him to join the financial services business until he agreed. “He called and made the offer eight times,” Anthony recalled.

It was the beginning of a key business and professional relationship. The veteran taught Downer that likeability, trust and belief are the three keys to successfully wooing and building relationships with clients. Downer said the veteran told him “people will do business with you in particular because they like you, trust you and believe you.”

“The trust takes the longest. There are levels of trust. Some people have low expectations. Some have high expectations. In the end, you have to show everybody what you can do.”

It took a few years for a confident Downer to realize how to balance clients who like him while getting each to believe and trust him. What he’s learned as a wealth management student he has put to work as he educates clients, starting with their own goals, then doing some head-to-the-grindstone work.

Most clients “need to see at least three months of statements,” Downer said, but it means staying ahead of your client by being educated on the market so he can educate them. Some might take more, even much more. He has learned how to handle the different levels of trust with what he calls “framing.”

“You have to frame what the client’s expectations are versus what the market is offering. A client might say they’re aggressive but what does that really mean?”

As a son and a wealth advisor, Downer started his successful career with someone he knew well, someone who knew him better than anyone else: His mother.

Raised by a couple in L.A.’s Windsor Hills and Ladera Heights, Anthony watched his nurse mother struggle with managing money. Working with his mother’s reasonable but limited resources he realized that he was good working with women. As he developed that realization, Anthony worked with more nurses, professionals with stable jobs, good salaries and desires for career, health and financial success. 

His clients are not limited to nurses. A potential client and his wife interviewed him as the couple considered where to place their $2 million portfolio. The husband decided to go elsewhere. When he died, however, the wife returned to Anthony seeking information.

“I think, men tend to be traders,” Anthony added. “Realistically, women will outlive most men and will take the proverbial reins of fiscal responsibility. To this end, 70% of my book represents women over 50 – widowed or divorced. 

He takes it all in stride, as a part of his important job as a reliable, trusted financial advisor. That’s why he does not mind helping one of his women clients purchase a car or another expensive item when they feel that they might get taken advantage. With one female client he let her take the lead until it got down to the small dollar amounts such as a docking fee. “I simply said, ‘She’s not going to pay that’ and that was it,” he recalled. “She appreciated that a lot.”

One day in 2013 one of his associates called his office and asked him to spend some time with a group of about eight college students. “’We want to have a session with you,’” the man told him. “Tell them how you got started, what you do, what it takes.’”

“I said okay, not thinking much of it, but that first meeting became what I call “the 12-hour MBA.” He gives small groups of students a set amount of time and talks with them about building a successful career and life. He developed a few, then 25, then 100 plus “Downer Life Lessons,” his own words of wisdom, sayings he’s developed to provide specific, strong advice about how to pursue excellence and success. He shares these mostly with college students and young professionals, but also with anyone willing to listen. They tend to creep into his conversations as he switches hats from counselor and educator to surrogate and mentor.

“In as much as I like to invest my time/money in people with the greatest rate of return (ROR), it stands to reason that I find investing in millennials to have the best potential outcome,” said Downer. “So, one of my life purposes … is two-fold: a) to provide hope - in that others can aspire to achieve as I have through discipline and consistency, and b) to be a continual resource to help guide and direct youth to make sound life and business decisions while considering the consequences of their actions.”

Whether he is working with well-heeled men, middle class nurses, and mature women in the winter of their lives or millennials, Downer works to “use my experiences to positively shape their futures.”