Barnes-Pettey celebrates 20 years
Clarksdale firm leads pack

By C. RICHARD COTTON
DBJ Contributing Writer

It was almost 30 years ago that Bob Traylor sat in a folding chair across a card table from an energetic new businessman. The Clarksdale optometrist, now semi-retired, wanted help with his financial future.

Three decades later, Traylor still relies on the energetic businessman, Dudley Barnes, founder of Barnes-Pettey Financial Advisors.

“I knew his mother and dad, we went to the same church,” Traylor remembers of his early affiliation with Barnes in 1976. “He finished college and came back to Clarksdale when I was looking for a retirement plan and help to manage my funds.

“I knew he was eager, smart and honest.”

Those three characteristics became the foundation for the firm started with a card table in a rented storefront. Today, Barnes-Pettey boasts more than 400 clients, whose combined assets total almost $500 million.

“I was a disenchanted stockbroker and insurance (agent),” the 56-year-old Barnes recalls. “I didn’t like the attitude that they were the answers.”

The financial planning industry was in its infancy back then. Barnes was entering new territory armed with little more than his college education and accumulated knowledge about the business of finance. He would forge a successful business while in a learning curve himself.

By 1980, he had earned his Certified Financial Planner credentials. In 1984, he partnered with Holmes Pettey. Today, the firm employs 13 people in its offices in Clarksdale, Memphis and Grenada.

“I got to working in his office and the business just took off,” said Pettey, 53. Though raised in Memphis, Pettey returned to run the family’s farm in Clarksdale after earning a business degree at the University of Mississippi in 1973.

The farming lasted for more than a decade: “I was looking for something else,” Pettey admits about wanting to get out of agriculture. Today, he concedes that the adversities of farming taught him a lot about succeeding in the world of business.

Between his connections in Memphis and old college chums from the Oxford days, Pettey arrived with a ready network of potential clients.
“I grew up not burning any bridges,” he explained.

Barnes says the business of financial planning is advising people how to best manage their money so they can live comfortably, pay for their children’s education and retire with ample funds to care for themselves through old age.

It’s a business that suits his personality and his interests: “I was really attracted by the people and the money. But if it was only the money, it would get stale.”

The typical financial planner, according to Barnes, first gets to know his client – the part Barnes likes best. Then the clients’ financial situation is analyzed and a plan formulated.

The next phase of the relationship is implementation, where, ideally, the financial planner’s suggestions are put into play. Assets and earnings are diversified into various investments, usually including stocks, bonds, savings accounts, insurance and other income-generating locations. Barnes said this can be the tricky part since adults won’t always do what’s suggested.

The final phase of the financial planner’s relationship with his client is “monitor and review,” a process that, as in the case of optometrist Traylor, goes on for decades. Changes are made as markets change, marital status changes and funds ebb and flow.

“We try to make people more effective with their money,” said Pettey. “And we’ve been very successful keeping people for a long time.” He estimates 80 per cent of the firm’s clients have been with Barnes-Pettey more than five years; 50 percent have been on board more than 10 years.

Although Pettey says the firm “does some advertising to help the town and the region,” most clients come from referrals.

He pointed out that Barnes-Pettey keeps in touch with clients both through direct contact and publication of a quarterly newsletter. Those personal touches have propelled Barnes-Pettey to one of the largest financial planning consultant enterprises in Mississippi.

“We have a genuine family of clients,” said Pettey. “We go to a lot of weddings and, unfortunately, to a lot of funerals.”

Barnes acknowledges that running a successful financial-planning company in the middle of the Mississippi Delta might seem an oxymoron to many observers: “We’re not the model (for financial planners),” he said.

“But there are a lot of small-business owners, doctors, lawyers and other professionals who have done very well in our area.” Barnes said the firm’s market area is a 70- to 80-mile radius of Clarksdale.

Bob Traylor says he realized early that planning his own financial future was more complicated an effort than he wanted to undertake himself. He saw a lot of himself in Barnes during those early meetings nearly 30 years ago.

“I started in business absolutely cold, on my own, trusting in the Lord,” Traylor declared, drawing a parallel between his and Barnes’s mutually humble beginnings. “You have to have strong ambition, as well as goals and objectives.”

And sometimes it works out. DBJ