Kevin was the CEO and founder of Blue Water Capital Advisors, which he retired from in late 2017. He is now semi-retired, working part-time for Great Waters Financial, LLC (which is part of the AdvisorNet RIA) as a consultant.  He has been in the financial advisory business since 1992. ... more

Kevin was the CEO and founder of Blue Water Capital Advisors, which he retired from in late 2017. He is now semi-retired, working part-time for Great Waters Financial, LLC (which is part of the AdvisorNet RIA) as a consultant.  He has been in the financial advisory business since 1992.  Kevin is an experienced speaker and is available (under certain conditions) by request.

Kevin brings a unique perspective to wealth and risk management that is very intuitive and measured.  Although he has been a leader within the regional wealth management industry for the majority of the last two decades, it is not his first career. He was a petroleum geologist and academic research scientist for 17 years in his first career. Kevin’s keen sense of risk-reward dynamics was developed during his geological career when he served as an exploration team leader and senior manager in the oil and gas exploration business. He drilled over 100 wells on his own geological interpretations and found millions of barrels of oil. This was a very high risk kind of business, and Kevin learned a great deal about how risk really works from his experiences in exploration geology.

He was also a instructor at The University of New Hampshire and an Asst. Prof. at Bryn Mawr College for several years and has published 12 papers in international scientific journals and books. Highlights of Kevin’s geological career include surviving a violent well blowout, working as a consultant to Phillips Petroleum, Texaco, Exxon, and numerous independent firms, acting as a Principal Investigator on a dinosaur dig in Montana, working as a team member and lead author in paleoclimate research, diving Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, teaching and advising students, receiving numerous research awards and grants, and conducting funded scientific research on sedimentology, paleoceanography, paleoclimatology, geochemistry, and global plate tectonics.

Kevin left his geology career when the global oil price collapse finally caught up to him in 1992. He went into the financial advising industry because his father had been a nationally-ranked leader in that field with a major national firm, so he felt comfortable with making the transition. Over the years he was awarded the Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) designation and has completed about half of the coursework for a Master’s degree in Financial Services. Kevin served as a Trust Officer and Vice President for a major Midwestern regional bank for seven years, and served as a Senior Vice President at the National Bank of Commerce in Duluth, MN for four years. He was a member and board member of the Arrowhead Estate Planning Council for a number of years. He has a refined sense of the big economic picture that is grounded in his ability to differentiate meaningful information from “noise,” as he once did while working in science and petroleum geology.