Fiscally Fit

But once a week, he remembers, "we were lucky and got a stack of Dun & Bradstreet leads — like [salesmen] in [the play] 'Glengarry Glen Ross.' We cold-called a hundred contacts a day."

Palmer's favorite prospects to visit now are first-time public companies listed on Nasdaq. "They need our services the most," he says.

He has modeled himself after star producers before him, not only "passionate but also great teachers. That's what clients relate to," he says.

In tenth grade, young Palmer aspired to be "a businessman who wore suits and had a corner office," he says. By the time he was in college and interning simultaneously at Dean Witter, he was well on his way. Right after graduation, he joined E.F. Hutton, moving to Kidder Peabody five years later — a week before the October 1987 crash.

"You looked at the screen, and it literally stopped your heart because you were young and inexperienced and you'd never been through something like that," he says. Plus, "I was transitioning my clients from one firm to another during the market dislocation — very, very frightening. It was a seminal moment. I said, 'It's time to take my game up:' I didn't know as much as I thought I should have."

At Kidder, he began concentrating on high-net-worth individuals in mid-market companies. His turning point came with the realization that those who amassed large pools of capital were folks who had big blocks of restricted stock in public firms.

"They were also people who had no time. So," he says, "they needed our services to help them plan and be their financial advisors."

In the early '90s, Palmer, scoping out opportunity among public companies in Denver, commuted monthly for four years between there and L.A. In 1996, two years after joining Smith Barney, he relocated to Denver and reverse-commuted. He returned to L.A. permanently in 2003, but retained the Colorado office.

What does he do for fun? Triathlons — even acing that challenging Ironman cycling-swimming-racing event in 2002. He also finds time to surf the Pacific four times a week, scuba dive, take photos underwater and, in winter, go snowboarding.

The most gratifying aspect of his work is that clients put their trust in him. "When someone interviews five people and chooses you," he says, "that takes a giant leap of faith. It's difficult for someone you don't know to say, 'Hey, you're my guy!'"

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Freelance writer Jane Wollman Rusoff is a Los Angeles-based contributing editor of Research and is the founder of Family Star Productions.