Henrys Career Move Has Been Right on the Money

Brent Henry has been an established professional in the financial services field in Northwest Arkansas for more than two decades.

But less than 12 months ago, he was mulling over the idea of making an important career move.

And while contemplating the thought of going to work for a rival brokerage house, a suggestion from his father gave Henry the perspective he was looking for.

“I was talking a lot with my dad during that whole process,” Henry said. “And he was a successful businessman. He looked at me one day and said, ‘You might just be ready for the next phase of your career.’ And he was right. I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms until he said that and it just hit me in kind of a different way.”

Henry and his team of wealth management advisers changed brokerage houses in June, establishing Benton County’s first Morgan Stanley Smith Barney office in Rogers.

The office now does business only as Morgan Stanley, a global financial services corporation that operates in three business areas — institutional securities, global wealth management and asset management.

“I think after 20 years of being in the same place, it was just time [to move],” Henry said. “The time was right for our team. Morgan Stanley shared our vision of how we want to build a business over the next phase of our careers.”

Henry is a senior vice president of wealth management. His small and specialized team of six individuals — Henry, Dustin Colebank, Mike Hudson, Josh McCaslin, Toni Peckenpaugh and Pam Raben — is known as the Hexagon Group, which operates in a “boutique” fashion, offering limited services and products to a restricted number of clients.

During a recent sit-down at his office in Pinnacle Hills Tower One, Henry described last summer’s career move as a leap of faith. The result, he said, has been nothing less than a blessing.

“I worried about having buyer’s remorse [after switching companies],” he said. “But there hasn’t been one minute of buyer’s remorse between the six of us. It’s been very enjoyable.”

Henry, 44, was a member of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s 2006 Forty Under 40 class.

A Wisconsin native, he began his career in financial services in 1991 immediately after graduating from the University of Arkansas.

At his previous firm, he helped grow an office that managed more than $1 billion in local assets in 2006.

True to the new firm’s low-key approach — the office doesn’t even have a presence on the Internet — Henry politely declined to provide exact details of assets presently under management by his group at Morgan Stanley.

The number of clients, he said, is kept “in the ballpark” of 100 households around the country, with about 65 percent of those in Northwest Arkansas and the majority of those in Benton County.

“We’ve been very blessed to deal with a lot of who’s who households of Northwest Arkansas,” Henry said. “Obviously we find people who are very successful in their own professions and we can build relationships.

“One of the things that we like to do is take a low profile and just do our job. Hopefully we do it well and I think those families appreciate our approach.”

To offset some of the stress of the workplace — clients do, after all, rely upon Henry’s team to keep their portfolios profitable in a turbulent economic landscape — recreation is a big part of Henry’s free time.

Traveling with his wife and two sons, ages 15 and 12, is common.

“Lara and I believe we are in the memory-making business when it comes to our boys,” Henry said.

When not with family, Henry is usually on a golf course, or headed to one. He’s a scratch golfer and spent seven years as one of the original 25 board members of the First Tee of Northwest Arkansas.

Since 2007, Henry has also been a course rater for Golf Digest. The magazine ranks courses every two years based upon evaluations of about 700-plus raters.

Henry estimates he rates between 20 and 25 courses every year. Blending work and play are what motivates Henry to be successful.

“In my mind, I equate success with freedom,” he explained. “The freedom to experience whatever life as I want to live it, freedom to control how I spend my time. The more of this world I experience, the more I want to see and the more it drives me to be successful.”