John Christensen grew up in a Nebraska town of 390 people, graduated in a class of 12, and spent a summer slinging 75 pound tent stakes for a party rental company in Annapolis before he ever set foot in a law school. Now he runs Story One Financial, a multifamily office in Kansas City that serves families worth between 20 and 200 million dollars. The path from farm kid to specialist in estate and tax planning sounds random until John walks Sam through it, and then it sounds like a series of conversations he was paying attention to.
What You'll Hear
- Why John says he didn't know it was okay to not like somebody until he was 25
- How a third-grade career fair introduced him to the word entrepreneur
- The summer job at Party Perfect in Annapolis that turned into years of managing a store outside Baltimore
- Where he was on 9/11 and how the news reached his office without internet or a TV
- How a letter to Hastings College alumni in Kansas City landed him his first trust company job
- What an aptitude test revealed about whether he's a generalist or a specialist
- Why Story One focuses on the 20 to 200 million dollar mid-market tier
- The Story Lens process John uses before he ever touches a client's estate plan
A Nebraska town of 390 and a class of 12
John opens with a fact that sets the tone for everything that follows. He grew up in rural Nebraska in a town of 390 people and graduated with 12 classmates. Nine of them had been together since kindergarten.
He says he didn't realize until he was about 25 that it was even acceptable to dislike somebody. In a town that small, you don't have the option. The kid you don't click with is on your football team, his grandma is your neighbor, and you're going to sit next to him in class for 12 years. You learn to get along or you make your own life harder.
His dad and grandfather farmed. His mother worked for someone who ran an arts and crafts business, and at a third-grade career fair she used the word entrepreneur. John had never heard it before. He decided on the spot that was what he wanted to be. He says he took a circuitous route to get there, and the rest of the conversation is that route.
The detail matters because it anchors everything else John says about patience and about trusting the plan. A farm kid who grows up watching neighbors run their own small operations absorbs a particular kind of entrepreneurial DNA. It's not the Silicon Valley version. It's the version where you show up, you do the work, and you figure out the rest as you go.
Hastings College, a congressional internship, and Party Perfect
John went to Hastings College in Nebraska to play football and to double major in business administration and economics. He loved economics. He tells Sam he always thought in percentages and numbers, and an econ class finally gave him a vocabulary for the way his brain already worked. He compares it to a friend who realized he had been thinking like a German his whole life but didn't know until he moved to Germany.
Between his sophomore and junior year he interned in Washington, DC for Congressman Bill Barrett, his district representative. It was his first flight, at age 20, and his first real exposure to the East Coast.
The following summer landed in his lap. A roommate mentioned that a friend in Annapolis owned a party rental company and needed big farm boys to haul chairs and tents. John called the owner, Mark Nash, and ended up living with Mark's family and working for Party Perfect. He liked it enough to come back after college.
Party Perfect booked everything from 10-person backyard gatherings to 10,000-person events on the National Mall. The company made 75 percent of its revenue in four months. Staffing swung from 35 employees in the summer to 7 in winter. John and a coworker eventually ran the Catonsville, Maryland store. He jokes that his longest shift was 42 hours and that everything you touched weighed 75 pounds. He learned what it meant to run a business where nobody cared if you were tired.
9/11 in Annapolis and a pivot toward law school
John was working in Annapolis on 9/11. His office had no internet and no TV. His boss took a phone call from his business partner, and that was how they found out. He describes it as a whole different world.
The party rental business had grown about 30 percent a year and was capital intensive. After the downturn, the owners were looking at each other and asking whether they wanted to keep pushing. An equity path for John wasn't going to open up there.
While he was in Annapolis he met Ron Holden, an estate and tax planning attorney in his mid-60s with a well-regarded practice. John had always figured he'd get an MBA after a couple of working years. Meeting Ron changed the question. He started thinking about a JD instead.
Before committing, he sat for a four-hour aptitude battery at a place called Abilities Potential. The consultant scored him 93 out of 100 on specialist and 7 on generalist. She told him people like him find obscure subjects to go deep on, and that if he spent his career drafting documents he'd hate his life. She recommended law school but steered him toward consulting and advisory work over document prep. That framing has stuck with him.
He applied to law schools, chose the University of Tulsa for its entrepreneurial law certificate, married his wife Suki, and moved. He finished in two and a half years, graduated in December 2005, and had one son with a second on the way.
Kansas City, a letter to alumni, and the trust company track
John didn't have a job when he moved to Kansas City. He didn't have his bar license yet either. He and Suki found a duplex at 39th and Holmes because a friend next door vouched for them.
He wrote to Hastings College and asked for a list of alumni in Kansas City. They sent 35 names. He mailed each one a letter and a resume. One letter reached a Hastings alum who was president of National Advisors Trust, a trust company owned at the time by around 115 registered investment advisory firms. That became John's first job in the industry.
He explains the premise. An RIA builds a relationship with a client for 20 years. The client dies. The trust agreement names a corporate trustee at a big bank. The RIA loses the relationship. A group of RIAs decided to build their own trust company to keep that business in the family. For John, the job was a crash course in how RIAs work, and it set him up for the next jump.
A friend at a wedding asked him what he wanted to do. John said he'd like to find an RIA to work for. The friend sat on the advisory board at Enterprise Bank and Trust, which was hiring someone with a law degree in its wealth management group. That's how John moved from document review into advising. Enterprise was a commercial bank, and its wealth clients were business owners with complex balance sheets. He jumped into the deep end and never had to build a book from family and friends first.
Story One Financial and the mid-market family office
After 15 years of independence at his former firm, John launched Story One Financial with partners Kenny Conklin and Cameron Bond. Cameron had worked with him for a decade. John describes the thought that pushed him over the edge. He believes it came about 18 months before launch and he believes it was true. People will move heaven and earth to stay in their comfort zone. He didn't want to spend the rest of his career there.
Story One targets what John calls the mid-market, families with a net worth between 20 and 200 million dollars. They're too complex for a traditional investment advisor but not large enough to build a single family office of their own. A single family office is what you see with ultra-high-net-worth families who employ their own CPA, their own attorney, and their own investment staff. A multifamily office like Story One gives similar depth to a group of families who share the cost.
John describes himself as a professional issue spotter. A law degree, trust company experience, and years of wealth planning give him enough exposure to spot where a tax, legal, or estate planning thread needs to be pulled. One of the firm's specialties is business exits. When a family is preparing to sell, Story One helps with charitable design, gifting to trusts, and estate tax planning that works best when it starts well before the sale.
He shares an example without naming anyone. A family kept referring to a specific piece of real estate as theirs. Eighteen months into the relationship John spotted something on a cap table and realized they had gifted 99 percent of the asset into a trust a decade earlier. They still talked about owning it, but 99 percent of it sat somewhere else. That kind of gap between the spoken balance sheet and the legal balance sheet is what his team is paid to catch.
The Story Lens process and sacred ground
Before Story One writes a recommendation, they run what John calls the Story Lens. It takes three to five meetings. It isn't a balance sheet conversation. He asks what matters to the client, what matters about their spouse, what matters about their kids. He says the meetings go deep, and he says his team ends up on sacred ground.
He explains why he does it that way. When a family designs an estate plan in a lawyer's office with the clock ticking, the plan reflects what fit on the lawyer's checklist. Ten years later the client realizes the plan doesn't actually match what they care about. If Story One does the heart-level work first and then walks the plan into the drafting attorney's office, the final document lines up with the family's real concerns. A daughter-in-law with a complicated marriage. A special needs grandchild. A charitable priority the client never articulated to anyone else.
John says he's heard I don't know why I'm telling you this more times than he can count. He treats that as a signal that the relationship is working. The more he knows, the more useful he can be.
He closes by pointing to Dave Parks, the founder of his former firm, as the person who taught him to slow down. John's default is to start fixing things. There are always broken things when you arrive. Trusts that aren't funded. Entities that were never formed. Dave taught him to understand a family's mission and values before touching the machinery, because helping a family before you understand them can do real harm. John's guiding principle is simpler than that. Wait on the Lord. He says it drives some of his friends crazy, and he says it works.
About John Christensen
John Christensen is the founder of Story One Financial, a multifamily office and wealth management firm based in Kansas City that serves families in the 20 to 200 million dollar net worth range. He grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska, earned a business administration and economics degree at Hastings College, and holds a JD from the University of Tulsa. Before launching Story One, John spent roughly 20 years in trust, estate, and wealth work at firms including National Advisors Trust and Enterprise Bank and Trust.