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Micahl Wester

Managing director, client advisory team, Tolleson Wealth Management

Being home-schooled on a farm in West Texas may not seem the ideal background for a career at a multi-family office, but Micahl Wester thinks otherwise. “I grew up untraditionally but interacting with people of all ages from the time I was a child actually was good training for what I do now,” she says.

When Wester began college at Texas Tech University, she intended to study home economics, but after taking a course in the school’s well-regarded financial planning program, she changed her mind. “It was totally new to me, but I loved it and switched my major.” After two years as a paraplanner at another firm, she joined Tolleson in 2007 and now has direct responsibility for some of its largest multi-generational client families.

Wester, 38, has made financial education a major focus with her clients and has helped create and deliver the firm’s curriculum for educating younger generations of client families.

“It’s important for younger family members to develop leadership and communication skills that go hand-in-hand with financial knowledge” so they can be successful stewards of family wealth, she says. As far as managing her own family of five, Wester says she and her husband “juggle.”

Evan Cooper