Our Founder’s Story

Gary often shares the path that brought him into the financial services industry. While working in a family business, Gary engaged a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional to help his family. He found that the advice he received was valuable, but that the advisor was dishonest and failed to disclose conflicts of interest.

The experience of dishonest service while sitting across the table from an advisor with the prestigious marks of “CFP®” behind his name brought Gary to realize that there was a need for an honest CFP®. In 1987, after spending 15 years in the family business, Gary founded his own financial planning firm, D. Gary Williams & Company in Gainesville, Florida. He decided from the beginning that his clients would come first and began to look for the best way to practice.

D. Gary Williams & Company became one of the early firms to adopt a new “no-commission” process that Charles Schwab had pioneered. The concept of offering a supermarket of mutual funds, stocks and bonds with nominal transaction fees and no commission was rare at that time, but he felt it was best for his clients.

In 1990, he moved his practice from Gainesville to Jacksonville. After laying roots in Jacksonville, he moved his compensation structure to “fee-only”. He felt that the fee-only model was the right approach for clients because he could see that managing money is about a process instead of products and that investment advice should be given without conflicts of interest.

In 2008, Chris Daunhauer joined the firm as a partner and they changed the name of the company to TrustWell Financial Advisors, LLC. In 2009, Brett Freese joined TrustWell as a partner because of the strong belief in the way TrustWell practiced.