UMSL alum Ryan Bowman recently launched his new wealth management firm, Terrace Wealth. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

Ryan Bowman, the president of Terrace Wealth, knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life from the time he was in eighth grade.

Spoiler: That original plan was not to become a co-founder of a wealth management firm before he turned 40 years old. But the life experiences and educational degrees – including a BSBA with a finance emphasis from the Ed G. Smith College of Business at the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 2013 – that shaped his career path can be traced back to the lessons he learned when he carried through on that eighth-grade resolve.

For Bowman, it all started with the award-winning World War II miniseries “Band of Brothers” on HBO. “I was fascinated,” he said. “Back in the day, you had to call your friends on three-way phone, so me and three buddies would all get on a call and talk to each other while we watched. One of my buddies and I decided, ‘We’re going to be Army paratroopers. That’s what we’re going to do.’ And then 9/11 happened my freshman year of high school, and that cemented the decision for us.”

Bowman signed up with the United States Army on a delayed enlistment shortly after he turned 17 years old and was sent to Airborne School in Fort Benning (now Fort Moore) in Georgia shortly after he graduated from Francis Howell Central High School in 2005. He was then transferred to a mechanized unit at Fort Carson, just south of Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he trained on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle for a brief time before he was shipped out to Iraq in February 2006 for a 10-month tour of duty.

When he returned to the United States, he was promoted to Specialist E-4 and became a team leader. He continued to earn promotions up to Sergeant E-5 – a non-commissioned officer – during his second deployment. That was a big development for Bowman; because he had known all through high school that he was enlisting in the Army, academic studies were admittedly not a priority.

“One thing that was essential to where I’m at now was my senior leadership believing in me,” Bowman said. “Because I didn’t apply myself in classes in high school, I never knew if I was intelligent. But they made me the platoon armorer when I came back from Iraq, so I was in charge of our platoon’s equipment, and they sent me to armor school and various other schools because they saw my potential. That instilled a new level of confidence in me.”

Bowman’s second tour in Iraq lasted more than a year, and toward the end of his original 15-month deployment, he was ready for a change. When he returned home in 2009, he enrolled at St. Charles Community College, thinking that would be the best way to dip his toes back into academic waters. He earned his associate degree in 2011 and, heeding the recommendations of multiple SCC faculty members, chose to pursue his bachelor’s degree at UMSL.

While at UMSL, he loved his accounting courses and chose the financial planning track, with a goal of earning his Certified Financial Planner certification after graduation. Bowman graduated in August 2013, started work as a client services manager at Moneta Group shortly thereafter and sat for the CFP exam in March 2014.

“I was blown away by how well UMSL, as an institution, prepared me to join Moneta Group and prepared me for the CFP exam,” Bowman said. “The feedback I was given at Moneta was that I was a good employee, that people believed in me and thought I was going to have good potential there. That’s partially because of my military work ethic and discipline in my background, but also because of the education I received here. I truly think UMSL is the best value in St. Louis, absolutely. Incredible. I learned a ton here.”

After years of taking multiple vacations to Colorado, Bowman and his wife, Stephanie, moved to the state in 2017. Bowman’s career grew as he took his best-practice experiences from Moneta and Mariner Wealth Advisors and applied them at Dunston Financial Group – a fee-only financial planning firm that had an entrepreneurial feel starting from the ground up – and as a partner at Aspen Wealth Strategies. When the couple had their first child, though, the allure of moving back to the St. Louis area to be back with family and friends was too great to ignore.

Bowman decided to enroll in the MBA program at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I had the entrepreneur bug from working at the startup and partnering with Aspen, so I really tried to lean heavy into that,” Bowman said. “And since I had focused on personal finance at UMSL, I wanted to focus on the areas of finance that I was a little bit weaker in, so I went the entrepreneur route, which is ultimately how I got introduced to Brian.”

Brian Wolfe, the founder and managing partner at Funded Ventures, is an adjunct professor at WashU, and a partner at Bowman’s new company, Terrace Wealth. While Bowman was working on his MBA, he and Wolfe had multiple conversations about potential projects and business options in the entrepreneurial space, including acquiring and growing existing companies, and ultimately decided to start a new company and grow both organically and inorganically through acquisitions.

They began the process before Bowman had finished his MBA program so that he would be able to get started soon after graduation this May. Terrace Wealth was officially approved as a registered investment advisory firm by the state of Missouri in mid-June.

Needless to say, Bowman is excited about the venture.

“The good news is I have the experience, and I’ve worked at a few firms,” he said. “I saw how Moneta did it, how Mariner did it, and the success we had at Aspen. I have a sense of the best. I’ve seen what other shops do, and what I’ve liked about those, and now I can build that into what I want Terrace to be. My vision can be carried out more versus some of the other shops. I can merge all the best practices because I’ve been fortunate to work at top-notch firms.”

Bowman plans to cater to veterans, not only with official Terrace Wealth services, but he’s also planning to be available personally to veterans after they leave the military.

“There are a lot of veterans who are underserved in the community,” Bowman said. “And once we can get our feet under us, one thing I want to do is find the right organizations to partner with and set up shop where I have a block of hours where I’m not focusing on Terrace, but I’m open for pro bono work. I’ll put you in our financial planning tool, and we’ll talk about things like, ‘What are your largest pain points?’ and we’ll start addressing those. There are a lot of veterans who are coming out of the service without a strong financial background. How do we help them? How do we get them going off the ground running?”

As Bowman looks back at his journey, how his path shaped him into the person he is today, he also sees himself in different characters in the Band of Brothers now than he did when he first watched as an eighth-grader. Back then, he was drawn to the characters with the fun attitudes and type of gun he liked – Technical Sergeant Donald Malarkey and Staff Sergeant William “Wild Bill” Guarnere stand out – but as he got older, he found himself relating more to the leaders, like Major Dick Winters and Second Lieutenant Carwood Lipton.

“(Lipton) was the guy that kept the glue together in the Battle of Bastogne,” Bowman said. “He had the calm and poise, but also the discipline. He allowed people to joke around and have fun, but he knew how to whip them in line. He was respected by the officers. I viewed that as how I tried to handle myself as a non-commissioned officer in the army when I was a team leader.”

And now, with Terrace Wealth, Bowman is ready to lead on his own.