RCA Wealth Strategies

RCA Wealth Strategies

RCA Wealth Strategies was formed in January 2013 by Michael Rood and Jace Champlin, two advisors who each spent years inside captive insurance and brokerage networks. Both describe that early career experience as the negative template for RCA — they watched corporate quotas and suitability standards override client outcomes and decided the only durable fix was independence. The firm operated initially as an independent advisory practice before converting to its own Registered Investment Adviser entity in October 2021, a move that hardened its fiduciary obligation and disconnected compensation from product sales. The practice offers a mix of financial planning, risk management, and discretionary investment management to a client base that includes individuals, high-net-worth households, corporations, and charitable organizations. The firm does not publicly disclose a standard portfolio construction framework, but its materials signal a planning-led, goals-based approach rather than benchmark-relative portfolio management. There is no published manager list and no public track record of direct co-investments or fund commitments — RCA functions closer to a personalized wealth office than an institutional asset gatherer. A defined practice niche serves federal employees, led by Huntsville-based IAR Kathleen Sanford, who holds the Chartered Federal Employee Benefits Consultant (ChFEBC) designation and focuses on navigating federal benefits and retirement systems. Michael Rood entered the industry in 1991 and holds securities licenses including the Series 7, 24, 53, and 66. Before co-founding RCA, he was a site leader in Kansas City for a prior firm. Jace Champlin, a Northwest Missouri State finance graduate, started his career in 2008 and holds the Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) designation alongside Series 6, 7, 63, and 65 licenses. The firm operates from Huntsville, Alabama, and serves clients nationally. In October 2021, RCA converted to its own RIA — a structural event that removed the broker-dealer intermediary and fully aligned the firm’s legal duty with the fiduciary standard its founders had advocated since 2013. RCA’s architecture differs from the standard dual-registered hybrid model still common among breakaway advisors. By launching its own RIA and operating without a broker-dealer affiliation, the firm eliminated the two-hat problem — the ability to switch between fiduciary and suitability standards depending on the product sold. That structure is less common among firms of RCA’s scale, where the overhead of standalone RIA compliance often pushes practices toward corporate RIA platforms or broker-dealer corporate RIAs. The cost of that structural choice is a higher regulatory and operational burden carried by a small team; the stated benefit is an undiluted fiduciary obligation to every client.