FIELDING'S DREAM: A super salesman avoids private equity and debt in building a national player in wealth management.

• Author: Barkin, Dan

Fielding Miller was manager of a bank branch, his first job out of college, and he wanted to make some extra money. So he started buying houses in Fayetteville for rental income. Nights and weekends, he'd fix them up, paint them, put in appliances. At the same time, he and his wife put their condo on the market because their first child was on the way and they had a buyer. They then bought a house in North Raleigh.

Disaster struck. All the rental houses became vacant, a risk faced by landlords when deployment orders come in a military town. The condo sale fell through.

It got worse. His wife's employer hadn't paid its staffs health insurance premiums. "So, I've got a pregnant wife with no insurance, and I've got five mortgages. And I was making about $18,000 a year. That's when I became a stockbroker ... needing to make a lot more money to get out of trouble," Miller says.

The near-bankruptcy at 25 turned out to be good fortune. In his first two years with Charlotte-based brokerage Interstate/Johnson Lane Inc., Miller became one of the company's most successful young salesmen. His continued success would help him create, with other top Interstate advisers, a different kind of financial-services company that got paid based on annual fees rather than trading commissions. Cap-trust Financial Advisors opened in 1996, targeting companies and institutions wrestling with then-newfangled retirement plans called 401 (k)s.

Today, Captrust is one of the largest independent U.S. wealth-management and institutional-investment advisory firms, with about 470 employees in 37 locations nationally, including Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh. It advises on more than $278 billion in client assets.

It's also a homegrown Raleigh success story with 33 acquisitions since 2006. Revenue increased 24% last year to more than $100 million. At the end of 2017, 267 employees had ownership stakes and benefited from a compound annual return averaging 25% since 2004.

Miller, 57, "got the big decisions right" that have been necessary for Cap-trust to excel, says Wilson Hoyle III, a managing director who joined the company in the mid-'90s. "And he was tough enough to stay disciplined and not get distracted by other business lines or ideas that came in front of us."

Miller learned about discipline while growing up in Lenoir. His father, Wayne, a World War II veteran, was a furniture executive who also served as a city councilman and United Way chairman. But he wasn't an entrepreneur. "He thought more about safety and security than entrepreneurship, which came from my mother's side," recalls Miller. Her father was a school principal who started an insurance agency at age 50 and developed real estate.

Miller's father was more interested in ensuring his three children understood the importance of education. He got Fielding a summer job on a loading dock, muscling furniture out of train cars and trucks.

"It was a brutal job," Miller says. The message: "If you don't go to college, this is what you're going to be doing."

Miller applied to one school, East Carolina University, joining a few friends and to "kind of get away from Lenoir." Many Caldwell County high-school graduates land at Appalachian State University, which is 30 miles north.

At ECU he met his future wife, Kim, who was from Raleigh and also a business major. After graduation, Miller worked as a branch manager for Bank of America predecessor NCNB for 2 1/2 years. In 1986, following his harrowing experience in the real-estate market, he landed a job in Raleigh with Charlotte-based Interstate Securities Corp., which was then the largest independent securities firm based in North Carolina. It was tough work, the white-collar equivalent of unloading furniture.

"If you are willing to really, really work--and I'm...