Meet Clint Kirby

Chief financial strategist Clint Kirby, an Alabama native, started DreamWork Financial Group, a Registered Investment Adviser, in 2015. He made the decision to open his own investment firm after working for a decade as an investment advisor and securities trader with large financial institutions in Birmingham, Ala.

Clint has always had a passion for trading. As a kid, he had success selling baseball cards which led him to an interest in the stock market. After high school, he enrolled at Auburn University and took every investment class available in both undergraduate and graduate schools.

From that point, he entered his financial career only to discover a dirty little secret: most banks and brokers are not fiduciaries. He found that many of them are glorified middlemen that aren’t even legally bound to act in their clients’ best interests. At that point, he became determined to change the way the average investor was treated.

Clint argues that DreamWork’s approach is different because he creates customized portfolios for clients that both align with their values and seek to meet their retirement and investing goals. To accomplish this, he uses the skills and fundamentals he learned in college, in conjunction with the inside knowledge he gained working for large institutions.

By aligning the interests of his clients with his firm’s own interests, Clint has successfully shaped DreamWork Financial Group into a “client first” advisory organization.

Clint expounded on this “client first” idea and provided a few closing words for prospective clients:

“At a big bank or a big financial advising firm, your account will get assigned to someone who is provided a packaged program designed to sell different products to you, regardless of whether or not they are in your best interest. They may not have what it takes to be a real investment manager on their own, but with the bank’s help, they can build a portfolio complicated enough that most people can’t understand it. This allows them to force feed you investments that pay the largest commissions to the advisor or the bank. You’ll essentially be in the back seat and the advisor will be driving the relationship and your money.

We do not work for sales commissions. The only way we make more money is by growing your investments. If your investments decline in value, so does our compensation.

I’d like to leave you with a final thought. At DreamWork, we do investing differently — we want you to be in the front seat with us. We will provide you with information so you can understand the markets and guide you in taking advantage of that knowledge. By investing intelligently — understanding what we’re doing at every step of the process — and by focusing on your core values, we can build a portfolio that will accomplish your goals while injecting your values into the process.”