J.J. Croix, BBA ’96, MPA ’97, owns and operates an independent wealth management firm out of El Campo, Texas called Croix Wealth Management.  Following years of committed service to his small-town community, J.J. was recognized as the 2020 Citizen of the Year of El Campo. To name just a few of his accomplishments in public service:

• he was a committed volunteer, and President, of The Boys and Girls Club of El Campo, and the Rotary Club; he also previously served on the El Campo City Economic Development Board;
• he currently serves on the advisory board for River Pointe Church in Fort Bend County;  he and his wife, Christy (UT alum ’96) have run Vacation Bible School for over 100 children in the most impoverished community in Wharton County and also recently took a turn as Young Life chairs in El Campo;
• he ran a successful campaign to build new schools and then served on the ECISD School Board for 6 years, during which time he was a strong advocate for students, especially those living in poverty, and he played an intricate part in getting the AVID program up and running, which helps students overcome obstacles and achieve success by assisting them in preparing for college or post-secondary education;
• he made immediate strides to help with hurricane relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, and through his leadership with the Rotary Club and collaboration with citizens of El Campo, managed to raise over $200,000 for the Wharton County Recovery Team to help families struggling with loss.

We spoke with J.J. about his time at the School of Business, about how he ended up in El Campo, and about the humbling public service he dedicates to his community.

Please talk about your experience as a student here at McCombs. Why you came here, groups you were involved with, favorite class/teacher, etc.

I got to UT in ’92. I wanted to study international business because I spoke Spanish, but there was a recession after the Persian Gulf War and I was concerned that jobs were difficult to find for international business majors.  I had to pay for my entire college with no grants and limited family support.  It was all on me, so I was scared to death at finding a career worth the effort. I had to get a job, and everybody said to just be an accountant, because accountants always get jobs.

I had a few favorite professors. We had Herb Miller, a marketing professor. He was so inspirational. He had the great quotes that I still think about today; things like: “By the yard is hard, by the inch is a cinch.” I don’t know if that was his material but he was definitely impactful just in terms of motivating us early on. And then another favorite was Robert Prentice, who taught business law. He was top notch. We were fortunate to be in their classrooms.

How did your educational experience change you?

I was an orientation advisor after my first year at UT, which led to an opportunity in my sophomore year to become an academic advisor. I’m not even sure if they still have student academic advisors, but that was such a cool thing because it allowed me to work face to face with my peers, giving them advice on scheduling. Ultimately that was a great fit to prepare me working one-on-one with clients and giving financial advice later on in my career. It’s one of the things I did not like about my first job out of school, because when I worked as an auditor for a big company helping big companies, it just wasn’t as personal. Our current business mission is to serve as a CFO for individuals, not companies, where my career could have possibly led had I stayed in public accounting. That’s the role we strive to play for our clients. I’d like to think that our clients seek and rely on our counsel for their most important financial decisions. The confidence I have in giving people financial advice now was probably born in that business school, where I gained a solid background in accounting and finance and had the confidence to give people advice on their class schedules.

Please provide a brief summary of your career path since graduating.

The plan was to stay in a big city when I graduated, and like most McCombs graduates we were very well trained to take on big things. I worked with Ernst & Young the first three years of my career in their audit practice. At the time it was one of the big six accounting firms. I did an internship with them that we secured through the BBA/PPA program in 1996. Back then, I think the accounting program was the number one program in the US, and it still is today. I was fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time, and that was a blessing because we were heavily recruited through that BBA/PPA program by all of the big six firms.

At first, I was heavily involved and working 70-80 hours a week. I had an early promotion to senior staff and was running engagements after one year and was on a pretty good path to grow within the company. However, that was also when my wife and I were thinking about starting a family. It was then I just couldn’t envision that being part of my story: working that much and trying to raise a family. I wanted to be very involved, as much as my parents were with me in my kids’ lives, and I could see a route out of that, outside the big city. In March of 2000, I resigned. We moved from Houston to my wife’s hometown, El Campo, just down the road. I had family members that were in the investment business, so I had the opportunity to join them that same year.

I joined my in-laws as a financial advisor at Edward Jones, which is a large brokerage firm. In 2000, the culture at Edward Jones was sales based, but I felt that I could better serve my clients with a planning-based approach. Ultimately, Edward Jones was not a good fit for me because I couldn’t use my knowledge as a CPA to help clients. In 2002 I started to study for the certified financial planner (CFP®) exam. In 2003, I left Edward Jones to start my own independent firm. My goal was to build a successful, independent planning-based financial services firm that I could use my full skillset as a CFP®/CPA to serve our clientele. Being an independent planning firm means that I own my book of business and am able to have more flexibility in running my practice than with an employee-based firm.

What are you most proud of in your career so far?

We were recognized in 2020 Forbes magazine on their Best-In-State list as one of the top 100 advisors in south Texas. The majority of the names on the Forbes list are with the big firms, such as UBS, Merrill Lynch, and not independents like myself. We’ve kind of done it on our own without the resources of the major firms. That was a top honor career-wise to be recognized as a top 100 in a pretty prestigious list.

How have you stayed involved with the school as an alumnus?

That’s something I’ve regretted because I have not. I have a lot of contacts from people that I was close with through the business fraternity I was in. Of course, we still go to football games and get involved there, but living in an agricultural-based community, there’s a strong network of Aggies here and not many Longhorns. In more recent years I have gotten closer to some of my peers just through social media, and I’ve had more conversations, and so I definitely look forward to getting more involved in the future.

What are your goals for the future, career wise?

The way I run my business is how I run my life. We are here to serve other people, so the greatest challenge in our business is in our capacity to do that at a high level. We are driven to help more people, but it depends on us growing in a smart way. As I’m limited to the number of clients I can help individually, I added a partner last year and our firm is growing. I would like to think ten years from now we would be one of the premier wealth management firms not just in south Texas but in all of Texas.

Please tell us about your community involvement.

The one quote that I gave during my acceptance speech for El Campo’s Citizen of the year was a Ghandi quote. It says, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” I have always found that if I’m helping other people, I feel fulfilled.

This approach has been helpful living in a small town, where it is beneficial to have a heart for service because there’s only so many people to take on leadership roles. I was president of the Boys and Girls Club. That was my first leadership opportunity here. I liked that because El Campo has a high percentage of economically disadvantaged students. I came from a similar background, and my parents didn’t go to college, so my heart has always been in trying to figure out how to play a role. I always wanted to figure out how to take what worked for me and just teach other people that came from similar backgrounds.

I was President of the Rotary club in El Campo, which is a large club – over 100 members. We had a fundraiser to help out after Hurricane Harvey, and the neighboring town of Wharton got hit very hard. I was able to work with others to refocus our fundraising efforts that year. We raised in one fundraiser $200,000 for our neighbors, which was definitely a proud accomplishment. It was definitely not just me, but I was very involved in that effort.

I also served on the school board for six years. Something I’m proud of in that is we adopted a program called AVID, [or Advancement Via Individual Determination]. During the great recession of ’08-’09 when things were really terrible, many of the school districts all had multimillion-dollar cuts in their budget. That was a painful thing, but even during the drastic budget cuts we were able to get our district to invest in the AVID program, which was a program that took disadvantaged kids like me whose parents didn’t go to college, and created a straight path for them in being able to go to college. It’s been a very successful program here and we see a lot of kids who are first generation college students going to college and may have not before that program had been put in place.

Any other hobbies or tidbits you’d like to share?

I’m in a small town so we fish a lot. I love to saltwater fish. We love to duck hunt. One of my greatest joys was being able to coach all of my kids in little league sports. My wife and I now have a farm in Fayetteville that helps keep the blood pressure low. We have a horse, chickens, etc., basically your typical farm. My son Griffen is now a freshman at UT, studying economics and hoping to do an internal transfer to McCombs. I know our teenaged daughters, Marin and Jillian, want to be Longhorns as well, and so we bought the farm in Fayette county to be halfway between El Campo and Austin on most weekends. You will find me there on a tractor or riding lawn mower, or feeding chickens – the simple life, right? I’m enjoying that kind of labor because the work of a financial planner is very long-term process. I’ve always joked that when people work with us on their retirement and estate planning, we never really know if we do a good job unless there’s money left over when they are gone. That sounds awful, but our job is to manage the whole process from start to finish, which can be an exceptionally long time. I’ve found that the immediate sense of accomplishment and peace I get from just shredding and making something look really good is very satisfying. I guess that just means that I’m getting older!