About

Who We Are & What We Mean to Do

Schultz Collins was founded by Dale Schultz, Patrick Collins, and Kristor Lawson in San Francisco, California. They had been colleagues and friends for many years at various other financial firms. Over those years, they had each formed similar ideas about how financial advice ought to be provided. In 1994, they decided together to start an independent advisory firm that would do things in what they had each decided was the right way. Namely, the way of the full fiduciary, interested first and foremost and always in the benefit of the client. In January 1995, they founded Schultz Collins as an independent investment counsel.

Our primary business has always been the supervision of investment portfolios customized to the particular needs of each client. Schultz Collins advisors also engage in financial planning and have provided litigation consulting. Our advisors have an average of over 25 years of financial services experience. Entirely fee-based, we adhere rigorously to the fiduciary standard, and are nationally known for our deep knowledge of and experience with fiduciary issues.

We provide investment counsel to three sorts of clients: individual investors, retirement plans, and institutions – trusts, foundations, endowments, and corporate accounts. We do not take discretion over client portfolios; rather, clients are involved with every decision in the management of their portfolios.

From our founding in 1995, client assets under supervision grew from about $20 million to about $1 billion in 2019. Due to our focus on our fiduciary duty to clients, Schultz Collins had become one of the larger independent investment advisory firms in Northern California. A national investment advisory firm intent upon full implementation of the fiduciary standard across all their operations – Hightower Advisors, LLC, headquartered in Chicago – had noticed what we had been doing, and approached us with an offer of affiliation, and of substantial capital investment in our project of fiduciary service to clients, with the hope that our rigorous adherence to the fiduciary standard of practice would redound to the benefit of its whole operation, nationwide.

After two years of mutual due diligence, we accepted Hightower’s offer, and we joined forces with them in early 2020. Thanks to Hightower’s scale and dedicated support, we have been catapulted forward in all our work. With help from Hightower, Schultz Collins is growing rapidly, with like-minded advisors and their firms joining us in our quest. In the first such transaction, storied investment advisory firm DHR Investment Counsel merged with Schultz Collins in early 2023, bringing total assets under supervision to roughly $1.5 billion.