John E. Chapman Chief Executive OfficerPart One: The Story of an Unconventional RIA
Twenty years ago, Clearwater Capital Partners was founded with the vision of creating a new type of Wall Street firm. The goal was not to grow quickly, but to build correctly. Now, in our twentieth year, we pause to share the story behind that vision, the decade of market extremes that shaped it, the risks it required, and the values that continue to uphold the unifying purpose of the firm:
“We exist to inspire and empower our clients to live with confidence, joy, and a spirit of abundance.”
Clearwater’s origin story began with a simple but radical conviction: to build the kind of firm Wall Street had forgotten how to be – truly independent, relentlessly client‑focused, and anchored in character and competency. While much of the industry chased scale and product distribution, John Chapman saw what was being lost: trust, purpose, and alignment.
His foresight didn’t emerge from a committee or a corporate strategy deck but from a deep, personal sense that the industry had lost its compass. Guided by that vision, he chose not to conform to a fading model but to create a new one – one that placed clients, not institutions, at the center of the equation.
From early in his career, John was less interested in titles and trophies than in autonomy, craftsmanship, and ownership. Even as he advanced inside large institutions, he recognized meaningful opportunities to serve families more holistically, align incentives more cleanly, and build a culture where long‑term commitment took precedent over a product sales orientation.
This tension between what John believed clients deserved and the existing industry standards forever shifted his career from C-suite executive to Wall Street entrepreneur.
The Years that Quietly Rewired Everything
Between 1996 and 2006, Wall Street experienced three different eras compressed into one: the dot-com bubble proved that risk was not theoretical, the 9/11 terrorist attacks that shook American confidence to its core, and a return of optimism that, in hindsight, masked deeper vulnerabilities.
For investors who remember it, emotions swung from “irrational exuberance” to panic when the tech bubble burst. A constructive view eventually followed – only to lead to excesses that produced the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression. For John, who came of age professionally during those years inside some of the largest Wall Street firms, this decade quietly rewired what advice, trust, and client relationships should look like in the 21st century.
Through it all, John realized a simple truth: life-changing value would never be created by chasing headlines or sales quotas. It would be formed through disciplined planning, holistic risk management, and the willingness to ask an unconventional question: How should client strategies be best aligned to achieve their most critical objectives? It would require an intelligent framework for consistent decision-making.
Those years cemented a core conviction: clients are best served by truly independent advocates – professionals who sit unequivocally on their side of the table. That principle still anchors Clearwater today, shaping every decision and guiding the firm’s path as the pace of change relentlessly accelerates.
Conviction Meets Opportunity
In the early 2000s, a subtle but decisive structural shift was underway: to offer advice with undivided loyalty to the client, the only real option was to build an entirely new kind of firm.
Advisors were growing restless with the bureaucratic weight of the large wire houses, and firms like Schwab and Fidelity began to answer that restlessness with limited custody platforms. The robust infrastructure of today’s independent advice ecosystem was still years away, but for the first time, it was possible to launch firms untethered from the Wall Street back office. These firms would be free of product grids, legacy constraints, and many of the embedded conflicts of interest that had long defined the old model.
John emerged as one of the early pioneers who transformed independence from a promising concept into a scalable, durable business model. Partnering with trusted CPAs Al Krause and Len Borhart, he founded one of the industry’s early independent wealth management firms and began blazing a bold new trail, one without institutional safety nets or guarantees, guided only by a shared conviction that this was the better way forward.
No Blueprint. Just Trial by Fire.
In 2006, establishing an independent advisory firm represented a formidable uphill climb on almost every front. It meant stepping away from brand recognition and institutional infrastructure and assuming full responsibility for compliance, supervision, technology, and operations. Nearly everything had to be built from scratch: designing a fee structure and investment platform truly aligned with long‑term client goals, taking on registration, compliance programs, written policies, and regulatory oversight that had previously been handled by a broker‑dealer, and selecting custodians, reporting systems, and planning software in an environment that was anything but plug‑and‑play.
It also meant accepting meaningful short‑term sacrifice, higher startup costs, and real uncertainty – in exchange for long‑term alignment. Independence was not a marketing slogan; it was a daily reality that presented many challenges.
Potential clients were intrigued by the new model, yet understandably questioned whether an independent firm could truly safeguard assets, deliver institutional‑caliber execution, and persist through full market cycles. In the absence of wire‑house marketing engines, growth and trust‑building were slower and more personal, relying far more on reputation and referrals than on advertising or a national logo.
John and his partners assumed meaningful professional and financial risk. They were building a new type of business while managing a complex regulatory environment that was naturally skeptical of the new model. All the while, they operated under the watchful eye of competitors, hoping the experiment would fail. Independence, in those early days, demanded a rare combination of entrepreneurial grit, patience, and conviction that the freedom to serve clients the right way was worth the discomfort and uncertainty.
The Great Recession
Not helping matters, the global financial system unraveled in the Great Recession just two years into the new venture. In what turned out to be the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the financial system collapsed. Once the leverage bubble burst, losses cascaded through banks, markets, and funding channels until credit itself seized up.
By this time, the firm had grown to include John Sleeting and Jeff DeHaan – both of whom would go on to make significant contributions to the firm and become Managing Partners.
John Chapman guided the firm by narrowing its focus: disciplined portfolios, clear communication, and consistency of philosophy. There was no pivot toward fashionable strategies and no abandonment of long-term plans. He tightened expense management, improved risk controls, and strengthened investment and planning processes to withstand extreme volatility. Most importantly, he stressed proactive communication with clients and spent countless evenings on the phone with families, helping them translate headlines into decisions that served their long-term goals.
Far from weakening it, the Great Recession forged the independent advice model into a symbol of stability and client alignment in a fragile financial world. In a world shaken by institutional failures and government bailouts, investors began to see through the conflicts and fragility of the “too big to fail” firms. In that moment, the independent, fiduciary RIA model stood apart as a symbol of clarity, trust, and alignment.
John and his team were building something extraordinary: an advice model intentionally closer to the client and purposefully distanced from the product manufacturing sales organization that was failing for so many others. Their success wasn’t just in surviving the crisis – it was in redefining what client‑first financial advice could be.
The failures and bailouts of large institutions made investors more skeptical of conflicts of interest and “too big to fail” brands, which in turn made the independent, fiduciary RIA model more attractive. John and his team had succeeded in creating an advice model that was structurally closer to the client and further from the many conflicts of interest of the previously dominant firms.
Why the Origin Story Still Matters
In his book, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell challenges the assumption that power always resides with the obvious giant, arguing that what may look like advantages can conceal deep vulnerabilities, while apparent disadvantages can become decisive strengths. He shows that underdogs often prevail not by playing the giant’s game, but by changing the terms of engagement – leaning on speed, creativity, and an unconventional strategy rather than size and scale.
Clearwater’s origin sits squarely in that narrative. From the start, John Chapman chose not to emulate the “Goliath” institutions whose balance sheets, brands, and distribution power dominated Wall Street, but to build a different kind of David – an independent firm designed to be faster, more client‑aligned, and free from the very structural conflicts that would later expose the giants’ weakness.
What looked like disadvantages became Clearwater’s greatest advantages, enabling the firm to avoid entrenched conflicts of interest, adapt quickly, and stand with clients when the industry’s “Goliaths” later stumbled.
For clients and future clients, the story behind Clearwater Capital is more than a biography; it is the story of why our advisors so naturally prioritize a client’s objectives over all else. The firm was born out of hard lessons learned in some of the most turbulent decades in modern market history and shaped by a refusal to accept conflicts of interest as an acceptable industry standard. Perhaps most importantly, the firm has been tested by crises that would have broken a less-anchored model.
Choosing Clearwater means choosing a partner built from the ground up to help our clients and their families thrive. It means having someone by their side who will ask the hard questions when optimism is overflowing, and who can bring perspective, reassurance, and steady leadership when the headlines turn dark. Clearwater Capital’s very story is a testament that when markets and life grow difficult, our clients have a seasoned guide who has already walked through the fire and come back with a disciplined, enduring way of working for their benefit.
Our firm enjoys an unconventional story and unwavering values, so that our clients and the people they care about most can live with confidence, joy, and a spirit of abundance.
20260311 – 2