Meet Alan Rhode

My wife, Jamie

Jamie is my rock and my better half. She is the person I call first, on the best days and on the ones that test me.

She is in the industry too, as a Partner at Screendoor, a venture capital firm. Which means our dinner table runs on capital allocation, founder risk, and the long arc of building something worth owning. I get to think out loud with someone who is sharper than I am.

We make a beautiful team. We love each other, we motivate each other, and we grow together. She keeps me honest and reminds me what all of this is for. Whatever steadiness I bring to a client's worst week, I learned a good deal of it from her.

Every plan I build starts from the same belief I hold about our own. Money is a tool for building a life together, and the life is the point.

Why I work with business owners

My father was a dentist. He ran a solo practice, and that practice carried our family. Everything we had ran through it.

Then he was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. In the middle of the hardest stretch of our lives, someone had to keep the practice open. I stepped in. I worked alongside my family to keep the doors unlocked, the staff paid, and the patients cared for, while we cared for him.

When the time came, I led the sale of the practice. The exit closed, and my mother was going to be okay. Nothing I have done in this profession has mattered more to me than that.

I miss my dad. I love him, and I bring him into every meeting I take. I love my mother, and making sure she was secure was never a task on a list. It was the entire point.

Together they raised me to be loving, caring, empathetic, loyal, ethical, and motivated. Everything I understand about standing by a family under pressure, I learned from the two of them.

I have sat on your side of the table, when the business, the family, and the future all depended on decisions made at the worst possible moment. Owners deserve a plan built long before that day arrives.

Friends who go back decades

Some of these people I have known since we were kids. Decades later, we still show up for each other. Weddings, births, hard news, ordinary Tuesdays. The group never thinned out, it just grew.

I mention it because loyalty is not a marketing word for me. It is how I was raised, and it is how I run a practice. The clients I take on are people I intend to still be working with in twenty years, at a firm that still knows their kids' names.