ATS Wealth Management, a San Diego-based financial advisement firm, is marking three decades of service in helping clients, including in La Jolla, strategize their investments and taxes and hold onto their nest eggs.
The La Jolla Light asked the following questions of founder and President Sandeep Varma to find out more.
Q. How and when did ATS begin?
A. After having been in the financial industry for several years, I asked my clients why they became and remained clients of mine. The No. 1 answer I got was that they trusted me. The No. 2 answer I got was that I was young but knowledgeable and they felt I’d be around longer than they would.
It was then that I decided to become an independent financial adviser and started what is now ATS Wealth Management back in 1994. Today, we are a group of three companies providing investment management, advanced wealth strategies and creative tax solutions for our clients.
Q. How would you describe its mission?
A. Our mission is to help our clients, particularly through education, gain an understanding of more complex investment, estate planning and tax strategies so that those strategies can be implemented for them and their families and to work with their families in a multi-generational approach to planning.
We strongly feel that making money and building a substantial estate is only half the battle. The other half is maintaining that estate, protecting it from taxes and predators like lawsuits, divorce and bankruptcy, and ing it on to the next generation in the most efficient and effective manner.
Q. What makes it unique compared with similar businesses?
A. I think there are three ways that ATS really stands out. …
First is our emphasis on education. We believe it is incredibly important for clients and their families to be educated and informed in order to make the best decisions based on the advice and recommendations we may give them. This is why we incorporate family meetings (with the clients’ adult children but not the in-laws) into our planning and implementation process to ensure that plans are understood and coordinated between generations.
Second is our comprehensive approach to everything we do — tax planning, estate planning and investment management. We take the time to get to know our clients, their family and family dynamics, their financial and legacy desires and what motivates them and what they worry about so that we can recommend the most appropriate strategies in any of these areas.
Third is our commitment to working as a member of a team of professionals — financial, legal and tax, working closely with the clients to learn about and implement the strategies that are designed to help them most efficiently and effectively reach their goals.
Q. What’s new with ATS that you want everyone to know about?
A. We’re about to do something that we never even dreamed of. I don’t know of anyone else in the business that’s done something like this. This weekend [Sept. 27-29] we’re premiering a play called “Don’t Panic, We’ve Been Here Before.” I’m excited and nervous. We’ll have a Friday and Saturday evening show and a Sunday matinee at the theater in the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla.
We hired an award-winning Hollywood writer, Leilani Downer, to write the script. It’s a nostalgic love story about a fictional young baby boomer couple that fall in love in the 1970s, and it’s based on the story in a book we put out a couple of years ago by the same name.
We follow the lovestruck couple, Mike and Jane Boomer, as they navigate their way through the last five decades, including recessions, wars, pandemics, bear markets and various “bubbles,” to come out on the other side today as a still happily married retired couple.
The music, wardrobes and hairstyles should help bring the audience back to the different decades to what it was like and that the economy and the markets survived those times.
Leilani did a great job of putting in some comedy as well as drama that’s sure to keep everyone’s attention. We’re doing a red carpet, searchlights and celebrity impersonators to make it a really memorable Hollywood-style premiere.
Q. What are the benefits of doing business in La Jolla?
A. In over three decades of working with clients in La Jolla, we’ve enjoyed helping them to understand and implement advanced strategies that their previous advisers hadn’t taken the time to talk with them about.
We’ve got a deep connection to the community where we have so many clients and where we’ve done so many client events, from dinners at restaurants along La Jolla Shores to huge client appreciation parties at the Birch Aquarium. What’s not to love about being in La Jolla?
ATS Wealth Management is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays at 5435 Oberlin Drive, Suite 200, San Diego. For more information, call (858) 643-5757 or visit atswealthmanagement.com.
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