Elliot Omanson is the Managing Partner and CEO of OWLFI Strategic Advisors, a financial planning firm based in Lenexa, Kansas. A U.S. Army veteran with three tours in the Middle East, Omanson entered the financial services industry after his military career, earning Series 7, Series 66, and Life and Health licenses at Sage Financial Inc. He later acquired the firm and rebranded it as OWLFI, expanding its services to include tax, insurance, and legal planning under one roof. Today, OWLFI serves business owners, investors, and individuals across Kansas, Missouri, and nationwide. Omanson hosts Murphy’s Market Minute, the OWLFI Podcast, and Ride$hare, where he shares financial insight with a broad audience. He is known for his direct communication style and his belief that long-term financial security requires a coordinated plan, not a collection of separate strategies. His work centers on helping clients build structures that protect wealth, minimize tax liability, and create lasting legacies across generations.
What Does Success Look Like to Elliot Omanson?
How do you define success personally and professionally?
Success, for me, is specific. It’s not a feeling or a milestone. It’s a structure. When a client can walk away from a conversation knowing exactly where they stand, what they own, what they owe, and what happens to their family if something changes, that’s a successful outcome. Professionally, I define success by whether the plan holds. Not whether it looked good on paper, but whether it performed when the pressure came.
Personally, success is about continuity. I want the values I operate on today to still be reflected in the firm ten years from now. That matters to me more than revenue lines or awards.
What was a defining turning point in how you think about success?
Coming out of the military was humbling in a specific way. In the Army, you know the mission. The objective is clear. When I transitioned into financial services, I had to build that clarity myself. Nobody handed me a map.
Watching my brothers in this business helped. But the real turning point was the first time a client told me their retirement felt manageable for the first time. That was the equivalent of completing a mission. I understood then that the work was real. Not abstract.
What hard decisions shaped where you are today?
Acquiring Sage Financial was the hardest call I’ve made in this career. There were easier paths. I could have stayed as an advisor, built a book, kept things simple. But I believed the model needed to expand. Tax, legal, insurance, these aren’t separate conversations. They’re the same conversation. To serve clients well, I needed to own the infrastructure.
That decision came with risk. It came with responsibility I hadn’t carried before. But I knew if I didn’t take it, I’d spend years referring clients to other professionals and hoping the handoffs worked. That wasn’t good enough.
What failure taught you the most?
Early in my career, I assumed that a good financial plan was enough. That if the numbers were right, the client would feel right. That’s not true. I had clients who had technically sound plans who still felt anxious, uncertain, disengaged. I had to learn that the plan is only part of the job. The communication around it, the clarity of it, the trust underneath it, those are equally important.
That failure in how I initially communicated changed how I approach every engagement now.
What habits or disciplines carry you through difficult periods?
The military gave me a framework for that. When things are unclear, you return to process. You check your fundamentals. You make sure your team has what it needs. I run the firm the same way. When a period gets hard, editorially, financially, operationally, I don’t improvise. I return to structure.
Daily discipline is unglamorous but it works. It’s the reason OWLFI can operate across tax, legal, insurance, and investment planning without the wheels coming off.
How do you think about long-term success versus short-term wins?
Short-term wins are seductive and dangerous. A big quarter, a spike in new clients, a run of good market performance — those feel like success but they’re not indicators of it. The question is always: what does this look like in ten years? That applies to a client’s portfolio, and it applies to the firm.
Playing the long game requires saying no to things that look good now but complicate the future. I’ve gotten better at that.
What tradeoffs have you accepted to get where you are?
Time. There’s no version of building something like this where time isn’t the sacrifice. The podcast, the content, the firm operations, the client work, these all compete for the same hours. I’ve had to accept that building something integrated and durable requires more from me than a simpler path would.
The tradeoff is worth it. But I don’t pretend it’s not a tradeoff.
What would you tell someone early in their career who wants to build something real?
Start with values, not tactics. Tactics change. Markets change. The regulatory environment changes. But if you know what you stand for, you’ll have a stable foundation for every decision that follows. The Sharp family at Sage Financial built something I was proud to inherit. I built OWLFI on that same foundation. That continuity is a competitive advantage.