Celebrating True Heroes: Brian Rathjen & Roberts and Ryan’s Mission to Serve Veterans
In honor of Veterans Day, I turned the spotlight on someone who embodies selfless service: Brian Rathjen of Roberts Ryan, America’s first service-disabled veteran-owned broker-dealer.
If there was a show about this Wall Street firm, it would be the opposite of the show “Billions”—highlighting generosity and patriotism instead of greed.
Brian, a proud Navy veteran and the non-executive chairman of Roberts Ryan, has made it his mission to give back. His firm has grown impressively since we first connected, now boasting 42 employees, many of whom are military and Wall Street veterans.
The most inspiring part? Roberts Ryan donates a significant portion of its financial transaction profits to support veteran organizations and youth programs.
To date, they’ve donated $2.3 million to over 50 initiatives, covering everything from health and wellness to career transitions for veterans.
We discussed their support for Boulder Crest Foundation , an incredible organization helping veterans overcome PTSD (or PTS, as Brian prefers—removing the “D” for disorder). With serene properties and life-changing programs, they promote post-traumatic growth and empower heroes to reclaim joy and purpose.
Roberts Ryan also partners with the Robert Irvine Foundation, funding high-tech I-Bot wheelchairs that restore independence to veterans who’ve lost mobility. Each chair is a $40,000 game-changer, and so far, they’ve donated ten!
Beyond veterans, Brian and his team invest in uplifting underserved youth, with internships and support programs. Roberts Ryan is a stellar example of business excellence fused with heart and integrity.
Here’s a company checking all the boxes: world-class financial service, diversity and inclusion, and an unwavering commitment to giving back.
So, to all the companies out there: consider joining forces with Roberts Ryan and be part of a mission that truly changes lives.
As Brian says, “What we do for ourselves dies with us, but what we do for others, lives forever.”
Thank you, Brian, for your service and heart. And Thank You Always and Forever to All Our Veterans.
Let’s all keep serving those who served!
Enjoy meeting Brian Rathjen in this podcast of our live conversation on The Debbie Nigro Show. If you’d rather read than listen the transcript of the audio is below.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
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And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show.
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I always feature people on the show that I think either are legends are going to be legends and my next guest fits that category. Hey everybody, I’m Debbie Nigro. Welcome to Veterans Day 2024. I just wanted to give you the visual. You know, there’s a show out there called Billions that a lot of people have watched.
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It’s all about Wall Street greed and excess.
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And if you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. But if there was a show about a Wall Street firm called Roberts and Ryan, it would be about generosity, patriotism, and selfless service. It would be a very different show. So today, I am honored to highlight Brian Rathjen, my friend and the executive, non-executive chairman, I’d rather say, of the incredible Roberts and Ryan, America’s first service-disabled veterans
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owned broker dealer. And under Brian’s leadership, the firm really exemplifies the true meaning of service, not only to their clients, but to our nation’s veterans and youth. Brian’s a proud Navy veteran and a patriot and my valued friend. And like I said, he’s the kind of guy who always asks, how can I help you? So Brian, how can I help you today, my friend, besides showcasing your fabulousness. Welcome to my show.
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Oh Deb, you are the best. I’m so excited to be here and I’m honored to have the opportunity to speak to you again on the air. Thank you. We started our
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relationship on this show a couple years ago. That’s correct. We met a couple years
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ago on your show talking about Roberts and Ryan and we became fast friends and speak daily, the day is not complete. You are one of the most energetic, driven, super-connectors that I’ve met and I’m blessed that Joe Blaney put us together a couple of years ago.
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Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned Joe Blaney because he was the friend that we both have that introduced us and actually said, Debbie, you’ve got to do a story about these guys and Brian and his company and what they’re doing. So you know I’m a huge fan and I always try and help you. And I just want you to talk to everybody about what’s happened since we first met.
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Brian first came in, because when I heard that he had this Wall Street company, service-disabled veterans that he had created to create a financial engine to be able to give a percentage of profits ongoing to the never ending needs
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of the disabled veterans in the country. I was like, this is a very big story. And since then, Brian, the company has grown and also the donations have grown. Talk to the progress since we first met.
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Sure.
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So just as a backdrop, Robertson Ryan is a service-disabled veteran owned broker dealer. We now have 42 employees, which comprise about half of us are military veterans that are also Wall Street veterans. And then I’ve got a great group of men and women who were Wall Street veterans that made their money and now are looking to give back in a more meaningful way. So we’ve got 42 folks. We’ve got eight of us are working down on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. We just had the honor of ringing the bell on Friday in honor of Veterans
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and uh… robert to mind with the with the firm that was for the nineteen eighty seven uh… by a combat marine who came back and started his broker dealer we put together a group of investors bought the firm uh… biggest about seven years ago really with the idea of of having a platform
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that was a financial engine to give back. And Deb, as you know, we’ve been at war. Thank God everything was winding down, but for 20 years after 9-11. So over 3 million military folks, men and women, have served overseas in a combat zone. And when those men and women come back, they need our support. And there is a funding gap.
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There is a funding gap. The government does not provide as much support as it probably should. And what we do at Robertson Ryan, we do financial transactions and then we give a large portion of that away. So we just crossed the $2.3 million of donations supporting about 50 different veteran organizations.
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Uh, help their families with health, wellness and career transition. Every day we wake up with a mission and a purpose to give back.
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There are not many Wall Street personas that people would perceive as coming from the heart and you are one of those people and I always say, best in class, best in class. You’re a crisp and classy business guy with heart. That’s how I describe you. Well, I think it’s good business to give back to be honest with you. If we could substitute
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the five words of what’s in it for me with how can I help you and Everyone in my firm is wired to help To give back put themselves last and when you put yourself last you’d be surprised how well you can do But it’s really about giving back at the end of the day. I love the quote that What we do for ourselves dies with us But what we do for others
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lives forever. And that’s really, we’re here for a short period of time on the earth, and it’s really not about material possessions and everything else. It’s about relationships and giving back. And I’ve been fortunate, you know, through Roberts and Ryan and prior to that, to have some great examples of folks like that, retreat which takes care of military veterans. Yeah, I want to hit on a couple of places that you support that are just doing beyond things.
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The Boulder Crest retreat somehow has, through all their time, effort, and research, figured out a breakthrough way to help veterans out of PTSD and PSD to want to live full lives again, which is not always the case. Talk to what they do down there.
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Sure. So, you know, obviously, we estimate with the 3 million people that came back, the men and women came back, about a third have some form of PTS. We’ve dropped the D because we don’t consider it a disorder. It is post-traumatic stress. And what we do at Boulder Crest, we’ve got three physical properties. We have 37 acres in Virginia, 130 acres in Arizona. We just bought a piece of land down in Texas, 65 acres. And eight months out of the year, we have 75 hours of curriculum that we put six to eight veterans at a time
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through a week-long retreat. And then we follow up on a monthly basis for 18 months and help these men and women just deal with the stress, anxiety that they may have experienced overseas. And it’s all based on post-traumatic growth, which is everybody’s got some type of trauma
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or some type of, you know, whether it’s from their childhood or the military experience, but that doesn’t cripple you. And you can actually grow from that and, you know, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So that’s what we do eight months out of the year. And the other four months, we open up the retreats to any combat veteran to go down there with their family or friends for a retreat.
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And it’s an amazing organization, and we’re growing. And now, we’ve reached out to the first responders, police, firemen, healthcare workers, to help them with what they’re going through. So this curriculum, hopefully we’ll be able to grow that.
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Yeah, it’s great.
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Amazing.
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Great, so that’s one of the organizations. Another inspiring, yeah, I’m sorry, Brian, I need to talk over you. Another inspiring thing you, it’s okay. Is your partnership with the Robert Irvine Foundation, because you’re providing those
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amazing I-Bot wheelchairs to veterans who’ve lost mobility, speak to that.
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Sure. So Robert Irvine is another. So Ken Falk is really a very dear friend and a mentor of mine, and he’s just an amazing guy. You know, his feet hit the ground every day. He’s thinking, how can I help?
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Who can I help today? So he’s a giver. Robert Irvine is another gentleman, Chef Robert Irvine, amazing man who’s served in the British Navy, and he’s got Robert Irvine Foundation, and he does a number of different things. One of the activities that he has is he buys these mechanized wheelchairs that provide mobility.
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They cost about $40,000 a piece. piece, they provide mobility to folks that are confined to wheelchair veterans. And these wheelchairs are really life-changing. One of the things when you’re confined to a wheelchair is everyone’s always looking down at you, right? And you’re wheeling down the street at someone’s hip level.
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But these allow you to rise up to be six feet tall. They can climb stairs, they could go on your lawn, go on your beach, and it really opens up the world to these folks that are in wheelchairs. So we just donated on Friday our tenth wheelchair, and the need is so great. I mean, I would like to be giving away a wheelchair a day to all the folks out there. The government, unfortunately, they don’t provide them, and they should. So we are working with Robert and trying to fulfill that gap.
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And then I just read that your latest initiative in the last couple of years was really about addressing the opportunity gap for young adults in underserved communities. I know you’ve got something going on in Harlem and New York and that you invest in a lot of these non-profit programs that help the young adults. That’s amazing.
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Yeah, so that stems from our, you know, taking care of the veterans is great, but we also want to take care of the country, right? It’s great to go overseas and fight for our freedoms, but really there’s a lot of folks here in the United States that don’t have the same opportunity set. So we’ve been working with the Harlem Boys and Girls Club, great organization. We had two young men come down to the floor and they interned with us.
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We’ve provided them some financial resources and we’re really trying to grow that initiative out as well.
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And then the big upside to people doing business with you from what I’ve learned from spending so much time knowing you and knowing your company and trying to help is that there are absolute initiatives out there to have companies make sure that they are dealing and being inclusive with minorities, women, veterans in terms of their day-to-day business. And you provide your company a sort of classy, upscale, in the money world anyway, minority company that sort of checks off all the boxes and everybody still gets what they need but at the highest level of business and integrity.
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Correct.
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So I think first and foremost, we have to provide first class client service, right? We’re not a charity. We have professionals that have been on Wall Street since 1996 and are probably one of the least experienced of our team. We’ve got an unbelievably professional team, so we can first and foremost do the business, right?
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We can do the financial transaction. What is that business? We’ve got really four main lines of business. Any company that’s issuing bonds can include us in that transaction as what they call a co-manager or co-lead, and we can do the work. Our CEO Ed D’Alessandro has been on Wall Street since 1992. You know, he worked at some of the bigger shops out there. We could do the work. Secondly, if
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it’s important to corporations, we could check the box on diversity and inclusion. So what will happen is these corporations will hire a big bank like a Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or Citigroup and then they’ll hire a woman a minority or veteran to be in that transaction so we could check the box for that and that but most important to us is the third leg which is we’re going to give back and we’re partnering with these corporations to give back so they can be a part of the 2.3 million that we gave
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back that was they were a part of that. So it’s very important for us to expand our mission to include other corporations. Right now we’ve done about 300 financial transactions on the bottom side with about 100 companies. That means there’s at least 900 companies out there
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that could use our services and be a part of this give back. Amazing, I hope some of them are listening today.
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You know, we are in a very interesting place in the world, Greenwich, Connecticut and New York area. A lot of businesses, a lot of CEOs, a lot of people that will read about you and hear about you after I share this as a podcast on all the major podcast platforms and out to social media. And that’s it today.
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I just want to wish you a great day. Thank you so much for doing what you do. You’re a great veteran and you’re a very sharp ex-Navy guy. I can tell they taught you how to press clothes in the Navy. I can tell, Brian.
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I can tell.
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You’re a great friend and I love you, Deb. Keep doing what you’re doing. You know, it’s Veterans Day, but really, veterans don’t exist without the people that support them. So when people say to me, thank you for your service, I always like to say, thank you for your support.
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Because you can’t do it without the great citizens of America.
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Great. Serving those who have served, Robert Ryan. Check him out at robertryan.com. This has been Brian Rathjen, their leader. Keep going, Brian. I’ll talk to you soon.
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Thank you. Thank you.
Transcribed with Cockatoo
