Experience: Started career in 2009

Education: B.S. Finance

Kyle is committed to ensuring that his clients are holistically cared for and thriving. He feels blessed and fortunate to work with great people and team members.

Kyle lives in the country and is happily married with four children. One of his favorite activities is helping his kids raise pigs, chickens, and turkeys. God, family, and clients are the three most important things in his life. He enjoys an active lifestyle that includes hunting, fishing, golfing, and coaching his children’s sports teams.

When it comes to giving to charitable causes, Kyle is a proud supporter of his church, three different missionaries, and Oakland Family Services.

Experience: Started career in 2005.
Education: Bachelors of Business Management – Purdue University

Carrie joined the team in October 2023 when Martin James Investment & Tax Management became a part of Modern Wealth. She plays a big role within our tax department through internal accounting/bookkeeping, client communications, first and last touch of client tax documents (SurePrep & then E-file), project management, and serving as a technology consultant.

Carrie and her husband, Andy, have two daughters, Lottie and Doria. Their kids’ activities keep them busy, as Lottie plays travel soccer and Doria is on the robotics team (been to World’s twice in Dallas). She loves to vacation at the beach and spends free times with friends and family.

Cydney has a wide range of responsibilities, including answering technology questions, processing deposits and withdrawals, updating any account paperwork, processing charitable donations, and answering client questions.

Before Modern Wealth Management, she worked in service to U.S. veterans who were looking to obtain or increase their disability benefits. Her favorite thing about Modern Wealth is the firm’s community and family feel. She’s thankful that every person in the organization has the clients’ best interest at heart and are always looking on how they can make the client experience better.

Cydney loves going to Table Rock Lake with her family, traveling, hiking, surfing, and reading. She moved to the Pacific Northwest to be able to do my favorite hobbies when she’s not working.

Host of America’s Wealth Management Show and The Guided Retirement Show

Dean Barber is a managing director at Modern Wealth Management. After serving as the CEO and founder of Barber Financial Group, he was thrilled to team up with Modern Wealth co-founders Jason Gordo, Mike Capelle, and Gary Roth in effort to provide a full scope of wealth management services to people nationwide. 

Dean has always  had the goal to help as many people as possible with getting them to and through retirement. He accomplished that and more with the team of CFP® Professionals, CPAs, estate planning specialists, insurance experts, and other professionals he built at Barber Financial Group.  

Under Barber’s leadership, the Barber Financial Group brand became a staple of the financial services industry in the Kansas City area. In 2009, Barber Financial Group took a big step forward Bud Kasper’s Lee’s Summit, Missouri-based team from Kasper Steck Wealth Management came aboard. Kasper and former Osiwala Financial Group President and CEO Ken Osiwala joined Barber as managing directors of Modern Wealth.  

At Barber Financial Group, Barber and his team created The Guided Retirement System, which is a comprehensive financial planning process that begins roughly a decade prior to the client’s desired retirement date and goes through the entirety of their retirement. Gordo, Roth, and Capelle liked what they saw in the Guided Retirement System and Barber Financial Group’s core services. It was an easy decision for them to reach out to Barber and present the opportunity to carry out many of Barber’s ideals on the national level at Modern Wealth.  

Dean enjoys that his work quite literally has a family feel to it at Modern Wealth. His brother, Shane, is an executive advisor, two of his five children, Nic and Cydney, are client service specialists, and his nephew by marriage, Chad Webb, is the vice president of people and operations. One last fun act about Dean is that his career began with Waddell & Reed on October 19, 1987, also known as Black Monday, which marked the worst stock market crash in Wall Street’s history. 

Nic’s job duties range from completing the morning alerts every day to working on client paperwork for Required Minimum Distributions, Roth conversions and model changes, to assisting with servicing the annuity accounts. He really enjoys the small business and family atmosphere that Modern Wealth provides for its staff and clients. It’s rewarding for Nic to help people in a way that helps them feel more secure about their future.

Working at Modern Wealth has shown Nic that it is possible to work hard, do a good job, and have a great work-life balance. He enjoys spending time with loved ones and family, collecting records, cassettes, and movies, going to concerts, bowling, surfing, and working on cars. Nic is an avid heavy metal fan and will take almost any opportunity to see live music.

Shane dedicates himself to helping his clients achieve financial independence, allowing them to retire with more confidence that they’re doing the right things with their money, freedom from financial stress, and time to spend doing the things they love. As a father and a grandfather, Shane understands that there are far more important things in his clients’ lives than money, and he works diligently to ensure that they can focus on those things.

Having spent nearly 20 years behind the scenes in the manufacturing industry, he gained a deep and unbiased knowledge of how the real economy works. Because of that experience, he believes that understanding the complex relationship between the economy and the financial markets is paramount in managing risk, providing sound advice and implementing wise solutions. His approach, of building a well-crafted wealth management plan that integrates the four pillars of asset management, tax planning, risk management, and estate planning puts the focus where it should be, on the clients’ best interests.

For Shane, the saying “you only get one life, so you should live it the best way you can” is the driving force behind his work for his clients…helping them to live their lives, the best way they can. Shane holds the Registered Financial Consultant (RFC) designation and has passed his series 7 and 66 exams.

Experience: Human Resources since 2014

Education: Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from Fontbonne University; Master’s degree Human Resources Management from Webster University.

Sadie’s core areas of responsibility are organizational development, change management, employee engagement, development and training, HR operations and compliance, and talent acquisition and retention. She joined the Modern Wealth team in March 2024—just under a year after the firm was founded. Sadie loves the process of designing, building, and integrating people programs, so the idea of joining the firm during its building phase was very appealing to her.

She has worked in human resources—supporting startup and growth stage companies—since 2014. After attaining her master’s, Sadie joined an outsourced HR firm and functioned as a fractional HR director for various small companies in the Kansas City area. She then moved to lead the HR department as one of her clients grew and was with them through their sale in 2020.

Following their successful transition, Sadie joined TVH Parts to lead the Americas Team on a three-year project. She helped to align their global HR processes and implement a new HRIS tool. Sadie worked with teams in EMEA and APAC to create a consistent employee experience across the company and modernize their People Practice. Following this project, Sadie joined Modern Wealth Management. She loves being back on a fast-paced and growth-oriented team.

Sadie’s family is the most important thing to her, especially her three sons. Her favorite hobbies include baking and spending time outdoors. She loves camping, fishing, going to the zoo, and traveling.

Education: Bachelor of Business Administration and Accounting; Master’s degree in Account with a tax focus

Experience: Tax since 1998

Suzanne enjoys meeting with clients to discuss their tax planning options. She has spent much of her career as a tax manager at regional CPA firms. Outside of work, Suzanne enjoys spending time with her family, traveling, walking, quilting, and volunteering.

Experience: Has worked in the RIA space since 1998 

Education: MBA from The Graziadio Business School at Pepperdine University; B.A. Economics from the Eller School of Business at the University of Arizona 

Shad Besikof is a managing director of the partnership development team and an accomplished wealth management executive with a diverse background in leadership, mergers and acquisitions, business strategy, and sales management. Shad spent two decades in executive leadership roles creating strategic RIA relationships at the nation’s largest custodians such as Schwab, Fidelity, and Pershing BNY Mellon.   
 
Shad was most recently head of corporate development at a prominent $5 billion wealth management-focused RIA, where he led their M&A business initiative and simultaneously ran a large team of advisors, creating double digit organic growth. 
 
Shad is a graduate of The Graziadio Business School at Pepperdine University, where he earned his MBA and his undergraduate degree in economics from the Eller School of Business at the University of Arizona. 

Nicole Bittner is the head of growth operations at Modern Wealth Management, where she is responsible for managing organic growth channels and delivering qualified prospects to the firm’s advisory teams.

Before joining the Modern Wealth team, Bittner served as the vice president of strategic partnerships and commercial engagement at Goldman Sachs, where she facilitated successful lead generation, client conversion, and pipeline management by overseeing ongoing partnerships for financial advisors.

Bittner earned her MBA from the Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business. She earned her bachelor’s degree in marketing and management from Northeastern University.

Fun Fact

Maria can say the alphabet forwards AND backward.