Entrepreneur, Financial Planner, And Minister James Barry Watts Built A Life Around Giving First
Generosity is often one of the best investments a person can make, especially when it’s made in service to the community. This is the lesson that James Barry Watts learned early on in his career, and he’s built his life around giving first and giving often, because—in his experience—giving comes before getting. Whether through his ministry or his financial planning work through his company WealthCare, Watts has demonstrated that generosity and service not only precede, but indeed produce, professional and financial success.
Barry Watts gives back outside of his company as well, namely through his ardent support of Project Hope in Springfield, a nonprofit organization that builds houses, provides medical clinics, and equips pastors to help people in need and guide them toward a personal relationship with God, along with support for Freeway Ministries and several churches in the area. In both his work as a financial planner and his work with charities, J. Barry Watts understands and demonstrates how providing real, material support first can open the door to further development, growth, and success for everyone in the long term. It’s a simple equation; in Watts’ words, “Once your purse is full, it’s easier to focus on others.”
“When you have your personal retirement secure, it allows you to think differently about giving resources to other causes,” Watts says. “That’s why we encourage people to make their money early. The focus of our company is helping clients give voice to what they want, then developing financial strategies that allow them to attain their most wanted things.”
Financial Security Empowers Generosity
It’s easier to give to others when you have more to give, and that simple truth underpins much of Barry Watts’ professional work over the last twenty years. He quotes Dan Sullivan, a mentor of his and the founder of Toronto-based Strategy Coach as saying that, “Money is an 80% solution. Eighty percent of problems can be solved with money. Make all you can, as soon as you can, so you can then free your intellect, creativity and energy to focus entirely on addressing the problems that money can’t solve.” Through WealthCare, Watts helps clients through investment selection, tax planning, risk management, and retirement and estate planning—all means through which he can help them achieve financial security, and thus encourage them to give back to their communities.
A large part of Watts’ philosophy is inspired by Zig Ziglar, the author, salesman, and motivational speaker known for teaching personal development that blended practical psychology and Christian values. Barry Watts cites one specific quote of Ziglar’s to describe his approach to both ministry and financial planning: “You can have anything you want, if you’ll just help other people get what they want.” This idea is the driving influence behind how WealthCare operates and works with clients from day to day.
“The focus of our company is helping clients give voice to what they want, then developing financial strategies that allow them to attain their most wanted things,” Watts explains. “In the process, we’ve discovered we prosper as well.”
Watts’ firm, WealthCare, operates on a set of core values rooted in faith and helping others. From maintaining a focus on helping the clients and community that depend on them, to embracing a growth and learning mindset, to taking initiative and being solutions oriented, WealthCare is dedicated to helping its clients and its team live a life of abundance. Whether this means helping clients plan their exit strategy years in advance, or walking them through tax solutions, the goal is to help people achieve financial security and then give back to the community. This often boils down to helping them learn how to think about their problems in order to find a solution.
“People have problems, but their bigger problem is that they often don’t know how to THINK about the problem,” says Watts. “We know how to do that, so when we bring experienced solutions to bear on our clients problems, it provides relief for them, and that’s of great value to our clients.”
Barry Watts plans to further build out the tax division of WealthCare to help business owners in the future. He also plans on deploying a more comprehensive exit planning solution for the same reason. Regardless of the solutions at play, he intends for WealthCare to continue to help everyone they can in some way, whether as a client or as someone he coaches from the sidelines.
“We cherish those relationships,” he says, “and I tell my team that if God brings them to us, it’s because we are supposed to help them.
The Value of Hope
As might be expected from a generous man of faith, Barry Watts is active in his community through his church and its mission projects. It’s been a consistent way for him to engage with others and lift them up in their times of need, an instinct rooted deeply both in him personally and the Midwest at large. The most notable of these projects in his local Springfield area are Project Hope and Freeway Ministries.
“I am a big fan of Project Hope, which builds houses, provides medical clinics, and equips pastors, all compelled by the love of Jesus Christ and in effort to help people develop a personal relationship with God through Jesus, and Freeway takes people from drugs and incarceration to a life of freedom in Christ,” Watts explains. “It’s about meeting immediate physical needs first in order to share spiritual truth and resources long-term.”
It’s a project neatly in line with Watts’ own beliefs about generosity: paying blessings forward starts with giving a blessing to begin with, and there are few blessings greater than security, care, and belonging. In his own words, Watts’ heart is, “deeply rooted in ministry,” in helping people develop a relationship with God through understanding the Bible, its teachings, and Christian salvation, and he expresses that both through community work like Project Hope and Freeway Ministries, and through his business sharing God’s principle across the conference table.
“It’s an umbrella philosophy,” he says, “and money is simply a category under that umbrella. If all I address is money, my clients are short-changed. We aren’t reluctant to talk with them about life, eternal life, and how they can have a relationship with God through his Son Jesus Christ.”
