Reilly Financial Advisors (RFA) is the only U.S. wealth management firm dedicated to serving the needs of the American expatriate community of Aramco. As CEO, Don Reilly's son, Frank, prepares to assume more comprehensive leadership of the firm. We asked Don to reminisce about his more than a third of a century of service.
A funny thing happened to me after thirty-six years of helping Aramco ex-pats plan for retirement: I'm suddenly staring the golden years in the face myself!
There hasn't been a lot of time to reflect. These have been trying times for all of us, and if you're like me, you won't be sorry to see last few years left far behind, at least from a financial perspective. But as my son, Frank, has ably taken on more and more responsibility, I've been thinking back over all those years and wanted to share a few thoughts and memories.
Back in the early 70s, my friends and neighbors, Roger and Peggy Fairbrother, went to Saudi Arabia to teach. In my limited view of the world, they might as well have been going to Jupiter. When Roger and Peggy came home on their first re-pat, they regaled my wife, Mary Ann, and me with stories about new friends, new experiences and what it was like to teach at the school on Third Street.
We sat, riveted, and eventually they got around to some more mundane matters, like what they should do with the money they were making. "Aramcons live a pretty good life," I remember Roger saying, but he went on to say that a disturbing number of ex-pats were shocked when they returned to the U.S. only to discover that they'd forgotten how different things are once you've left the company fold. That can be a devastating blow to people who have worked hard for many years, only to come home and discover that they have to continue working. "We don't want that to happen to us," Peggy added.
At the time, my specialty was real estate and financial planning, so I spent time with Roger and Peggy laying out a plan to ensure they had what they needed when it was time to come home for good. When we had a good plan in place, Roger said, "You ought to go to Saudi and see about helping some of our friends over there." While it was an expensive trip for us, we also thought it was a good time to take some risk. I bought two tickets and Mary Ann and I headed east in January of 1975.
It was one of the smartest decisions I ever made, which isn't to say that it wasn't a bit of a shock plunking ourselves down in a strange land. I was surprised at how many flights there were in and out of Dhahran back then, but I also learned what can happen when three of them land at the same time and 1,000 people try to get through a customs operation designed for one flight at a time. It also took me awhile to get used to scheduling appointments with the overseas telephone operator so I could talk to my kids (now Frank just hops onto Skype whenever he feels like talking to his kids).
The reason for the frequent flights was all around us. Those were the post-embargo oil boom days, with billions of dollars going into infrastructure. That was good in a lot of ways, but there were also some downsides: it seemed like every huckster and con man in the Western hemisphere was carpetbagging his way to the kingdom armed with can't-lose deals of every stripe. They were investing people into restaurants, dinner theaters, jojoba beans, complicated currency exchange schemes…you name it. One thing was immediately clear to me: for the long haul, Aramcons needed to know there was an honest game in town, and that’s what we represented.
It paid off for us, and continues to do so. After our first few trips, people began throwing parties for us whenever we'd come to camp. At first I was flattered, and thought I was some kind of celebrity. Then I found out that Aramcons looked for any excuse to throw a party! For one thing, it was a chance to break out the drinks and brag about the best brew, brown or white in camp. But the friendships were real, and we spent a lot of time in spare bedrooms instead of hotels owing to the warm hospitality.
Sometimes the "hospitality" was difficult to understand, however. We were once invited to dinner at the home of a Saudi family. Another local couple was there as well, and the man's wife kept admiring and commenting on a beautiful black silk dress my wife, Mary Ann, was wearing. The next day, an American friend of ours told us we were obligated to offer the dress to the lady who had ooh-ed and aah-ed over it. Mary Ann obliged, and that was the last we ever saw of that dress.
When the Gulf War broke out, a lot of those spare bedrooms we'd been staying in started going to American soldiers in camp to provide for a little break, so I started spending some time in the Reyazat compound. There was a lot of tension in the region, but the first time I came down to breakfast in the dining hall, it was amazing to see that there were automatic weapons by the dozens strewn about the tables and propped up against walls. One of the things I remember most clearly is talking to soldiers during the winter and discovering that the U.S. military command didn't know much about the desert. Temperatures were dipping into the low 30s and many of the troops were outfitted with summer desert gear. There were a lot of coats and blankets donated to the troops that year by Aramcons.
While most of my appointments with clients over the years have taken place in the evening, back in the beginning I had to compete with television, because it only came on at five in the evening and many in the camp were glued to it. There was only one station, and it was heavily censored. Every time a man and woman were about to kiss, a groan went up because we knew we were going to miss another scene. The most popular show was Dallas, but it was impossible to follow the plot because of the editing. Most of the key dialogue took place in bedrooms and other "forbidden" locales, so we had no idea what was going on half of the time because it was blacked out. Some of my other memories include playing golf on the sand course, exploring the caves in Hofuf, enjoying Half Moon Bay with its giant sand dunes, visiting my brother when he worked in Jeddah and Abu Dhabi and shopping with my wife in the gold souks in Dammam and Khobar for what she called “investments”.
Back then, shopping was a different experience, too. There were no malls, just King Khalid Street serving thousands of ex-pats. Unfortunately, those numbers have decreased dramatically, and I've experienced all the reasons why and all the issues the ex-pat community has faced: surplusing, Saudi-ization, the war with Iraq, right up through the RIP and the 2.87 bond rate. Mary Ann and I wanted our kids to have the opportunity to experience Saudi Arabia, so we took each of them on a trip there when they were in high school. Frank, our youngest son, was so taken by Saudi Arabia that he moved there after graduation to work for me, helping with all of the clients. He still goes a couple times a year to visit clients and has already taken his eldest daughter to the kingdom as well. He plans to take his four other kids over the next two years.
If you said that there are hundreds of top quality outfits providing services like ours, you'd be right, but there's a reason that we're the only ones doing it for the ex-pat community in Saudi Arabia. Ex-pats have a set of unique challenges that are impossible to understand unless you've been completely immersed in it over the long haul. Now that we've grown so much, and because personal service is our stock in trade and key to understanding individual goals and dreams, we're considering establishing a permanent presence in Saudi Arabia. We hope to have that in place sometime in the near future (Insha’Allah).
I feel very much a part of the community and plan to keep visiting, even though Frank is getting his hand firmly on the tiller. I can only imagine what kind of new changes are going to occur to rival the ones we're already lived through! And, to answer the question I am asked most often, I am not anticipating retirement anytime soon.
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