David Callanan and the Advantage of Staying Put

David Callanan’s business partner roots for Kansas State. Callanan roots for Kansas. In a partnership that began with college friendships and became Advisors Excel, this is a useful reminder that agreement need not extend to basketball. They have found more consequential things to agree on: independent financial advisors need help running their businesses, good colleagues deserve room to grow, and Topeka is a place worth staying.

Callanan came from Benton, a small Kansas town northeast of Wichita, and graduated from Washburn University in 1998. His career has taken him into a national network of financial professionals without carrying him away from the city where those college relationships formed. He is now a co-founder of Advisors Excel and chief executive of AE Wealth Management. The geography has remained remarkably consistent while the responsibilities have multiplied.

There is a temptation to tell this kind of story backward, starting with the large numbers and treating every early decision as an obvious step toward them. Callanan’s beginnings offer something more useful: a group of friends encountering an irritating problem, understanding why it existed, and deciding they could make a business out of solving it.

Three friends and a support problem

Before the kitchen-table plans, there was work inside an insurance marketing organization. Callanan entered financial services in 1999 and became a director of annuity sales. He knew the machinery that connected insurance companies with the independent professionals selling their products. He had also seen what happened when an advisor needed help beyond the product itself.

In 2004, Callanan and Cody Foster left corporate employment to work as independent financial advisors. Independence supplied a useful education. The support available to them fell short of what they thought an advisory business required. A professional could understand clients and still need considerable help finding the next ones, organizing the office and keeping a company moving.

With fellow Washburn friend Derek Thompson, they began working through the idea for their own organization. Advisors Excel opened in Topeka in 2005. Their customer would be the advisor, and the service would reach into the practical business surrounding the advice.

It was an unglamorous insight with plenty of room inside it. A client meeting occupies an hour on a calendar. The preparation, paperwork, marketing and management occupy the rest. A business organized around those remaining hours could become useful in ways a product catalog alone could never manage.

A second business, built around the same customer

AE Wealth Management followed in 2016, adding an investment advisory business to the wider group. The original customer relationship remained recognizable: work with financial professionals who, in turn, serve families preparing for retirement. The registered investment adviser supplies investment management and planning services through its advisor network.

Callanan’s two roles require some care with the nouns. Advisors Excel is an independent marketing organization supporting advisory businesses. AE Wealth Management is an investment adviser. They belong in the same career story, but their measures of activity describe different things. Annuity production, assets under management and a company’s revenue each answer a different question.

In July 2025, AE Wealth Management announced that it had passed $40 billion in assets under management. That figure describes client assets managed by the firm. It conveys the size of the responsibility entrusted to the organization. It also gives the startup story a second act: building something larger creates more obligations to the people already relying on it.

The business proposition has continued to expand around advisors’ working lives. AE Marketplace, for example, connects potential buyers and sellers of practices. Eventually an owner who needed help building a business may need help deciding what happens to it next. The customer’s career keeps presenting new chapters.

The scorecard with people on it

Asked which accomplishment made him proud in his Greater Topeka 20 Under 40 profile, Callanan organized the answer around people. At that point, he described a company of 250 employees, its work with roughly 1,000 financial advisors and the families those advisors served. These were the figures of an earlier stage of the business, but the way he arranged them is revealing.

He began with the families supported by employment in Topeka, then moved outward to the advisors and their clients. It is a different way to walk through a company’s results. Payroll becomes part of the story before scale does.

His answers also allowed for less solemn priorities. Asked about desert-island essentials, he included his family and a personal chef. The chef had a practical assignment: accommodating a household with firm opinions about dinner. Even an Eagle Scout can appreciate the benefits of delegating the catering.

Callanan and his wife, Karlun, married in September 2003 and have two daughters, Chloe and Jolie. Alongside the business roles sits a familiar set of commitments: family, friends and Jayhawks basketball. These details give the language of serving families somewhere concrete to land.

Eleven people are only the beginning

By the time Advisors Excel reached its twentieth anniversary, Callanan and Foster had enough experience to discuss the less tidy parts of leadership. Their Business of Advice conversations addressed accountability, consistency and the consequences of what a leader says. Being capable at a particular job does not automatically prepare someone to guide the people doing it.

In a later discussion, Callanan described investing regular time in the leaders reporting to him. He counted eleven people receiving that direct attention, then questioned whether the effort reached deeply enough into the organization. His concern was development beyond the first circle.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Eleven productive relationships can matter enormously. A larger company also needs people those eleven can prepare, challenge and trust. Otherwise responsibility accumulates near the top, where every small decision eventually forms a queue.

That is a revealing assignment for a founder whose original business helped other owners improve their companies. As his own organization grows, the same practical question returns: which work requires his attention, and which work requires someone else to become ready? Developing that readiness asks for patience well beyond an anniversary celebration.

An old classroom, a new assignment

Washburn reappears throughout the story as a working relationship. In 2023, Callanan and Foster made a lead gift toward renovating Henderson Learning Resources Center. Together with other donations, it brought fundraising beyond $10 million toward a $15 million goal. Their contribution was part of that total.

For Callanan, university president JuliAnn Mazachek was already a familiar figure. “She was my accounting teacher!” he recalled. He remembered forty-five minutes in her office working through material he had struggled to understand. Years later, the student was helping fund the institution she led.

“Washburn is the fulcrum for the success of Topeka.”

David Callanan

The proposed renovation reached well beyond a single business classroom. Henderson held a quarter of the university’s available classrooms. Improving the building could affect students across disciplines, including future graduates who might work at companies throughout the region.

By June 2025, the project had a new name and an unusually literal opening act. At the glass-breaking ceremony for Advisors Excel Hall, Callanan stood with Foster, Mazachek and foundation president Marshall Meek holding the rope used to break glass. The plans included flexible teaching spaces and a storytelling lab with podcasting, artificial intelligence and virtual reality tools. A company born from business and marketing experience was helping make room for both subjects’ next generation.

The city stays in the picture

The workforce connection was already measurable. In a January 2025 account of the building project, eight of Advisors Excel’s thirteen senior executives were identified as Washburn graduates. For a company seeking capable colleagues, investing in the institution down the road has a practical logic alongside the personal one.

That local commitment extends into ordinary working days. Advisors Excel holds quarterly volunteer activities on company time. Employees from different departments work together, giving people who might otherwise meet only through email a shared assignment. During 2025, the company recorded 7,525 volunteer hours for local agencies.

Its property investments have remained in the picture too, including the conversion of the former Ed Marling’s furniture store into headquarters and expansion at Gage Center. These are physical commitments to a city. They require the place to keep working for employees, recruits and the businesses around them.

The effects run in several directions. A volunteer day can help a nonprofit, introduce colleagues and show a prospective employee something about the company. A classroom can educate a student who becomes a recruit. Staying put still involves a great deal of movement.

The work after the anniversary

Callanan’s recent reflections leave room for difficulty. Writing about 2025, he described a year that demanded renewed effort from him as a leader. He wanted winning to encompass impact on people, his team and the community. For 2026, his stated ambitions included bolder goals and a renewed entrepreneurial drive.

In another public reflection, he returned to a question an industry CEO had put to him: what could the business offer that was “objectively better”? He applied it to the value his organization provides advisors and the value advisors provide clients. It is a useful question precisely because a confident adjective will not settle it.

His later podcast appearance also considered complacency, bureaucracy and the need to keep finding purpose after years of success. For someone who began by finding weaknesses in the support available to advisors, the risk of becoming comfortable with his own organization’s habits is particularly relevant.

Callanan’s career has kept returning to the same relationships at different scales: classmates become partners, advisors become business owners, students become colleagues, and a former teacher becomes a university president. The people remain recognizable. The assignments change. In Topeka, there is still work waiting after the game.