Franklin Shearer Moore, aka Spike, was born October 9, 1960 to Franklin H. Moore, Jr. (IV) and Nancy Shearer Moore. His first home was in an apartment over a bakery in downtown St. Clair that overlooked the St. Clair River. His parents planned to call him Frank, too, but with two Franks already living in town, they jokingly began calling him Spike to their friends. The family doctor and friend, Harry Mayhew, that delivered him cautioned them that the name would stick and it did.
He moved with his family to 817 North Sixth Street in St. Clair upon the birth of his sister, Beth, in early July, 1962. Another sister, Jenny, was born in September, 1964 and finally a brother, Wally, in April, 1968. The family then built a new home on Meldrum Circle and moved in early 1969.
Like his father and grandfather, Frank V, attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He returned to the Midwest to attend the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and, loving the town, decided to stay after graduating in 1983 with a degree in Economics.
During his junior year at Michigan, he began working part-time at Michigan National Bank to see if he would like the occupation of his father and grandfather. He excelled as a teller and began training other employees to balance and refill the new Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). Upon graduation, though, there weren’t many banking jobs as the economy was in recession and the unemployment rate in Michigan topped 15%.
After graduation, Frank V found a job selling mutual funds on a commission basis and passed his first securities license exam in September, 1983. A year later, after becoming one of the top salespeople at the Southfield office, he was given the position of supervising a new hire, Jennifer McCutcheon. But three months later, he decided that if he were to continue as a financial advisor that he would need to become independent in order to serve his clients well. He and Jennifer had started dating and he asked her to join him in the new venture.
At the beginning of 1985, Frank and Jennifer founded Vintage Financial Services, a Registered Investment Advisory firm, and moved their securities licenses to Mutual Service Corporation, a Detroit based independent broker/dealer. The Vintage name came from their first office at 31505 Grand River Avenue in Farmington which had been a winery building in the 1960’s. Their small office in the lower level of the building had once been a wine vat. By early 1986, the company was doing well enough that they relocated to an office on South Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor.
Frank and Jennifer’s relationship survived the company start-up and they were married in June, 1988. Their first child, Katherine (Kate), was born in November, 1990 followed by Franklin McCutcheon Moore (VI), aka Mac, in April, 1993 and Michelle in June, 1996.
Frank and Jennifer’s first house was on Greenview in Ann Arbor, just a few blocks from where Frank’s parents lived in 1960 when he was conceived. They designed and built a new house in the Uplands subdivision just west of Ann Arbor and moved in 1995.
In 1996, Frank was asked to join the board of DSLT, the family business that had been the Diamond Crystal Salt Company. At that point the salt mining division had been sold off and the company consisted of a couple packaging plants and some real estate developments including Harbor Village in Manistee. Frank hadn’t been to Manistee so he went to tour the new development and immediately loved it. They bought a newly finished condo there in 1997 and the family enjoyed many summers on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Vintage Financial continued to grow nicely over the years. Frank joined the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA), the organization of fee only financial planners, in 2005. He served on the Midwest board as treasurer and chairman and then on the national board where he served as Chair in 2015-16. In 2017, he was named to Barron’s Top 1,200 Advisors list, one of just 30 advisors in Michigan. In 2018, Forbes named him the #10 ranked wealth advisor in Michigan and Barron’s put him at #18 in the state.