John Zaiss got some “spot on” advice from his father before he embarked on a career as a financial adviser: You need to understand accounting.

And time and time again, Zaiss’ background as a certified public accountant and his training in breaking apart financial statements has been the fundamental backbone of his 30-year career in financial management.

Zaiss is a vice president and senior portfolio manager for Merrill Lynch Wealth Management’s Zaiss-Johnson Group in Kalispell.

The group affiliated with Merrill Lynch in October 2011 and includes Mark Johnson, who has had a long career in business development and joined Merrill Lynch as a financial adviser in 2008; and Doug Johnson (no relation to Mark), who has worked in the financial industry for three decades, including nine years as a commerical loan officer at Whitefish Credit Union.

Client Associate Sue Meskimen and Registered Senior Client Associate Marolyn McLeod round out the Zaiss-Johnson team.

With assets under management of $80 million to $100 million, the Zaiss-Johnson Group is one of Merrill Lynch’s top-performing small-market offices in the country.

“It’s been a smooth integration and positive for Merrill Lynch,” said Maggie Draper, a public relations consultant for the company’s global wealth investment management division. A continuous goal “is how we can find talent and integrate it into the existing infrastructure.”

Prior to his affiliation with Merrill Lynch, Zaiss spent 17 years running his own successful registered investment adviser firm, Crescent Capital Management, and worked a dozen years before that as a vice president with major stock brokerage firms. He relocated to Whitefish in 2006.

It was Zaiss’ clients who persuaded him it was time to look for supporting infrastructure for his investment firm.

“A couple years ago I began getting a lot of questions: ‘What happens to me if something happens to you?’” he said. “So I promised my clients I would build the infrastructure.”

Zaiss placed advertisements for a partner and got hundreds of resumes back. With the recession still in play, there were lots of financial advisers looking for work.

No one “jumped off the page,” though, he said.

Zaiss knew Mark Johnson from Whitefish Rotary meetings and had been impressed with his background in business. As he began recruiting Johnson to join Crescent Capital, Johnson urged Zaiss to consider an affiliation with Merrill Lynch.

“After several months we were running parallel paths,” Zaiss said.

There was some initial apprehension, Zaiss admitted, adding “I was concerned I’d be a square peg in a round hole.”

Zaiss took three weeks to travel around the country and meet personally with each of his clients, which include 50 investors who began with a minimum investment of $250,000.

On a national level, Merrill Lynch & Co., like many other financial institutions, was swept up in the subprime mortgage financial crisis. The longstanding company — dating back to 1917 — was purchased by Bank of America at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. It now operates as the wealth management division of Bank of America.

Zaiss said he didn’t look at the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 any differently than he did the crash of 1987 when stock markets around the world crashed on what’s now known as Black Monday.

“There’s always something on the horizon,” he said. “Right now it’s Europe.”

Zaiss said he’s been “pleasantly surprised” with Merrill Lynch. One of the immediate benefits was access to many more resources — “more arrows in the quiver,” he added.

“Feedback from my clients has been virtually all positive,” he said.

Zaiss has managed investment portfolios on a discretionary basis since 1989, and he retained that buying discretion with the transition to Merrill Lynch.

“I still have complete discretion, and I’m allowed to go against the research of Merrill Lynch,” he said.

Of Merrill Lynch’s roughly 16,000 financial advisers, only 150 are senior portfolio managers like Zaiss.

Mark Johnson said bringing Zaiss’ skill set to Merrill Lynch is “pretty unique.

“It’s rare to find that in markets this small,” Johnson said.

Zaiss likewise is impressed with Johnson’s credentials, calling him the “quarterback” in handling Merrill Lynch investment products.

“He’s good at managing projects,” Zaiss said. “He works through them and hones in on hot buttons.”

Doug Johnson completes the trio, bringing a strong background of community involvement to the table along with solid expertise in the financial industry.

He has served on senior management teams for several financial institutions overseeing commercial lending, and has maintained loan portfolios in excess of $300 million.

It’s pretty powerful, Zaiss said about the team. “There’s a lot of gray hair in our group, a lot of experience.”

Navigating the troubled waters of the financial industry has been a bigger challenge over the past several years, but Zaiss said his success has boiled down to taking the emotion out of investing for his clients.

A pendulum swings between fear and greed in the investment world, he said, adding that “most of the time it’s fairly normal.” It’s during the extremes of the pendulum swing — when the market was down 50 percent during the 2008-09 crisis, for example — when Zaiss has earned his clients’ respect by taking a pragmatic and unemotional approach to investing.

These days, investors’ fear isn’t as severe as during the depths of the crisis.

“I think people are more confident we’re getting through this,” Zaiss said. “They’re cautious, but they’re not hiding under the covers.”

Even so, the scars of ’08 and ’09 are “still pretty fresh,” Mark Johnson acknowledged.

“A lot of baby boomers fell into the real estate trap, and got caught up in the emotion of get rich quick,” he said. “They used houses like an ATM, and a lot of people in this area have [their] money tied up in real estate.”

Education is a big part of investing, they agreed.

“We can take lessons from the past and teach the younger generation how to avoid” the same pitfalls, Johnson said.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.